Approximately two-thirds of the workers who maintain golf courses in the United States are Latino immigrants. Some are documented and others are undocumented. The work is gruelling, but invisible by design: They rise before dawn to trim the grass, level the sand traps, and chisel weeds out of the turf. They earn about $10 an hour. Gabriel Thompson wins the January Sidney Award for “The Caretakers,” which tells the stories of the men who make golf possible as a sport and an industry. Golf Digest took the unusual step of commissioning the piece because they wanted their readers to understand the huge contributions of Latino workers to the golf industry. Read my interview with Thompson in The Backstory. 

Temporary work used to mean exactly that, but today’s economy, “temps” have become a disposable second-class of permanent workers who can do the same work as employees for years at a time, but with lower wages, and no job security. Sarah Jaffe reports on the tempification of the American workforce for In These Times. Bosses have used temporary labor as a tool to divide their workers and forestall unionization, but Jaffe reports on encouraging signs of temp/perm solidarity at a Nissan plant in the deep south. 

[Photo credit: Haughygrandeur, Creative Commons.]

The Obama administration has called on clothing buyers to use their purchasing power to improve working conditions in the global apparel industry, but the contractors who supply uniforms for the federal workforce are still sourcing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of clothing from sweatshops, Ian Urbina reports:

Labor Department officials say that federal agencies have “zero tolerance” for using overseas plants that break local laws, but American government suppliers in countries including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam show a pattern of legal violations and harsh working conditions, according to audits and interviews at factories. Among them: padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records and repeated hand punctures from sewing needles when workers were pushed to hurry up.

The U.S. Marine Corps buys shirts from a Bangladeshi factory where children make up a third of the workforce. 

[Photo credit: for illustration, NYC Marines.]

• Temporary work, lasting harm: The latest from Sidney winner Mike Grabell and his team at ProPublica.

• Why injured workers can wait years for workers’ comp.

• West Virginia legislator calls for disciplinary action against an anti-choice doctor who lied to the state’s Attorney General about abortion complication rates.

• When “life hacking” is really white privilege.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]