A larger backlog of EEOC cases could increase the number of workplace discrimination cases which go directly to court. If a workplace discrimination charge goes unheard by the agency for more than 180 days, complainants can request that a “Notice of Right-to-Sue” be issued automatically. However, those cases could still go unheard thanks to a rash of vacancies in the federal courts.

Some of the cases unheard by the EEOC might not even be submitted to the courts in the first place, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former OSHA commissioner.

“They’re hard cases to bring, hard cases to prove,” he said. Plus, “most people can’t afford attorneys to do it.” Instead, they rely on government agencies to “help them assert their rights.”

For complaints about health and safety standards, employees don’t even have the option of going to the courts on their own. Instead, all those complaints must go through OSHA. While that agency hopes to avoid serious reductions in its workload capacity due to the sequester, Eisenbrey said that the status quo at the department is already “completely insufficient.”

“The chance of having an OSHA inspection, if you’re an employer, in any given year is close to zero,” he said. He estimated that there were only about 1,000 inspectors in the agency, compared to seven million employers nationwide.

Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., said Nutter appears to be taking a hard line stance similar to that of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, whose tussle with his city’s teacher’s union resulted in a strike last year.

Emanuel, Eisenbray said, is among a breed of new Democratic leaders who aren’t as beholden to unions as their predecessors were; instead, they’re more beholden to wealthy contributors who are more likely to want tax cuts.

Workers, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly marginalized. Despite the recession, the nation’s income has continued to grow, but a larger portion of it goes to the wealthy, Eisenbray said.

“Part of what’s going on is that everyone, all blue collar workers and even white collar college-educated workers, have seen their wages stagnate or fall in the past 10 or 12 years,” Eisenbray said. “They’ve lost their retiree health benefits, their employer-covered health care, their pensions have been virtually wiped out. There has been this huge erosion across the board in the compensation of the American middle- and working-class, and the public employees have held out longest. They had a good relationship with the politicians they bargained with. But now they’re under attack.”

The debate over what to do with Apple’s reserve money has been “one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders,” writes the Economic Policy Institute’s Isaac Shapiro. The workers who manufacture and sell Apple products, he notes, have been left entirely out of the debate. Despite the notoriously grim conditions at some factories which make Apple products, low-level employees are unlikely to see any benefit from a massive corporate surplus.

Currently, 40 percent of private sector employees nationwide cannot earn paid sick days, and lower-paid service workers in the restaurant and fast-food industries are particularly unlikely to have this safeguard. Food service workers, health care workers, child care workers and others who come into physical contact with the public or handle our food are among the least likely to have paid leave.

Data on unpaid internships are difficult to find, but surveys tell us that taking an unpaid internship doesn’t lead to better job placement than going straight into one’s first job. According to Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, unpaid internships don’t lead to higher starting salaries, either. Instead of giving recent college grads a leg up, unpaid internships may put them at a disadvantage: Rather than hiring grads who have been trying to stay afloat during the recession, employers hire newer, more recent graduates.