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Apple, Google, Microsoft and a broad coalition of major tech companies are making a loud call for greater government disclosure of digital communications monitoring.

In a letter out today, an alliance of 63 companies and groups are calling for dramatically increased transparency around U.S. government surveillance efforts. This comes as the companies — and individual Americans — continue to grapple with recent revelations of a sweeping surveillance program led by the National Security Agency.

(Read the full letter.)

The alliance, which also includes investors and trade organizations — asks for Internet and communications service providers to report national security-related requests with specificity.

In the letter addressed to President Obama, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, Attorney General Eric Holder and congressional leaders, they've asked to regularly report:

• The number of government requests for information about their users.

• The number of individuals, accounts or devices for which information was requested.

• And the number of requests that sought communications content, basic subscriber information and/or other information.

The coalition also asks that the government begin issuing a transparency report of its own, and in it, provide similar information — the total number of requests made and the number of individuals affected by each.

You may notice that no hosting providers like Amazon Web Services or Go Daddy have co-signed the letter. Also absent are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard. We're reaching out to these companies and will update with their input.

Click to read the full letter.

For decades after the 1930s, the National Labor Relations Board served as the arbiter for squabbles between management and unions, or workers who wanted to join a union. In more recent years, though, the board itself has become a battleground.

Democratic appointees to the NLRB have grown increasingly sympathetic to organized labor, while Republican appointees have grown increasingly hostile, says Harley Shaiken, who studies labor relations as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Management tends to in general prefer a far less active NLRB, where unions view it as essential for the future of the labor movement," he says.

Shaiken says that antagonism extends to confirmation battles: Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked President Obama's nominees to the board, making it hard to preserve the three-member quorum the NLRB needs to operate.

"The NLRB has been limping under the Obama presidency simply because the president has been unable to get appointments onto the five-member NLRB board," Shaiken says.

That could end as early as next week, after a Senate deal defused a standoff over Republican filibusters of executive-branch appointees.

The 'Recess' Gambit

Last year, Obama used controversial "recess" appointments to fill vacant seats on the board, when the Senate was out of town, but not technically in recess. Several federal appeals courts have challenged that move, and the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the issue in its upcoming term.

Those recess appointments became a crucial bargaining chip in this week's Senate negotiations over filibuster rules. Republicans agreed not to filibuster a series of presidential nominees, including the Labor secretary and the EPA administrator, both of whom were confirmed on Thursday.

But in return they insisted the White House come up with two new nominees for the NLRB.

"The NLRB nominations, I think, were at the heart of the deal to avert the so-called 'nuclear option' in the Senate," says Ilyse Schuman, an attorney who represents management in labor disputes.

Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, is disappointed that Obama had to withdraw his two recess nominees. But Cohen says he's perfectly happy with their replacements: Nancy Schiffer, who has been a lawyer for the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, and Kent Hirozawa, chief counsel to the NLRB.

Cohen says he thinks they'll be just as favorable for organized labor as were the previous nominees: Sharon Block and Richard Griffin.

"There's no difference, in terms of their skills, their background, their commitment, their values," says Cohen. "There's no difference."

'Full Speed Ahead'

Schuman agrees the new NLRB board members will be equally pro-labor, and without the handicap of a legally dubious recess appointment.

"With this cloud of uncertainty removed from the authority of the board, it is going to return full speed ahead, if not even faster, on implementing, I think, enormous changes to labor-management relations," Schuman says.

Schuman says the NLRB could now make it easier for workers to organize a union, something the Obama administration has tried but failed to do legislatively.

"In the face of the legislative logjam ... there are other avenues — administrative avenues — that are being turned to to try to achieve those same objectives. ... Trying to seek ways to facilitate union organizing and increase the sort of record low numbers of union membership."

Shaiken says Republican senators did come out of the week with a pair of political scalps.

"The Republicans won a symbolic victory in that the president's two initial nominees were withdrawn. But the Democrats won a substantive victory in that the two new nominees — very highly regarded, quite qualified — will be Democratic nominees on the NLRB," he says.

If the deal holds together and the new nominees are confirmed in the coming days, the NLRB will be fully staffed with five Senate-approved members for the first time in a decade.

In the 1980s, a popular fast-food commercial touted chicken-breast sandwiches — and mocked chicken nuggets sold by competitors.

In the ad, a competitor's doofus clerk explains nuggets. "All the parts are crammed into one big part," he said. "And parts is parts."

Today, clerks may believe that catchphrase could apply to them as regular full-time schedules disappear. For many workers, hours are not only short, but increasingly erratic as managers scramble to cover shifts without the steadying influence of experienced full-time employees.

"It's ridiculous," says Amere Graham, an 18-year-old high school graduate who works at a McDonald's in Milwaukee. "My schedule is all over the place. It's completely unpredictable."

Government data support Graham's impressions of workplace conditions. The ranks of people working part time because they can't find full-time jobs have roughly doubled since the summer of 2007, from about 4.3 million to 8.2 million.

"There has been a surge in part-time work," says Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute.

The change reflects business owners' reluctance to hire full-time workers while they still have so many worries about the strength of the recovery and the cost of the Affordable Care Act, Mathur says. "You want to maintain flexibility so you can respond to the economy" without having to carry the costs of hiring and firing full-time employees, she says.

In a study of retail working conditions, conducted in the fall of 2011 in New York, only 17 percent of retail workers said they have a set schedule.

With so many people working in so many part-time positions, frustrations are growing, according to Michael Wilder, coordinator at Wisconsin Jobs Now, a union-supported group that advocates for low-wage workers.

Business

Jobs Outlook Is Brighter For Class Of 2013

This summer was supposed to be a time to reintroduce the public to the Affordable Care Act and teach people how to sign up for benefits this fall.

But that's not what's happening.

Instead, earlier this month, the Obama administration decided to delay some key pieces of the law, most notably the requirement for larger employers to provide coverage or risk fines, because they couldn't have reporting regulations ready in time for next year's rollout.

Then this week, the Republican-led House voted to delay the so-called individual mandate for a year to match. It was the 39th such vote against the law.

And now some are starting to worry that the White House is getting dangerously off-message.

The administration tried to regroup Thursday: It put President Obama front and center in the White House East Room, surrounded by smiling beneficiaries of the parts of the Affordable Care Act already in effect.

Among those singled out: those who have been on the receiving end of a somewhat obscure provision requiring insurance companies to pay rebates to policyholders if the companies spend too much on administrative costs rather than medical expenses.

"Dan Hart, who's here, from Chicago, had read these rebates were happening," said Obama. "But he didn't think anything of it until he got a check in the mail for 136 bucks."

This year an estimated 8.5 million Americans will get rebates thanks to the law's "medical loss ratio" rules. That's actually down from the 13 million who got them last year. And Obama admitted that even those who are getting the checks don't necessarily associate them with the health law.

"I bet if you took a poll, most folks wouldn't know when that check comes in that this was because of Obamacare that they got this extra money in their pockets," he said.

Which is a big part of the administration's messaging problem. According to public opinion polls, many of the law's provisions are extremely popular. But the law itself isn't. Still.

And while the president is talking about a few million people getting refunds of $100 or $200, Republicans have been talking in much more expansive terms.

"A government-run health care system is at its very basis a beginning of socialism in medicine and we oppose that," said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, during the House floor debate Wednesday.

At his daily briefing Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney derided Republicans' continuing efforts to roll back the law.

Carney said the president is willing to make changes to the law as necessary. "But that is wholly different from this constant and now almost comical effort to spend most of the time in the House of Representatives hoping to repeal in some form or manner a bill that has been passed into law by both houses, signed into law by the president, and upheld as the law by the Supreme Court of the United States."

Still, there's a major difference in the way Republicans talk about the law and the way the president does, says George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley and an expert on political messaging.

Lakoff says Republicans talk about the law as a moral issue. "Basically ... they say that democracy is about liberty, the liberty to pursue your own self-interest without you having to take care of anybody else's interests or anybody else having to take care of yours."

But when Obama talks about the health law — at least this week, says Lakoff — "his message was all about money."

And Lakoff says that's pretty much been the president's problem: He's mostly shied away from talking about health care on the same moral terms as have the Republicans.

But he could talk about it from the moral perspective of Democrats if he wanted to, Lakoff says.

"Health care is about life itself, about living a decent life, about living free from fear, and also free from economic fear. Fear of losing your home because you have to pay out of pocket for operations that really ought to be paid for by having healthcare insurance," he said.

The administration, however, has seemed to be all over the place when it comes to its messaging about the health law.

Of course it's been a lot easier for the Republicans. Their message is pretty much one word: No.