Today, we commiserate Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. The gap between the earnings of black women and white men is so large that, essentially, up to today black women have been working for free. Think of it as the modern-day equivalent of the constitutional count of slaves as three-fifths of a person.

Sometimes failure is a good thing. That was especially true last week when the U.S. Senate failed to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It meant that Congress was stopped from taking health care away from tens of millions of Americans, at least for now.

President Han Sang-gyun of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions has spent his life fighting for the rights of workers and has paid a high price. Han has been in jail since December 2015, serving a three-year sentence for defending trade union rights and fighting back against corporate corruption and the repressive government of former President Park Geun-hye. For his perseverance in the face of anti-democratic repression, the AFL-CIO Executive Council this week honored President Han with the AFL-CIO’s annual George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, and joined the global labor movement in calling for his release.

In our fragmented workplaces with perma-temps, contracted workers, agency employees and subcontracting, we must be vigilant so every worker is protected and paid fairly, and that goes double when it comes to protecting the freedom to stand in unity for better pay and working conditions.

The Trump administration has begun a process to undo President Obama’s overtime pay rule and deny working people a pay raise.