Each week, we take a look at the biggest friends and foes of labor. We celebrate the workers winning big and small battles, and we shame the companies or people trying to deny working people their rights.

Every week, we'll be bringing you a roundup of the important news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here's this week's Working People Weekly List.

The world lost a musical icon yesterday. You'll read about his impact as a musician and an entertainer elsewhere, but let's take a second to look at Prince's career-spanning fights on behalf of working people.

The Wall Street investment bank Lazard held its annual shareholder meeting this week at Bermuda’s luxurious Elbow Beach Hotel. Bermuda is known for its beautiful sandy beaches and, less flatteringly, as an offshore tax haven. Headquartered in New York City, Lazard is incorporated in Bermuda.

The AFL-CIO released a video today showing firsthand the devastating economic impact the Trans-Pacific Partnership could have on communities across the country. When global companies move jobs offshore to take advantage of trade deals, they not only destroy jobs, they suppress wages, deprive local governments of needed resources and leave working families behind. 

Every week, we'll be bringing you a roundup of the important news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here's this week's Working People Weekly List.

Check out this video of Union Veterans Council Director Will Fischer cutting through the rhetoric and lifting up where Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump really stands when it comes to veterans. 

Let's be clear about North Carolina's H.B. 2 and other "bathroom laws" popping up in states that would bar transgender people from using the restroom facility of their identified gender: We won't stand for it. 

Four years after the tortured, lifeless body of Bangladesh garment worker–organizer Aminul Islam was discovered in a ditch, his killers have yet to be arrested. Yesterday, the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation and Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity demanded that authorities find and bring Aminul’s killers to trial.

Working people at Verizon are on strike. After months of negotiations with the telecommunications giant, they’ve decided to take a stand to create a better workplace. They want to make sure the needs of working families are met, instead of standing by as a handful of individuals get richer and richer. They’re fighting to stop the company from sending jobs overseas and to get Verizon to end its continued intimidation of working people at Verizon Wireless who are trying to create a better future for themselves and their families.

Starting yesterday, more than 387,000 people began finding out they qualify for complete forgiveness of their existing federal student loan debt.

In the past five years, 126 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia. This is in addition to 74 other murder attempts. Investigations have produced almost no indictments or convictions. Colombia continues to fail to formalize employment, to protect working people who want a voice on the job and to address vast inequality.

This past week, two of this country’s biggest states, California and New York, took monumental steps to combat income inequality in America. Both passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour in the coming years. That’s more than double the paltry $7.25 an hour guaranteed by the federal government. More than 9 million working people will benefit from higher wages and larger paychecks. This is really life-altering.

Each week, we take a look at the biggest friends and foes of labor. We celebrate the workers winning big and small battles, and we shame the companies or people trying to deny working people their rights.

Once again, the right-wing neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute have created their alternative version of reality regarding runaway CEO pay levels. AEI claims that the average pay for chief executives was a mere $220,700 in 2015.

Like many who speak up in Honduras, indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was murdered for her activism. She was repeatedly threatened and eventually murdered just before midnight on March 2. Since 1993, Cáceres worked to build a democratic, just and sustainable Honduras. More than a month after her assassination, there is little reason to believe that the Honduran government is handling the investigation properly or addressing the causes of this and many other acts of violence against human rights defenders. As a reminder to those in positions of power to bring justice to Honduras, and in Berta’s honor, the Cáceres family, movement leaders and allies of COPINH, the organization she founded, marched yesterday in Washington, D.C., from the World Bank to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The withdrawal by New York-based pharma giant Pfizer of a proposed merger with Irish company Allergan could save U.S. taxpayers billions. If the merger had been completed under the Treasury Department's old rules, Pfizer could have dodged paying $35 billion in taxes on $150 billion in overseas profits. In 2014, Treasury revised rules to make it harder for corporations to use the process called "inversion" to avoid paying taxes in the United States. The AFL-CIO recently joined more than 50 organizations that sent a letter to the Treasury calling for stiffer rules on inversion so that companies are required to pay their fair share.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued the following statement in reaction to the Department of Labor's final fiduciary ruling.

Racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric is permeating our national political climate. We hear calls from local and national politicians to force Muslims to bear special identification cards, to end refugee resettlement or to impose greater surveillance of Arabs, South Asians and Muslims. What we are witnessing now is part and parcel of the impact of a domestic "war on terror" that characterizes Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities as being worthy of suspicion, discrimination, surveillance and profiling. The current political environment is taking a particular toll on these communities, extending even to acts of violence.

On Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed a law raising the state's minimum wage. In New York City and some more prosperous suburbs, the new minimum wage will be $15, while in the rest of the state, the new minimum wage will be $12.50. The increases will be phased in, and millions will see wage increases. Future wage increases will be tied to economic indicators. The law also establishes 12 weeks of paid family leave for working people.