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Costco is well known as a high-road employer, in stark contrast to companies like Walmart and McDonald’s. And now, Costco is raising wages:

The second-largest U.S. retailer will start paying at least $13-to-$13.50 an hour, up from $11.50-to-$12 an hour, the company said Thursday in a conference call with analysts. The increase will cut its earnings per share in the next three months by 1 cent, and by 2 cents in the following three quarters, the Issaquah, Washington-based company said. [...]

Costco’s highest hourly pay is about $22.50, and the company plans to give those workers about a 2.5 percent raise this year, Galanti said. It takes a full-time Costco employee about four years to reach the top of the pay scale, he said.

Meanwhile, Walmart is looking for credit for boosting pay to $10 an hour.

With the addition of 242,000 new full- and part-time seasonally adjusted jobs in February, the U.S. economy has now seen job growth in the private sector for 72 straight months, the longest such streak in history. (If one month of decline is excluded, there were 85 months of private-sector growth during the Reagan administration.) 

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the total comprised 230,000 new jobs created in the private sector while government added 12,000. 

The official unemployment rate, U3 in bureau jargon, remained unchanged at 4.9 percent, its lowest level since February 2008. The BLS calculated the number of unemployed in February at 7.8 million, the same as January.

New job counts for December were revised from 262,000 to 271,000. The January count was revised from 151,000 to 172,000.

The civilian workforce in February rose by 555,000, after having risen by 502,000 in January. The employment-population ratio climbed 0.2 to 59.8 percent, and the labor force participation rate also rose 0.2, to 62.9 percent.

● Gawker continues to be a pioneer in unionizing digital media:

The union representing the editorial staff at Gawker Media has announced that it has successfully bargained the first union contract at a digital media company – an innovative three-year deal that sets minimum pay levels and gives Gawker’s 99 union members a 3% across-the-board raise each year.

Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, the union representing Gawker’s workers, said the deal was far different from traditional television or newspaper contracts. He said it includes an unusual provision on editorial independence: “Any decision on editorial content has to be made by the editorial side – not by business decisions or advertisers.”

● House Republicans backed off of privatizing air traffic control.

● The lawyers who are fighting for the same rights as janitors.

● Massachusetts: Where are the missing women?

Republicans just keep showing exactly how committed they are to their famous love of local control: not at all. At least not when it comes to cities and towns that want to help workers by passing laws like minimum wage increases. Birmingham, Alabama, is the latest victim of a minimum wage pre-emption law:

Alabama’s governor and legislature Thursday blocked Birmingham’s attempts to raise the city’s minimum wage as they swiftly approved legislation to strip cities of their ability to set hourly pay requirements.

The Alabama senate passed the legislation on a 23-11 vote that largely broke along party lines. Governor Robert Bentley signed the bill into law about an hour later. The legislation voids a Birmingham city ordinance attempting to raise the city’s minimum wage to $10.10, the city’s legal department said Thursday afternoon.

Alabama Republicans aren’t alone. A similar bill is moving ahead in Idaho, and several other states have either passed or tried to pass such laws, targeting not just minimum wage but paid sick leave laws. This all comes thanks in part to a major push from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), because we can’t have cities, towns, or counties improving conditions for workers, can we? Not if there’s a Republican-controlled state government to put a stop to it.

Just one more reason to oppose the rise of 401(k)s.

Many workers whose jobs are funded by the federal government don’t work for the federal government—they work for companies with federal contracts. And many of those jobs don’t pay a living wage, effectively making the government a low-wage employer. In South Carolina, it’s actually the largest low-wage employer in the state, a new analysis by Good Jobs Nation finds:

These low-wage jobs are in occupations such as home healthcare aides (4,336), construction (1,185) security guards (876) and food service workers (444). And, just as Demos found for the nation as a whole, the 30,000 low-wage jobs subsidized by federal funding streams in South Carolina make the U.S. government the single largest creator of low-wage private sector jobs in the State, outranking Wal-Mart and McDonald’s combined, which employ an estimated 20,600 and 8,900 low-wage workers respectively within the State.

President Obama signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour in 2014, but that is going into effect gradually. And $10.10, while a big improvement over the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, is not enough.

Workers at the Donald Trump co-owned Trump International Hotel Las Vegas voted to unionize. When hotel management challenged the union vote, the National Labor Relations Board rejected the challenge. But the Trump Organization fights on—to deny its workers their right to organize. The claim, of course, is that the big bad union intimidated the workers into voting to unionize:

“We will continue our fight to ensure a fair election for our valued associates, many of whom vigorously oppose union representation,” said Jill Martin, an attorney for The Trump Organization, in a statement to reporters. “The hearing officer’s recommendations erroneously disregarded the severe misconduct undertaken by Union agents, which clearly impacted an incredibly close election.” Trump management has until next week to formally challenge the NLRB recommendation, and then the Board’s regional chapter will determine whether or not to certify the union. Even if the local board backs the workers, Trump can further delay by appealing their ruling to the federal board in Washington, D.C.

That intimidation claim is what the NLRB’s local hearing officer already rejected. There is good reason, though, to believe that the vote was fraught with intimidation and retaliation … coming from management:

For some workers, like Donato, that wait is especially painful. After three years working at the hotel, Donato was suspended and then fired shortly after the union election, which he thinks was retaliation for his open support for the union. He is desperately hoping to win his job back as part of the bargaining process, and says he is mostly worried for his elderly mother and siblings in the Philippines, who depend on the money he sends them.

That wasn't the first time the Trump hotel management went after a worker for exercising their legal right to organize. But even if all of management’s claims that the union harassed workers into voting yes are thrown out in the end, they can delay the final recognition of the union and delay a contract for months, at least, inflicting pain on the workers who’ve already risked so much to fight for a better workplace.

● America’s biggest meat producer averages one amputation per month. 

● A Pennsylvania nurses union has grown nearly 40 percent in weeks. Labor Notes takes a look at that stunning story.

● What Success Academy's student enrollment patterns tell us about the no-excuses charter chain. And here's more:

A Guardian analysis has found that Success Academy loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared with the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.

● Workday Minnesota is putting the focus on wage theft.

● Looking over to England, staff at Kensington Palace might go on strike over a schedule change that would leave some workers earning below living wage.

● Workers Independent News report for February 23, 2016:

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Workers at the Donald Trump co-owned Trump International Hotel Las Vegas voted to unionize back in December, despite having faced a harsh anti-union campaign that included workers being suspended for showing union support. Now, the National Labor Relations Board has rejected management’s effort to get the workers’ vote thrown out:

Trump Hotel management had asked the National Labor Relations Board to throw out the results of that election, claiming that organizers from the Culinary Workers Union intimidated and coerced employees into voting yes, which “interfered with their ability to exercise a free and reasoned choice.” But after weeks of reviewing the evidence, the labor board did not agree.

Hearing Officer Lisa Dunn announced: “I recommend that the Employer’s objections be overruled in their entirety.”

Trump’s management has already withdrawn some of their objections, but still refuses to recognize the union. They have two weeks to challenge this new recommendation.

The workers are going to keep pressing their case as the spotlight is on Nevada for the Republican presidential caucus, trying to get Donald Trump to meet with them (you can guess how he’ll respond to that) and rallying outside the Trump International Hotel on Tuesday. They have a union. Now they need a fair contract.

● Why is the SEIU endorsing this Republican state legislator in California?

● Here comes another minimum wage pre-emption bill, this one in Alabama. Because state-level Republicans are not interested in cities and towns raising the bar on their own.

● New York Times editorial: Hillary Clinton should just say yes to a $15 minimum wage.

● Walk-in for public schools.

More.

● Another improvement for workers that wouldn’t have come without workers organizing: Walmart is improving its worker scheduling. Not enough, but it’ll still make a difference.

● Workers Independent News report for February 18, 2016:

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Vermont is about to become the fifth state in the U.S. with a paid sick leave law. The state House, which had previously passed a sick leave bill, this week passed the state Senate’s version of the bill, described as “somewhat more business-friendly.” That usually means “somewhat less worker-friendly,” but it’s still a major advance:

The measure calls for employers to provide workers three paid sick days a year for the first two years that the law would be in effect and five thereafter.

It does not cover employees working fewer than 18 hours a week or 21 weeks a year.

The bill is headed to the desk of Gov. Peter Shumlin, who supports it. Vermont will join Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon as states with paid sick leave laws. A number of other American cities and towns—many of them in New Jersey—have similar laws. And, of course, most other countries in the world have this basic, common-sense policy.

Walmart likes to burnish its public image by maintaining a decent record on LGBT rights. But the retail giant didn’t offer benefits to the same-sex spouses of its workers until 2014, a decade after marriage equality became the law in Massachusetts, and that has landed Walmart in a legal battle. Jackie Cote, a longtime Walmart worker, is suing—along with as many as 1,200 other current and former Walmart employees—arguing that the rejection of spousal benefits is sex discrimination, illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Cote, who has worked at Walmart since 1999, married Diana Smithson in Massachusetts in 2004. In 2012, Smithson, a breast cancer survivor, was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. Within two years, without Walmart insurance to cover Smithson’s treatment, the couple racked up more than $150,000 in medical bills. “I thought that they would really have no choice because I was legally married in the state of Massachusetts,” Cote says.

Seeking compensation for the benefits that were denied and out-of-pocket medical expenses, the suit alleges that Walmart’s stance was unlawful because it’s a form of sex discrimination. “The sex of her spouse is the reason for treating people differently—isn’t that discrimination based on sex?” asks attorney Gary Buseck, legal director for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, one of the advocacy groups representing Cote.

If Cote had tried to get benefits for a male spouse, she would have succeeded, so the rejection was based on sex, according to her suit. One big question is whether Walmart will go to the mat to defend itself on this one, as it so often does on its poor treatment of workers:

Walmart denies wrongdoing and opposes class-action certification (the two sides are slated to present briefs on the class question this summer) but hasn’t ruled out a resolution. “Before the lawsuit was filed, we attempted to resolve it, and we’ve said we remain open to further discussions,” says Randy Hargrove, Walmart’s director of national media relations. He declined to elaborate on the company’s legal strategy.

This will be an interesting one—if it goes to court, it could have significant implications for workers at other companies. And if Walmart settles before it goes to court, that too will send a message to other major employers that this battle may not be worth fighting.