According to Pro Publica, Walmart accepted shipments from factories in Bangladesh unsafe for workers despite explicit promises not to. This violation of Walmart’s own stated policy comes shortly after the world’s attention fell on Bangladesh’s troubled manufacturing sector with the Rana Plaza building collapse that killed more than 1,100 people.

Last week, immigrants’ rights groups finally got the papers they’ve been waiting for, an 844-page whopper of a bill that attempts to “fix” the immigration system by promising a little bit to everyone: businesses get workers, workers get jobs and millions of undocumented people get an opportunity to gain citizenship.

Last week, immigrants’ rights groups finally got the papers they’ve been waiting for, an 844-page whopper of a bill that attempts to “fix” the immigration system by promising a little bit to everyone: businesses get workers, workers get jobs and millions of undocumented people get an opportunity to gain citizenship.

Billionaire Penny Pritzker, of the plutocratic Pritzker family, has been floated by the Obama Administration as a candidate for Commerce Secretary.

This was a tumultuous year for working people and their families. From the grassroots uprisings last winter to the low-wage workers’ strikes at year’s end, 2012 saw many people coming together for the first time and finding their voices. Below are the items that I would highlight as the best and worst developments of 2012 in the world of labor and progressive social movements.

Michigan’s new right-to-work law has has struck a savage blow to America’s labor movement in its heartland. Unions across the state have thronged to Lansing to oppose the attack, which makes union membership optional and thus reduces labor’s bargaining clout. But tucked into the legislation are subtle exemptions for particular workers—police and firefighters, who have historically played by a different set of rules, creating political divides in the labor movement.

But in this case, it seems that many members of Michigan’s police and firefighters unions—about 1,700 bargaining units altogether—are standing in solidarity with other public-sector unions to oppose the law.

Thankfully, stories of striking workers at Wal-Mart and Hostess are making the front pages of newspapers and leading the “A” blocks of cable news shows. These two companies epitomize the war against workers that began over 40 years ago. Wal-Mart is the poster-child for corporate malfeasance and draconian worker policies. Wal-Mart workers on average are paid so little that the American taxpayer is literally subsidizing these workers as tens of thousands of them have no health benefits which forces them to use state Medicaid for healthcare. Wal-Mart made $15 billion dollars last year. Four out of the America’s top ten Billionaires are Wal-Mart heirs.

When Walmart warehouse workers in California and Illinois went on strike last month, they weren’t just challenging the world’s retail hegemon, they were rising up against a broader global traffic in manpower. Many of the protesting workers had been hired indirectly through staffing agencies.

As the summer heat seared New York City, tensions between the city’s major electricity company and its union reached a boiling point over the weekend. By Monday, a meltdown in the talks over pensions and benefits left thousands of Consolidated Edison utility workers suddenly frozen out of their jobs.

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.