I’m the AFL-CIO’s deputy director of public affairs for publications, Web and broadcast. Prior to joining the AFL-CIO in 1997, I served as publications director at the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund for 12 years. I began my career as a newspaper reporter in Southwest Florida, and since have written, edited and managed production of advocacy materials— including newsletters, books, brochures, booklets, fliers, calendars, websites, posters and direct response mail and e-mail—to support economic and social justice campaigns. In June 2001, I received a B.A. in Labor Studies from the National Labor College. Most important: I’m the very proud mom of a spectacular daughter.
Although African American workers are significantly better educated than they were three decades ago, they're actually less likely to be in good jobs, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
If you’re in or anywhere near Raleigh, N.C., the North Carolina State AFL-CIO urges you to join Moral Monday on June 24 to let Republican state legislators know what you think of their assault on working families.
Moral Mondays began in late April and have been growing, standing up to the legislature’s unemployment benefit cuts, higher taxes for the poor and working families, rejecting federal funds for Medicaid expansion and attacks on public schools and voting rights.
If anyone still has questions about just exactly how much extremist House Republicans loathe low-income families, they got answers last night when the U.S. House voted down its agriculture spending bill in a 195 to 234 vote.
Guess who’s calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage ? A self-proclaimed capitalist.
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer made our case for a minimum wage increase yesterday in Bloomberg .
“The fundamental law of capitalism,” he says, “is that if workers have no money, businesses have no customers.”
The immigration reform bill being debated now in the U.S. Senate, which would provide a road map to citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans, includes protections for foreign students who come to this country under a “summer-work travel” program.
But a USA Today story says au pair agencies, amusement parks, summer camp operators, hotels and others who count on this “cultural exchange” program for summer labor are lobbying to kill them.
Don’t forget to join the live online discussion with Robert Reich today from noon to 1 p.m. EDT. Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and Chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is posing this question to you:
The rich keep getting a bigger share of the economic pie while everyone else’s share keeps shrinking. What should be done to reverse this trend?
Some 6,000 hotel workers and community supporters rallied Friday in front of The Cosmopolitan hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Members of Culinary Workers Union/UNITE HERE Local 226 picketed to support Cosmopolitan workers who have been trying to negotiate a contract with their employer for more than two years, since they first voted to join the union.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Alliance for Retired Americans Executive Director Edward Coyle today issued this joint statement on the 2013 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report:
The most important message from the 2013 Social Security Trustees Report is that our Social Security system continues to work for the American people. After years of economic crisis for working families, Social Security is in better shape and more dependable than 401(k)s, private pensions or any other public or private program. We must call out those who will try to misuse today’s report as political cover for unwarranted and ill-advised benefit cuts, like switching to the “chained CPI” to calculate Social Security’s annual cost-of-living increase (COLA).
As word spreads that President Obama’s budget proposal will call for Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts, other voices are calling for increasing the successful programs instead as the medicine struggling families and a weak economy need.
A report for the New America Foundation highlights the crisis in retirement security and proposes expanding Social Security.
For a heart-breaking look at how the Republican-engineered dysfunction at the National Labor Relations Board is affecting working men and women, check out Dave Jamieson’s weekend piece in The Huffington Post.
Jamieson chronicles the nine-year ordeal of union coal miners at the Cannelton mine near Smithers, W.Va., who lost their jobs when Massey Energy (since purchased by another mining company after the notorious Upper Big Branch disaster) bought the mine.
It’s been four years since low-wage workers got a raise. Sign the petition to tell Congress it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
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