Tonight at midnight, the three-year contract at the Village Voice expires, so Voice workers held a strike benefit at Williamsburg's Public Assembly last night. The bands were really loud and the crowd drank a lot.

The crowd was heavy with, yes, Village Voice staffers and their friends, as well as a handful of former-Voice employees there to show their support. Ex-employees in attendance included: Zach Baron (who left The Voice for The Daily back in March), Foster Kamer (of the New York Observer), and Tom Robbins (the influential writer who left the paper after the departure of long time columnist Wayne Barrett). Robbins' appearance was perhaps the biggest "screw you" move of the night and was a reminder of the ever-more-corporate Village Voice. As was the arrival at the paper of Nick Pinto from the Village Voice Media's (the parent company of The Village Voice) Minneapolis weekly City Pages.

Back in March, Pinto wrote the nationally printed and murky Voice cover story "Women's Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science." The story defends Village Voice Media's ownership of the classified site Backpage.com.

Backpage.com allows "adult ads" to be posted; last year a 15-year-old sex trafficking victim sued VVM for aiding and abetting prostitution. This week's piece, by Martin Cizmar, Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman—which doesn't have a lot of fans on the staff—was called "Real Men Get Their Facts Straight." Billed online as "The Truth Behind Sex Trafficking," it targets Ashton Kutcher's "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" campaign against U.S. underage sex trafficking.

The piece also pokes fun at estimates of underage sex workers, using arrest records from American cities. Because obviously the number of minors arrested for prostitution must somehow explain the number of minors in the sex business, right? A sidebar to the piece also blamed "feminists, religious zealots" and others for bringing Craigslist's adult services section to a Congressional hearing.

A while after attendees of the benefit stumbled home from last night's party, Ashton Kutcher took to Twitter to berate the Voice for their cover story.

Kutcher's 11 angry tweets to his seven million followers were apparently only the beginning.

The Voice answered back this morning.

Meanwhile, Voice editor Tony Ortega took the time to joke about the union negotiations.

We hear Village Voice Media's Executive Editor Mike Lacey is going to take control (has taken control?) of the Voice's Twitter account today to fire back at Ashton. [UPDATE: We are told we hear wrong.]

Disclosures: Myles Tanzer worked previously at the Voice; The Awl is happily pro-labor.

Last night Philip Glass told this story about how John Cage once emptied the house during a performance. Cage had gotten it into his head to do a spoken performance where he made a cut-up poem out of syllables or something? Man, it sounds like the worst thing ever, just being trapped in a room with John Cage endlessly making vowel noises at you, and so he achieved a 100% audience walkout. Glass' point was that there has to be a place to try and make things and achieve failure along the way (typical Buddhist!) and he was telling this story because this was at the 40th anniversary dinner for The Kitchen, which to its great credit still provides a space for young creative people in New York City to experience flop sweats. Then Sina Najafi, the editor of Cabinet magazine, told me a related story about Mierle Ukeles, which is at this point, with me telling you, really is something of a game of telephone and may range in accuracy anywhere from "apocryphal" to "entirely accurate," the failures being mine. READ MORE

Yesterday we noted the details of a bill introduced by Wisconsin's new Tea Party Republican Governor Scott Walker that would increase payments from public sector employees while eliminating collective bargaining powers for unions (including teachers)—while also introducing unprecedented executive powers to terminate state employees with little due process. In passing, Walker mentioned plans to call in the National Guard, if necessary. It's an announcement that rankled many (maybe intentionally), including the 100,000-member "voice of America's 21st century patriots" organization VoteVets: "Veterans are strongly objecting to Governor Scott Walker's inappropriate threat...." READ MORE

According to The 1938 Almanac for New Yorkers, excerpted below: 110 years ago tomorrow, hazing was outlawed at West Point! And also this week in 1919, 35,000 dressmakers in New York City went on strike for, among other things, a 44-hour workweek. Later that year, the National Association of Ladies' Hatters went on strike as well. 1919 was a big year for striking! See also: the Seattle General Strike, the Boston Police Strike, the New York Harbour Strike and the Actor's Equity Strike that shut down Broadway. In 1919, the women of the New England Telephone Company shut down New England's telephone service for five days. Women were also instrumental in the Winnipeg General Strike in May. Overall, in New York City, one in four workers went on strike. More than 4.1 million people in the country were involved in just nine of the largest strikes—and there were more than 3000 labor strikes in the course of 1919.

Blanca, a 50-something nursing assistant, was sitting across from me at the nurses' station at the Intensive Care Unit inside of a Tenet Healthcare Corporation-owned hospital in downtown Los Angeles. It was midnight, and this was 2004. Blanca's patients were gurgling, asleep or comatose. I was there talking to Blanca on behalf of workers at Kaiser, who were bargaining away benefits because Tenet, the for-profit, non-union hospital chain was driving down wages in the county. The argument was that every one would be better off, Blanca and Kaiser workers, if they were all in one union. READ MORE

Employees of a French trucking company facing possible closure "have threatened to dump a toxic substance into the River Seine if their demands for extra compensation are not met, union representatives said on Thursday." READ MORE

Le boom: "French workers were barricaded inside their bankrupt car parts factory today after threatening to blow the plant up with gas canisters unless they receive a bigger pay-off."