Under a white, wintry sky, nearly two-dozen union members volunteered to rebuild a 100-foot wooden bridge on a public trail in the Black Hills.

“When you’ve got skilled workers with the right tools, the work goes quick,” says Dana Garry, who manages the 109-mile Mickelson Trail for South Dakota’s Department of Game, Fish and Parks. In two days, the volunteers rebuilt abutments and replaced the bridge surface and railing. “It was just amazing,” she said. “These volunteers fill an important need.”

On a bright, chilly Friday before the Martin Luther King Day weekend, Lapronda Eason wheeled a garbage can through the gleaming halls of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Eason has been a caretaker, literally, of American history for almost 13 years. She’s a janitor, a custodian, or a BSW, as the job is called at the Smithsonian, a building service worker.

The distinctive timbre of Dr. King’s voice could be heard in the museum’s gleaming entryway. It was his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he gave in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The speech recording is part of an exhibit called "Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and the March on Washington, 1963."

Check out an excerpt of the AFL-CIO's new Innovators website feature, "No Depression: Pharmaceutical-Labor Alliance Flourishes."

“I certainly admit going in with an attitude of let’s-see-what-this-is-about,” Johnson & Johnson Vice President Donald Bohn says about cooperating with labor unions. “It turns out we have a lot more in common than you might think.”

And that’s why, about four years ago, Johnson & Johnson joined the Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association (PILMA), a growing coalition of pharmaceutical industry giants and the major building trades unions. Its goal is to foster good jobs in the domestic pharmaceutical industry while increasing access to affordable medicines.

WI

Reports of sketchy robocalls, misleading e-mails and even canvassers urging  people not to vote have marred a day of Wisconsin recall elections otherwise notable for heavy turnout and enthusiastic volunteers. If the recall is successful, voters end the short-but-rocky tenure of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Reports of sketchy robocalls, misleading emails and even canvassers urging people not to vote have marred a day of Wisconsin recall elections otherwise notable for heavy turnout and enthusiastic volunteers.

As of 6 p.m. in Wisconsin, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had received 1,310 phone calls. The majority of those calls have been about polling locations and new requirements to vote—mainly a new requirement that voters prove 28-days of residency in Wisconsin. If the recall is successful, voters will end the short-but-rocky tenure of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Sessi Agnes Funmi has the simple goal of awakening the “sleeping giant.” That’s how her Nigerian union has been tagged, she said. And
it’s starting to work.

Funmi is the head of the Lagos State University Branch of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities. The union has about
8,040 members, who are the non-teaching professional university staff. The members include nurses, physicians, administrators and senior housekeepers and security officers.

Ironclad collective bargaining rights for all workers would fix America's ailing economy and create millions of jobs because of demand-led growth, Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen said today at the Center for National Policy.

Fifty-nine pilot and flight simulator instructors at The Boeing Company voted by a 4-to-1 margin to join the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)/IFPTE Local 2001 in an election that was certified today.

A bad gamble by J.P. Morgan resulting in a quick $2 billion loss has raised the specter of the financial crisis of 2008, when Big Banks ruined the economy and caused the recession, high unemployment and housing problems that still dog the nation. Fully enacted financial reform can't come too soon.

College grads today are wondering whether education plus hard work is really the formula for success—and for good reason. The missing ingredient in that formula? It’s leverage. The power of collective action.