Above is a screenshot of the homepage for retailer Joe Fresh after news broke last night that a total of 1,021 bodies had been pulled from the ruins of Rana Plaza, a collapsed factory that produced clothes for Joe Fresh and UK chain Primark, among others. Remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? That killed 146 garment workers.

Joe Fresh is a Canadian company, but there are five Joe Fresh stores in the United States, all located in Manhattan and Long Island.

Fun fact: That dress costs one dollar more than what those killed in the collapse made in a month.

ZOMG, pleats!

[@sydbrownstone][sbrownstone@villagevoice.com]

Eneas via Compfight cc

It's been a long time coming. After three years, New York City Council has finally passed veto-proof legislation guaranteeing paid sick days in businesses with more than 20 employees. Now (hopefully), restaurant workers afraid of losing their jobs won't come to work hacking up pathogens into soup. But there's fine print, and conditions. Here's what you, New York City citizen, should know.

How many days am I allowed to be sick without losing my job in a tenuous economy?

You've got five days, or 40 hours, so don't get mono.

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"I make $7.25. I can't afford a Big Mac meal," said Stephen Warner, who works at a Manhattan McDonalds.

It was still dark when the fast-food workers began gathering outside the McDonald's just north of Times Square yesterday morning. Carrying signs that read "Strike for higher pay for a stronger New York," they lined up outside the restaurant, where workers from the night shift were still on the job. Some of those outside were scheduled to take over for the day shift, but they wouldn't be going in. Instead, they were taking part in the largest strike of fast-food workers in history, as roughly 400 workers from franchises across the city picketed to demand better treatment, a union, and wages of $15 an hour.

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As we learned on Wednesday with the Community Safety Act, a mayoral race can do wonders to political priorities.

This week, the paid sick day bill in the City Council has been on a legislative roller coaster. At first, Christine Quinn, using her privileges as speaker, refused to allow the bill to come to a vote on the floor. She argued that the bill was "anti-business" and would hurt companies by forcing them to provide five paid sick days.

This is an election year, so the labor vote (the endorsement of the 32BJ union) is a serious mover/shaker. And now Daily News and Post have both reported that Quinn has agreed to negotiate on the bill.

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Jason Lewis/Village Voice

A panel of labor policy experts dicuss the plight of low-wage workers at yesterday's symposium.

When a worker in this city has to endure a three-hour walk to work because his minimum wage salary doesn't allow for him to afford public transportation, that's a problem.

Low-wage workers across the city have stood up in the past year to demand that such insecurity be eradicated and to pressure employers to finally begin to provide them with just compensation for their labor.

Building on the progress generated by these worker-led movements--in industries such as retail, fast-food, airline security and car washing--UnitedNY, the Center for Popular Democracy and other advocacy groups held a symposium and released a report yesterday analyzing the state of the city's low-wage worker movement.

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The group of Brooklyn technicians fired by Cablevision two weeks ago have been rallying around the city with high-profile politicians to give their account of how Cablevision has mistreated its unionized workers.

Cablevision maintains that Communications Workers of America, the union which 282 Brooklyn technicians joined earlier last year, is making last ditch efforts to hold onto to those workers. The company announced last week that some Brooklyn technicians still employed by Cablevision contacted the National Labor Relations Board to request a vote to decertify the union.

"Virtually all Cablevision employees have a direct relationship with the company. Cablevision looks forward to an election at the earliest possible date to allow its Brooklyn employees to determine whether or not the CWA union will continue to represent them," the company stated in a release.

The union says that the mass-firing was simply the latest ploy by Cablevision in a campaign of intimidation and coercion to break the union.

"This is just one more piece of management's campaign of fear and intimidation," Tim Dubnau, a CWA Local Union 1101 spokesman, said in a statement. "On the same day that Cablevision-Optimum fired 22 workers, they also sent an email and handed out a memo in person discussing decertification, in a clear attempt to intimidate people."

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This morning a group of protestors, led by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, demanded that management at Cablevision's garage in Canarsie come out and have a little chat about yesterday's firing of 23 workers.

Cablevision says that the fired technicians were illegally striking and refused to work. The union says the workers were taking advantage of an open-door policy at Cablevision, which permits employees to voice work-related grievances with management.

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Diana Eliazov

Prince Jackson is one of the airport security guards who voted to strike.

Employees of two security contractors at JFK airport voted this afternoon to go on strike December 20 if their employers don't come to the table and address at least some of their complaints.

The timing of the strike, near the peak of the holiday travel season, could seriously snarl traffic out of JFK. It would be difficult for the contractors, Air Serv and Global Elite, to hire replacement workers, since it can take weeks and months for required security checks to go through.

The employees aren't members of a union, but they are backed by the Service Employees International Union 32BJ.

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Diana Eliazov

Prince Jackson is a security guard at JFK's Delta terminals, where his employer, Air Serv, pays him $8 an hour.

A year after the Voice first wrote about the struggle of security guards at New York airports to earn a living wage, the guards are escalating their tactics.

Tomorrow at 2:30, roughly 300 security contractors at JFK will vote on whether to go on strike December 20th, just in time to completely scramble airport operations during the holiday rush.

Two hundred of the contractors work for Air Serv, a Georgia-based company owned by Frank Argenbright, a man with a long history of cutting corners in airport security. Argenbright started Air Serv in 2002, after his previous company, Argenbright Security, was effectively sunk by an impressively lengthy string of scandals -- culminating on the morning of September 11, 2001, when Argenbright employees waved through two soon-to-be plane hijackers even though they'd set off a metal detector.

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Mahoma Lopez, one of the leaders of the Hot and Crusty bakery workers, at the rally yesterday.

A crowd of out-of-work bakery employees and their supporters blocked sidewalk traffic on the corner of 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue yesterday to rally to pressure the bakery's new owners to recognize their union and reopen the bakery.

Tired of the workplace harassment, unpaid overtime, and sub-minimum wage jobs that they say was common at their bakery, workers have spent the past year organizing.

The owners of the shop at the time countered by hiring a union-busting firm, but in May, the workers won an election to form an officially recognized union.

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