The best of the week’s news:

• How the minimum wage could finally sink Mitch McConnell.
• Payday lenders back modern-day debtor’s prisons.
• Bored? Broke? Start a “corrective behavioral institute” to rehabilitate California criminals. You don’t need any qualifications. You don’t even need to file your taxes!
• How the paint industry shirks responsibility for lead poisoning, via Fair Warning News.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

An eye-opening account of the uses and abuses of civil asset forfeiture by 2012 Hillman Prize-winner Sarah Stillman of the New Yorker. Stillman tells the story of one couple from Texas who lost their cash and their car after the police pulled them over and found nothing illegal in the vehicle but threatened to charge them with money laundering and seize their children if they didn’t sign over their assets:

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services. [NY]

Unlike with criminal forfeiture, the police needn’t obtain a conviction, or even press charges, to confiscate property. Not only that, police departments get to keep whatever they seize, a glaring conflict of interest. When citizens complain, they can be threatened with criminal charges, which they signed away their stuff to avoid in the first place.

But as Stillman reports, some victims are fighting back against overwhelming odds.

[Photo credit: Ian Britton, Creative Commons.]

Sidney-winner Stephen Greenhouse on the wave of fast food strikes sweeping the nation:

From New York to several Midwestern cities, thousands of fast-food workers have been holding one-day strikes during peak mealtimes, quickly drawing national attention to their demands for much higher wages.

What began in Manhattan eight months ago first spread to Chicago and Washington and this week has hit St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and Flint, Mich. On Wednesday alone, workers picketed McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Popeye’s and Long John Silver’s restaurants in those cities with an ambitious agenda: pay of $15 an hour, twice what many now earn. [NYT]

Some fast food workers in St. Louis were inspired by demonstrations in New York and Chicago that they organized an action of their own. 

[Photo credit: Simon Miller, Creative Commons.]

Sidney Award co-winner Steven Greenhouse continues his coverage of worker safety and labor rights in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, the deadliest industrial catastrophe in history, which killed over 1000 workers. On Friday, the Obama administration laid out a set of conditions that Bangladesh will have to meet in order to get its special trade status restored:

Three weeks after announcing it would suspend Bangladesh’s trade preferences, the administration released an “action plan,” which calls on Bangladesh to significantly increase the number of labor, fire and building inspectors and to improve their training. The plan urges Bangladesh to impose stiffer penalties, including taking away export licenses, on garment factories that violate labor, fire or building safety standards.

In addition, the administration recommended that Bangladesh create a public database of all garment factories for reporting labor, fire and building inspections, including information on violations found, penalties assessed and violations corrected, with the names of the lead inspectors.

In addition to its demands for measurable progress on work safety, the administration drew attention to the widespread intimidation of Bangladeshi workers who seek to organize and bargain collectively and urged Bangladeshi leaders to safeguard the freedom of association of their workforce. Finally, the Obama administration called for a transparent investigation of the murder of union organizer Aminul Islam. Islam was an organizer with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, he was murdered after helping Western journalists expose the terrible working conditions that have killed so many Bangladeshi garment workers in preventable fires. The Sidney Hillman Foundation presented its 2013 Officers’ Award for Public Service in Islam’s memory. We hope that mounting international pressure will help bring his killers to justice. 

[Photo credit: Rushdi13, Creative Commons.]