Labor

To their legions of fans -- Sasha Obama and Snoop Dogg included -- the Ugly Dolls are anything but ugly. With names such as Babo, Big Toe and Puglee, the creatures look more like impish cartoon monsters than adorable Beanie Babies. Millions of these odd, squishy misfits have charmed their way into buyers' hands since David Horvath began doodling them eight years ago on letters to his college sweetheart, Sun-Min Kim. Manhattan Beach residents Horvath and Kim had dreamed about creating toys that could tell stories and make kids happy.

In the Ozark Mountain town of Rogers, Ark., more than 250 business owners gathered for lunch at a construction company last month to focus on what they saw as a major threat -- a proposal in Congress to make it easier to form labor unions. At each place setting, attendees found pre-stamped postcards and pre-written letters to be sent to Arkansas' U.S. senators, Democrats Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, who had supported the labor bill in the past.

As youngsters in the United States return to school, children in Uzbekistan will be returning to the fields. For them, it is the autumn cotton harvest. From now through the end of November, instead of attending classes, 2 million Uzbek children ages 6 to 15 will be forced to spend their days picking cotton. Unlike most instances of forced child labor in agriculture, this mass mobilization is not driven by exploitative plantation owners or desperate families but by the government.

The tight race between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has opened surprisingly deep and bitter divisions in the ranks of organized labor, as rival union leaders fly planeloads of last-minute volunteers into key states, accuse each other of trying to disenfranchise members, and even launch open attacks on rival Democratic candidates.

Mariam, a 28-year-old retail chain employee, went to great lengths to get fired. Knowing she would be ineligible for unemployment payments if she simply quit, Mariam asked her company to fire her, but she was turned down. Then she simply stopped showing up for work. Her wish was granted at last -- she was fired, went on the dole and found a new job six months later. Soon, such convoluted yet surprisingly common schemes may be a thing of the past.

California plans to spend up to $5.6 million in federal grant money to retrain mortgage industry workers who lost their jobs in the wake of the sub-prime lending meltdown, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday. The state's initiative will focus on thousands of former employees of mortgage lenders in California, home to many of the big institutions that offered sub-prime mortgages to borrowers with patchy credit histories.

Pilots for Delta and Northwest were still negotiating the terms of a labor contract late Wednesday, delaying plans to sign a deal that would create the world's largest airline. Directors for Delta Air Lines Inc., the nation's third-largest carrier, and No. 5 Northwest Airlines Corp. had been expected to vote Wednesday on a combination if a pilot deal had been reached. But a spokesman for Northwest's chapter of the Air Line Pilots Assn.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has asked the federal government to review its immigration enforcement priorities, warning that work-site raids on "non-exploitative" businesses could have "severe and lasting effects" on the local economy.

Moving to stop the economy from stumbling further, the Federal Reserve said Friday that it would pump more cash into U.S banks to keep the nation's financial system from seizing up. The surprise action came as the Fed formally signed on to tough new rules for the credit card industry announced a day earlier by other regulators. The two initiatives were the latest examples of how the Fed, under the chairmanship of Ben S.

California's moribund construction and real estate industries helped push the state unemployment rate to 6.8% in May, its highest level in nearly five years. The state Employment Development Department reported Friday that joblessness in May rose six-tenths of a percentage point from the previous month and was a dramatic 1.5 percentage points higher than in May 2007. And the outlook is likely to get worse for California -- at least for the rest of the year, experts said.