Chalk one up for Arizona’s workers and put another black mark up for state legislators obsessed with attacking workers and their unions for their corporate sponsors. A federal judge yesterday ruled 2011 laws on paycheck deception and restricting workers’ right to picket were unconstitutional.

California’s second-largest city has a progressive mayor, former Democratic U.S. House member Bob Filner, who beat his Republican rival by three points in November.

The 70-year-old Filner spent 20 years in Congress. A reliable and articulate liberal—with high marks on his AFL-CIO, ADA and Sierra Club scorecards—he’s a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and was a “Freedom Rider” during the early 1960s civil rights movement, spending two months in jail for “disturbing the peace and inciting a riot.”

Blake Poindexter is a former T-Mobile USA worker who had worked in a call center in Frisco, Texas, before the company announced in March it would close that center along with six others. Last week, he urged Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann to respect T-Mobile USA workers’ right to join together in a union and stop the company’s harassment of workers.

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report from New Hampshire.

Union-endorsed working family candidates have gone for four-for-four in the special elections held after Republican House Speaker Bill O’Brien rolled out an anti-middle class agenda that puts partisan high-horsing above the needs of Granite Staters. Peter Leishman, a Democrat from Hillsborough, swept the final special election for state representative by an astounding 20-point margin on Tuesday night.