Author: Wisconsin Examiner

A federal judge on August 31 blocked a ruling that would have prevented Wisconsin voters with disabilities from getting assistance when casting a ballot. The ruling will allow voters with disabilities to have another person return their absentee ballots for them. In July, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a decision that also banned the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, ruled that voters must mail their ballots themselves. Following the state court’s decision, voters with disabilities worried that they’d be forced to choose between breaking the law or disenfranchisement. The decision from U.S. District Judge...

Republican candidates who claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have been nominated for governor in four critical swing states, raising concerns that if elected they could try to sway election results in 2024 and beyond. In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state. Many more Republican gubernatorial candidates have questioned whether the 2020 election...

COVID-19 boosters shots are on track to become as frequent as the annual flu shot, though high-risk people may need more than one dose per year, Biden administration officials said on September 6. “For a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said during a briefing. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of...

On Labor Day, right-wing prognosticators like to revel in the supposed demise of the U.S. union movement. While there may be a kernel of truth in the data, organized labor only represents 6.4%of the private-sector workforce, gross numbers are misleading and don’t begin to show today’s unfolding story of a newly invigorated union movement. It is time the naysayers changed the channel. More than 17 million TikTok viewers have watched a video of a Starbucks manager firing a SBWorkersUnited (SBUnited) union organizer in a Buffalo store. Every barista in the store left Mocha Cookie Crumbles and Java Chip Frappuccinos...

Unemployment is down, wages are up and Wisconsin workers are more willing to talk union this Labor Day. That is the summary of the newest State of Working Wisconsin report from COWS, a University of Wisconsin research center that looks at the state of the economy through the eyes of the broad workforce. “The question we’re always trying to track is what is the relative balance of power between employers and workers,” said Laura Dresser, associate director at COWS and lead author of the report. “This is a moment when I see more consistent signs of increased power for...