Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates

Some good news: dining hall workers at Harvard University could end their strike this week after reaching a tentative deal with the university.

Brian Lang, the president of Unite Here Local 26, which represents about 750 cafeteria workers, confirmed that terms had been reached early Tuesday morning that satisfied the workers’ demands.

Mediators helped work out the agreement between a union subcommittee and the university. On Tuesday, it would be reviewed and voted on by the full bargaining committee. It would then be brought before the entire union membership on Wednesday, and those on strike could return to work as soon as Thursday.

Solidarity is powerful:

The settlement announcement came after a nearly 12-hour bargaining session Monday that was punctuated by a student sit-in at the Cambridge office building where negotiations were taking place. More than 200 participants pressed administrators to meet the demands of the workers and settle the contract. The sit-in was part of a larger action by more than 300 students who walked out [of] classes Monday in support of the striking workers.

On Monday, a worker detailed in the New York Times how her pay wasn't keeping pace with her medical costs and rent. It’s not clear why Harvard administrators didn’t avert the strike by realizing in advance that “workers at university with $35.7 billion endowment can’t pay to have possible cancer checked out” was not going to be a narrative that got the university good publicity, or that students would support the workers. Maybe a lesson for next time, guys?

Rosa Ines Rivera, a cook at Harvard University, lays out the harsh economics that has her and 750 coworkers on strike:

The co-pays alone can be a problem. When a doctor told me my daughter had failed a hearing test and might need surgery, I thought about what care I could do without. I recently skipped an appointment to have a spot on my lung checked for cancer to save on the co-pays.

Medical students analyzed Harvard’s proposal and found that the cost of premiums alone could eat up almost 10 percent of my income. And Harvard wants to increase our co-pays for every single doctor visit to $25, from $15, for primary care and to $100, from zero, for outpatient hospital care and some tests. Some costs would be reimbursed for lower-income workers, but out-of-pocket expenses would still be hard to meet.

The students say that Harvard’s proposal is unaffordable for nearly all of us according to state government guidelines. If it goes through, I will keep avoiding the doctor to save that money for my kids’ co-pays. Any increase puts me at the breaking point.

Harvard’s endowment is $35.7 billion. It can afford to pay its cooks and other workers enough that they can afford the co-pay to get possible lung cancer checked out.

After going without a contract for more than a year, and with their administration withdrawing from negotiation, faculty at Pennsylvania state colleges and universities (but not including Pennsylvania State University, confusingly enough) went on strike Wednesday. The administration is running the usual “oh, those greedy workers” playbook because the faculty don’t want to make concessions on healthcare expenses that other workers have been pressured into. Meanwhile:

Union President Ken Mash stood outside the chancellor's office building Thursday afternoon in Harrisburg to push for a resumption of contract talks.

"If they want to come out and right now and negotiate, we're willing to go ahead and do that," Mash said. "But, I don't want to be totally unfair either, because they do have my cellphone number, so if they want to call later on and say that they're ready to negotiate, we're ready to do that too."

This might have a little something to do with the faculty’s grievances:

State funding for the system, at $444 million this year, is about the same as it was 17 years ago, even as full-time enrollment has risen more than 10 percent.

And:

The union also balks at having to take on other duties without compensation, including a 67 percent increase in the supervision of interns who go into the business world. The increase would raise the annual allotment of interns to 120. The union also balks at cuts to competitive grants for research and professional development. Another issue is the state system's plan to put part-time adjunct professors on a lower pay scale for the first time. And it objects to changes in the promotion, tenure and grievance rules.

People who work for Donald Trump might have a special insight into what it would be like to live under a Trump presidency. And these workers in his Las Vegas hotel are absolutely clear: Trump is a terrible boss and signs are he’d be a terrible president. They’re pointing out that if he was serious about his campaign promises, he’d negotiate with their union, which he’s so far refusing to do:

"We hear the phrase often and again and again about let's 'Make America Great Again,' let's make America what it was supposed to be," Wise tells CNN, "if you want to start making America great, start from the bottom with the workers."

And it’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of votes from Trump workers:

"I will vote for Ms. Hillary Clinton, and my family, too," says [Celia] Vargas, who was 23 when she came to the United States illegally. "She fights for keeping families together, she fights for the younger people, for Dreamers." 

(Vargas became a citizen after Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty law, so don’t get your panties in a knot about her voting, Trump supporters.)

Imagine waking up and regretting you didn’t help defeat President Trump. Now, sign up with MoveOn to call swing state voters from home, and get out the vote no matter where you live!

Remember when the founder of Latinos for Trump said that if Donald Trump wasn’t president, there would be “taco trucks on every corner”—like it was a bad thing? The Culinary Union and other progressive groups do, and with the third and (thankfully) final presidential debate coming up in Las Vegas on Wednesday, they’re trolling the Trump International Las Vegas Hotel with taco trucks:

The Culinary Union, long a Donald Trump antagonist in Las Vegas, is going to “build” a wall of taco trucks outside Trump’s hotel, just a couple miles from UNLV, site of the final presidential debate.

The groups aim to have at least five taco trucks outside the hotel, in addition to a banner in the style of a wall that participants will be able to sign.

“We’re reminding Mr. Trump that immigrant workers here and across the country will be watching the debate and voting in November,” said Yvanna Cancela, the political director for the majority Latino and predominantly immigrant union.

Immigration isn’t the Culinary Union’s only argument with Trump. The group is also locked in a fight with Trump’s Las Vegas hotel after workers chose to unionize, only to have management refuse to negotiate a contract.

No matter where you live, sign up with MoveOn to call voters in swing states from the comfort of your home. Get out the vote and take nothing for granted!

Harvard University has the largest endowment of any university in the nation. And for nearly two weeks, its dining hall workers have been on strike for better wages. How did the geniuses in Harvard’s administration not realize how that contrast would play out in accounts of the strike? Or did they just not care, so determined were they not to put any of the fruits of that more than $35 billion endowment toward giving their own workers a raise? Did they not predict that a significant number of students would take the workers’ side? Because:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren had previously walked the picket line with the striking workers. The workers are calling for an average wage of $35,000 a year, up from $30,000, in one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S.

Seriously, Harvard. The right thing to do is also the thing that will make the embarrassing headlines stop. And you can more than afford it. 

According to Donald Trump, his business bankruptcies were tremendously smart things to do, and, if looked at from the right angle, almost a heroic blow against nasty Wall Street types:

"These lenders aren't babies," he said during a Republican primary debate last fall. "These are total killers. These are not the nice, sweet little people that you think, okay?"

From a sheer dollar perspective, Wall Streeters and other big investors might well have had the largest investments in Trump’s various mismanaged and doomed enterprises, but that doesn’t mean “little people” didn’t lose more than they could afford. Those “little people” included people Trump should have felt doubly responsible for, Mother Jones reports:

Trump's company encouraged its employees to invest their retirement savings in company stock, according to a class-action lawsuit filed by employees against Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts following its 2004 bankruptcy. Then, when the stock price was near its nadir as bankruptcy loomed, the company forced the employees to sell their stock at a huge loss. More than 400 employees lost a total of more than $2 million from their retirement accounts, the lawsuit states.

But hey, nothing illegal in that, it turns out. Kind of a huge harm, no foul situation.

A former Trump Plaza worker sums up the lesson learned from trusting Donald Trump: "I didn't realize he was as stupid as he is.” For a lot of people, that was an expensive lesson to learn.

Daily Kos is teaming up with Color of Change to mobilize black voters in crucial swing states, with groundbreaking texting technology. Click here to get involved from the comfort of your home.

President Obama’s executive order banning labor law violators from getting federal contracts is set to go into effect later this month. Except, of course, industry groups are suing to block it. Here’s how the order will work:

The key change in how agencies buy goods and services involves the identification of scofflaw employers. Federal government contractors will be required to disclose violations of 14 federal labor laws and executive orders. The government’s contracting agencies will take these violations into account when deciding whether an employer has enough integrity to do business with the government. The laws include, among others, the National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Service Contract Act, the Davis Bacon Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. The executive orders include E.O. 13658 (Establishing a Minimum Wage for Contractors) and E.O. 1124 (Equal Employment Opportunity). The rule requires contractors to update their reports of violations every six months.

All disclosures under the new rule will be public, but the main purpose is to inform agency contracting officials about the integrity of the contractors. If they violate labor law, they may be assumed to [be] less trustworthy than their law-abiding competitors and the government may choose not to do business with them until their compliance improves.

Literally this lawsuit is to force the government to keep hiring companies that break its laws. This is a lawsuit aimed at ensuring there’s zero accountability for businesses, ever. And it’s the sort of move Republicans enthusiastically endorse.

One of the things you hear is that Donald Trump is supposed to win over union members by pretending he cares about trade and American jobs. But unions aren’t having it. Last month, the AFL-CIO announced that Trump’s support was dropping and that in Ohio, he was behind Mitt Romney where union members are concerned. Now, SEIU is releasing polling showing Trump at rock bottom among its members:

According to a member poll conducted by the nearly 2 million-member Service Employees International Union last month and provided to POLITICO, Trump’s support among the group was 17 percent — 51 points behind Hillary Clinton, far lower than even Jeb Bush’s 24 percent in the spring, and behind both Mitt Romney and John McCain during their presidential bids.

Significantly, SEIU is majority women and majority people of color. The union isn’t letting it rest with Trump just polling badly, though. It’s planning a major election effort:

On the volunteer side alone, it had 8,400 canvassers on the ground over the weekend of Sept. 10, nearly 3,500 last weekend, and roughly 1,000 rolling through Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Hampshire every weekend. Now, on Saturday, it will be ramping up by expanding that volunteer program to Colorado, Nevada, Michigan, and Ohio, while the group works to mobilize Hispanics through canvases and phone banking in Los Angeles, Fresno, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Houston, Orlando, Chicago, Phoenix, and Tucson. 

Part of the SEIU's offensive has involved investing in Latino-focused digital ads and partnering with iAmerica to air 30-second Spanish language anti-Trump TV ads in Nevada and Florida pegged to his immigration policy. Much of its focus, however, is on the independent expenditure canvassing program: it is aiming to make three stops at over one million doors in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Virginia, according to data provided to POLITICO.

That should help put a few more nails in Trump’s coffin, as well as mobilizing voters who can help Democrats retake the Senate—and maybe even the House.

Do you live in a state that will determine the presidential race and/or who controls the Senate? Click here to sign up with Working America to get involved in crucial door-to-door canvasses and phone banks.