Bankruptcy is being used by corporations—and now even by entire cities—as a sword to cut themselves free from legal obligations to workers who earned their pensions and retirement health care benefits. Wednesday’s action session “Bankrupting Retirement: Retirement Security and Bankruptcy as an Employer Strategy” at the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention convened four seasoned veterans of the battle to protect workers from a bankruptcy code skewed in favor of corporations. The discussion was moderated by Brandon Rees, acting director of the AFL-CIO Office of Investment.

Attendees of the action session, “This Is NOT What Democracy Looks Like! The Democracy Initiative,” heard hopeful solutions to large problems with our democratic process. The tool for correcting these problems of political inequality was the topic of the session: the Democracy Initiative. The executive director of the Democracy Initiative, Marissa Brown, summed up the group’s task: “We are about making government function for people who voted for a government that functions.”