At the end of a week of fuss and tea-leaf reading about the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments about Obamacare, a judge in Wisconsin ruled on a similarly controversial state law.

Workers caring for our greying population are intimately woven into our family lives, but are alienated from essential labor protections–though that could change soon. As we’ve reported previously, a longstanding loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act excludes home care or “companionship” workers from minimum wage and time-and-a-half overtime regulations. Nationwide, about 2.5 million home care and personal assistance aides–projected to grow to about 3.8 million by 2020–work around the clock to help their clients handle the basics of life, while often themselves scraping by on poverty wages.

The world’s greatest games are about to begin in London. But outside the sporting spectacle this summer, few will notice where the real cheating is going on: in Asian factories that churn out plush mascots and other Olympiad gear, corporations have freely exploited lax labor regulations. As the Olympics approach, activists are racing to push the brands behind the games to play by the rules of fair trade and human rights.

Trying to avoid an instant replay of London’s age of imperialism, the Play Fair 2012 campaign aims for accountability and transparency in the corporations scoring massive profits from cheap labor in the global south.

For years, they wondered why they kept getting turned down for jobs, even when they seemed well qualified. The workers might have all just chalked it up to bad luck if they hadn’t eventually discovered they were at the center of an extraordinary conspiracy.

An investigation by the U.K. government’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) in 2009 revealed that some of the country’s most prominent construction firms had worked with a secretive company, The Consulting Association, to create a blacklist of workers with a history of being suspected “troublemakers” or labor advocates.

The students came for a summer learning experience with a job at a classic American company. Instead, they got a crash course in the realities of the global economy.

Following months of campaigning, young foreign students who have waged a bitter labor battle against a U.S. candy giant, the Department of Labor has cited two subcontractors that helped import the students into the Hershey plant in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, where they were reportedly subjected to coercive, exploitative conditions.

Just three years after occupying Republic Doors & Windows to save their jobs, union workers have once again occupied the factory on Goose Island in Chicago. The factory, now owned by California-based Serious Energy, was to shut down Thursday. But, workers wanted a chance to save the jobs and find a buyer. Serious Energy refused and fifty workers decided to re-occupy the factory to save it from closing.

You may have heard about Politico’s gaffe of the year (at least so far), when a reporter claimed that the Wisconsin state flag, which has the year of the state’s founding, 1848, on it, was actually the flag of the “Wisconsin local 1848″ union. This has now become a rallying cry within the labor movement, particularly as they head into recall elections in Wisconsin that could depose Scott Walker and give the state Senate back to Democrats.

The term “banana republic” has become a cliche to describe economic imperialism throughout history, but the legacy of colonialism persists in Latin America today. The tradition of predatory capitalism echoed in the recent death of Miguel Angel González Ramírez, a member of the Izabal banana workers’ union SITRABI in Guatemala.

Last week several groups, including the United Steelworkers, petitioned the federal government to whack the latest trade mole – illegally traded auto parts from China.

With President Obama announcing creation of a new trade enforcement unit in his State of the Union Address, the feds probably will investigate. But even if they whack down the auto parts mole, experience has shown a new mole will pop up.

Despite fierce opposition from major transit unions, the Senate yesterday gave final approval to the FAA Authorization bill, a five-year extension that removes uncertainty from the FAA, approves a next-generation air traffic monitoring system and, in Harry Reid’s telling, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. But unions were unhappy about changes to labor law insisted upon by House Republicans, and they expressed betrayal at the hands of Senate Democrats.