While a giant winter storm is about to hit the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states, many of those snowbound will, like much of the nation, be tuned into the Super Bowl on Sunday.

But the Super Bowl should also be a reminder about human rights and workers' rights. 

Say what? 

Yes, elemental, universal human and workers' rights and their violation are a part of Sunday's event.

First Jonathan Tasini at Working Life writes: "There has been a lot of controversy about the pro-life television commercial that Florida quarterback Tim Tebow will appear in during Sunday's Super Bowl. Here is one Peyton Manning should do--thank to our friends at the National Labor Committee:

NFL jerseys have been sewn under illegal sweatshop conditions at the Chi Fung factory in El Salvador for at least the last four years, according to a new report by the National Labor Committee.  Often forced to work 12-hour shifts, workers were at the factory 61 to 65 hours a week, including 12 to 15 hours of obligatory overtime, which was unpaid.  The workers were paid a below-subsistence wage of just 72 cents an hour, which meets less than a quarter of a family’s basic subsistence needs for food, housing, healthcare and clothing.

An assembly line of 28 workers had a mandatory production goal of completing 2,300 NFL jerseys in the regular nine-hour shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The production goal was 255 jerseys per hour, which meant that each of the 28 workers in effect had to sew nine jerseys per hour, or one jersey every 6.6 minutes. The workers were paid just 10 cents for each $80 Peyton Manning NFL jersey they sewed. This means that their wages amounted to just a little more than one-tenth of one percent of the jersey’s retail price.

"People can get all over Tebow for speaking out for something you don't agree with. But, frankly, it's nice to see any sports figure being willing to take a stand about something and not be concerned about hurting their endorsement chances. When we think of the massive amount of money Manning will likely reap at the end of this year--in new endorsements and what is likely to be a record new contract--he could finance his own commercial on behalf of these workers.

"And the chances of that happening are?"

David Matland at Center for American Progress about the post-Super Bowl contract negotiations.

"Yet lurking underneath all the [Super Bowl] excitement is a disagreement between the players and owners that could potentially cause next year’s football season to be the last for some time. We should care about these negotiations not just because their failure might force a change in our Sunday afternoon rituals, but also because of what those labor negotiations show us about the problems in our economy.

"At first glance, it might seem far fetched to claim that a dispute between two groups of the extremely wealthy—National Football League players and owners—is at all relevant to our working lives. But the fact that the players are able to bargain on equal footing with the owners is directly relevant to our economic fate. One of the contributing factors to our current economic situation is that most workers—unlike the NFL players—are not able to negotiate on relatively equal footing with their employers as part of a union. That’s why workers’ wages have stayed flat for decades, instead of rising alongside their companies’ profits."

So while you're watching the Super Bowl, think about those workers making NFL jerseys in sweatshop conditions in El Salvador, and decades of stagnant wages endured by workers in the US.

That this is the reality for workers in both the US and El Salvador is not only terrible, it is shameful and unacceptable,