As expected, the US approved the implementation date for the recently-passed Colombia Free Trade Agreement, despite continued violence against trade unionists in the country. The announcement timed with President Obama’s appearance at the Summit of the Americas. Labor leaders denounced the move, because there’s been little or no progress in protecting unionists.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s first ad of the gubernatorial recall election in Wisconsin begins by asking the question, “isn’t it time to end the civil war in Wisconsin?” He was referring to Scott Walker and the war on public employees, but he could be referring to the battle among Democrats over the next month, since unions have endorsed Kathleen Falk instead.

President Obama will sign the JOBS Act today, a bill that sprung from his own Jobs and Competitiveness Council, a group with 19 corporate executives and 2 labor officials. Dealbook reports that Wall Street companies have begun to scour the bill for provisions that they can use to their advantage. Because that’s how it works, right? Congress writes the legislation, and only afterwards does Wall Street look to see how it benefits them! They never try to influence the process or write the legislation themselves, that would be untoward.

Under the banner of National Farmworker Awareness Week (March 25-31, consumer and labor groups are working to educate communities about egregious conditions on farms. Now that organizations like the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers have begun to rattle the food industry with colorful worker- and consumer-driven campaigns, Washington should be ripe for long-overdue reforms to curb the worst forms of child labor.

But common decency has again been overshadowed by a well-oiled campaign by the agricultural industry lobby, which has pushed to block the rule changes by claiming that child labor reflects good old American values.

As Swopa pointed out, a US district court judge overturned two provisions of Act 10, Scott Walker’s anti-union law in Wisconsin.

The judge, Obama appointee William M. Conley, did not touch the provision most associated with the law, which removes all collective bargaining rights except circumscribed increases in pay for most public employees. However, Conley did strike down the measure that forced unions to annually re-certify with an “absolute” majority of all workers, and the “automatic dues” ban, which stopped union dues from being taken out of worker paychecks. Conley said in his opinion that the exemption for public safety workers from the rules (remember that these unions mostly supported Walker’s election back in 2010) made it so that the state was picking and choosing among workers to punish, violating equal protection laws.

The implosion of Mike Daisey’s Foxconn stories may have, in the short term, returned focus to Apple’s suppliers of their electronic products. Now Foxconn, the notorious Chinese manufacturer, has announced a series of changes to working conditions at the plant.

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.

Dayen’s news roundup from Tuesday evening, sans the GOP primary, with other stories about the foreclosure settlement, HUD IG reports, Ben Bernanke, Eric Schneiderman, Spain, banksters, Rebecca Brooks, Sarah Palin, health insurance exchanges, Afghanistan shootings, T. Boone Pickens, Goldman Sachs, Rush Limbaugh, labor, Dick Cheney avoids Canada, and much more.

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.