It’s a refrain that’s all too familiar for America’s working families—anti-worker politicians and special interests use divide-and-conquer strategies in hopes that highlighting our differences will split us apart. 

A new documentary film "Harvest of Empire," opening in select theaters this Friday, examines the inherent contradiction in American policies that have compelled Latino immigrants to migrate to the United States—but at the same time closed the doors to opportunity for aspiring citizens.  

Jennifer Kauffman is an AFL-CIO immigration policy and training associate. These are her thoughts on allies crossing the Hyatt picket line to attend the 2012 Online News Association Conference & Awards Banquet (ONA).

Colleagues in the immigration advocacy and DREAM movement have wondered aloud whether journalist Jose Antonio Vargas crossing the picket line was such a bad thing, after all, since he drew the attention of more than 100 journalists to the plight of the Hyatt Hurts campaign workers.

The answer is simply this: Crossing a picket hurts EVERYONE.

One of the most important legacies of the Wisconsin uprising is the mobilization of a new wave of activists. A powerful example is the nearly 300 workers at Palermo’s Pizza in Milwaukee, who were emboldened by the broader movement for workers’ rights in Wisconsin to fight back to raise standards for themselves and customers alike. Many of the workers had come to the United States to build better lives for themselves and their families, and their concern over unsafe working conditions and unfair wages at the frozen pizza plant inspired a desire for a voice on the job.

Labor activists, comprehensive immigration reform advocates and art aficionados alike turned out last night at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., to meet with Christine Ashley, UNITEHERE! Local 217 member and artist, who was wrongly detained for a month in 2011 upon entering the country from her native Great Britain.

Jennifer Kauffman, AFL-CIO Immigration Policy & Training associate, sends us this. Labor and civil rights activist and icon Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her lifelong work fighting for economic justice and workers’ rights.

House Republicans continued their attacks on working women, and last night voted to pass a shameful version of the bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, filled with restrictions that undermine the very intent of a law (originally written by then-Sen. Joe Biden) designed to help victims of domestic violence. The House version, which passed 222 to 205, leaves working immigrant women, same-sex couples and even Native American women vulnerable and makes it harder to keep these women safe.

In Raleigh, N.C., state lawmakers returned to a cacophonous chorus of pots and spoons, clanging and ringing.

This was no serenade. North Carolinians, fed up with the General Assembly’s agenda of pursuing giveaways for the rich at the expense of everyone else, greeted lawmakers with a first-of-its-kind, 15-minute non-stop clamorous protest of politicians’ reckless ways.

While anti-worker bills in state capitols across the country still threaten middle-class families, Republican state legislatures are beginning to second guess whether to continue pursuing their extreme agenda attacking working families.

Yesterday morning, the Republican-controlled New Hampshire Senate tabled HB 1677, the so-called “right to work” bill.  This bill is the pet of Speaker Bill O’Brien, dubbed by a recent Concord Monitor editorial as a “self-drawn caricature of vindictiveness and power run [amok].”  “Right to work” failed last year, and so far this year it has failed to muster a veto-proof majority.

The Republican-controlled Georgia state legislature ended its session. In a victory for working families—and for the Bill of Rights—the anti-free speech bill (S.B. 469), that brought union, faith and tea party activists together to protest the proposal to subject picketers to big fines, died. But not before lawmakers, in a last-ditch attempt to pass the bill in some form, stripped the picketing provisions and turned S.B. 469 into a purely anti-union bill that would affect dues deduction for public employees. But the bipartisan coalition opposed to the S.B. 469 held firm, and lawmakers decided not to take up the bill.

But the victory was bittersweet. Republicans still managed to pass bills that cut jobless benefits severely and require some welfare applicants to pass drug tests.

Perhaps Georgia's House Industrial Relations Committee staged Monday's surprise vote on S.B. 469—the draconian bill that would infringe upon the rights of Georgians to speak out for economic justice or choose whether to support a union—as an apt welcome for Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker as he came to Atlanta for a Republican fundraiser.  

The Republican-led committee held the sudden vote on Monday morning with little notice, posting the hearing on the calendar less than an hour prior—and waiting until just 10 minutes beforehand to post a note on the hearing room door. Not surprisingly, the measure easily sailed out of the committee without any legislators present to represent Georgia's working families. The committee also voted to pass S.B. 447, which would gut unemployment insurance down to the fewest number of weeks in the country.