While, according to official government statistics, union density declined last year, there were a handful of states that actually saw an increase in membership. California placed at the top of this list.

Taking their cues from the young immigrant students, known as the Dreamers, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and UNITE HERE, the restaurant and hotel workers union, want to encourage more young students to share their stories of immigration—either their own or somebody else’s—with the country, especially with national lawmakers who may vote on an immigration reform bill as soon as later this year. The two labor organizations are sponsoring a student short film contest called “Cortos y Fuertes / Short and Strong.” The author of the best overall video will receive $2,000.

Sebastian Velasquez saw his family for the last time when they were helping him move into his Georgetown University dorm before the start of his first semester. A few months later, he found out that his father, mother and sister were in deportation proceedings. They were eventually deported to Colombia.

Over the weekend, two prominent Colombian union leaders survived an assassination attempt in Cali, a city of more than 2.2 million in western Colombia.

The targets—Luis Miguel Morantes Alfonso and Adolfo Devia Paz of the Colombian Confederation of Workers (CTC, after its name in Spanish) and Emcali Union (USE)—survived unharmed inside a bullet-proof SUV provided by the Colombian government, according to a communiqué released by the National Labor School (ENS), a Colombian nonprofit organization dedicated to the empowerment of workers in the country. 

As part of a six-day worldwide labor solidarity campaign, American union members protested outside the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., yesterday in support of greater trade union rights and protections in Mexico.

Around 200 AFSCME supporters protested Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s austerity measures outside a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel today at noon.

As Nutter participated in the first day of the 79th winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, people in the block-long picket line that formed in front of the hotel chanted things like “No more cuts! Nutter’s nuts!” and “Take a hike! Corporate Mike!,” alluding to his administration’s record of reducing community health services and closing down libraries, schools and fire stations and his support for tax breaks for the wealthiest.

To the lyrics of African American spirituals and freedom songs like “Guide My Feet” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” a group made up of DREAMers, their families, clergy and other people of faith in Washington, D.C., earlier today launched the nationwide Campaign for Citizenship to call on Congress to create a road map to citizenship for the country’s 11 million aspiring Americans.

In some year-end reviews of labor in 2012 (here and here), we see an important missed connection that the union movement is committed to building in 2013. While these reviews identify important worker struggles throughout the year, they fail to recognize that all workers—immigrant, public, private, low-wage and middle-class—share values and experiences that unite them in a broad-based union movement. A major theme of many of last year’s important labor struggles was how immigrant workers and the union movement came together in local communities to win justice.

There has been much talk recently of our immigration policy and the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform, but too often these discussions, especially in the halls of Congress, lack a human and family dimension. In the first half of 2011, 46,000 undocumented immigrants were deported from the United States. Depending on which new outlet reports that fact, we may hear a variety of terms used to describe those people, ranging from “illegal aliens,” or “illegal immigrants,” to “undocumented immigrants,” or simply “immigrants.” Rarely do we hear: “46,000 parents  were torn away from their children and deported to another country in the first half of 2011.” A Wish for the Holidays campaign wants to change that.

A recent poll confirms what a growing number of politicians, community leaders and mainstream news media already suspected: Most Latinos, like most other Americans in battleground states, support a plan to reduce the deficit that includes more revenue from tax increases for the wealthiest people.