Comprehensive immigration reform with a road map to citizenship is essential to all of America’s workers, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a telephone press conference today, as he and Maria Elena Durazo, chair of the AFL-CIO’s immigration Committee, announced the labor movement’s campaign for a common-sense immigration process.

A new investigation finds “compelling evidence” that Palermo’s Pizza’s firing of 90 workers at its Milwaukee plant is directly tied to the company’s anti-union practices and was illegal under both U.S. and international labor standards. The report, by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), says Palermo's Pizza should reinstate—with full back pay—the fired workers and begin negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement.

In a near party-line vote, the North Carolina House of Representatives gave preliminary approval to a bill that would harm many of the state's more vulnerable citizens by cutting back on unemployment insurance. The measure would cut maximum weekly benefits by one-third, bringing the top weekly payout to $350, and reduce the maximum length an unemployed worker can get from 26 weeks to 20. As the bill currently stands, 80,000 workers are set to lose unemployment insurance payments.

Most of us don’t know what happens to our recycling after we take it to the curb each week.

On Feb. 2, hundreds of recycling workers and community supporters gathered in Oakland, Calif., at the Recycling Workers Convention to discuss a wide range of serious problems plaguing Alameda County’s recycling industry with an audience of elected officials and policy makers who oversee this supposedly “green” industry.

Feb. 14 will mark the second anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA's) submission of the silica dust standard for review to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Every year that goes by without the enactment and enforcement of the proposed standard that controls workers' exposure to silica dust, 60 workers will die, AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director Peg Seminario told NPR in a story broadcast today.

Trade unionist Valentin Urusov is proof that in Russia it’s still possible to be imprisoned in the 21st century equivalent of the gulag for standing up for worker rights on the job. An electrical fitter at an ore-processing mill owned by the diamond mining company Alrosa, Urusov has spent more than four years of a six-year term in a penal colony in Yakutia in far northern Russia.

Working families aren't fooled. There's nothing "fair and balanced" about the Bowles-Simpson budget plan that would ultimately increase unemployment, cut Social Security benefits, tax workers’ health benefits and scapegoat federal employees while giving more tax breaks for sending jobs overseas and lowering tax rates for Wall Street and the wealthiest 2%. Yesterday, Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) introduced an amendment to H.R. 444, that would direct President Obama to follow the budget recommendations of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, known as the Bowles-Simpson plan.