Union members in the Marietta, Ohio, area are joining with several charitable organizations to raise funds to build a “smart home” for Army Private First Class Kyle Hockenberry who lost both legs in an improvised explosive device attack in Afghanistan last year.

The Parkersburg-Marietta Building and Construction Trades Council has volunteered the labor to build the house. The group is also working with the Gary Sinise Foundation and the Tunnels to Towers Foundation’sBuilding for America’s Bravest initiative in promoting an Aug. 16 fundraising concert in Marietta featuring Sinise’s Lt. Dan Band. Sinise portrayed double amputee Lt. Dan in the movie “Forrest Gump.” 

William Plotner waited for his daughter’s second birthday to enroll in the military on Sept. 11, 2004—three years after the World Trade Center twin towers fell. He wanted his daughter to remember the significance of her birth date. But most of all, he wanted her to think of him as a hero. Now Plotner, a U.S. Army veteran and member of the Laborers (LIUNA) Local 79, is rebuilding the World Trade Center.

Says Plotner:

On 9-11-04 I swore in. And now I get to work here. It brings, like, another sense of pride.

The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York will be replaced through a union-public-sector partnership involving 14 building trades labor bodies and the New York State Thruway, a project that will create thousands of family-supporting jobs and save taxpayers $452 million.

The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT) is investing $10 million toward a $14 million project to rehabilitate the Mayfield Manor Apartments in Canton, Ohio, as part of HIT’s national Construction Jobs Initiative and the AFL-CIO’s Green Jobs Initiative. The project will keep 144 units affordable for current residents at the senior citizen facility for 20 years and is expected to create 100 union construction jobs in an area hard-hit by the economic slowdown. Rehabilitation work on the six-story building will be done with 100 percent union labor.

Members of Laborers Local 563, Minnesota Laborers Employers Cooperation & Education Trust (LECET) and the Minneapolis Building and Construction Trades recently teamed up with volunteers from Minneapolis companies to build a new playground at Sheridan Arts Magnet School.

This is a cross-post from Chaz Bolte of the We Party Blog.

The city of Los Angeles and its mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, have been leading the national push for Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) to help create jobs for local workers. This trend continued last Thursday as the city and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that PLAs have been entered into to ensure that 40 percent of the work hours performed on most MTA projects moving forward will be done by people who live in economically disadvantaged communities.

Here’s a bipartisan solution: Labor and management working together to create jobs.

Former President Bill Clinton yesterday singled out the efforts of the union movement in creating massive numbers of jobs through union pension fund investments. Speaking yesterday at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Clinton praised the AFL-CIO and AFT for already providing $1 billion in pension fund investments to improve infrastructure and increase energy efficiency. (Watch the video of the event here. )

Tom Dalzell is business manager and financial secretary of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1245, which represents electrical workers in the state of Nevada (excluding Las Vegas) and Northern California. He describes how online organizing complements traditional organizing—and why both need to work together.

When I started with the United Farm Workers of America in 1972, some of the old hands taught me a trick: Before you organize people, you have to meet them. To meet them, you have to know where they are. Back then, that meant fields, parking lots where crews gather in the morning, their homes  and the occasional bar. Now, with more than 500 million people on social networks like Facebook, that means going online.

Terry Davis, the AFL-CIO Community Service liaison from the Central Alabama Labor Federation in Birmingham, sends us this update on how unions are continuing their outreach to help the victims last month’s series of deadly tornadoes.