Several hundred young people from California, Florida, Arizona and Texas took part in the Voto Latino Power Summit in Los Angeles this past weekend, joining local community leaders in a two-day event to empower young Latinos to create positive change in their communities.

The familiar world of the post-World War II South has been changing. The textile and garment industries are now in a free fall. Agricultural employment has shrunk. Urban hubs such as Houston; Charlotte, N.C.; Atlanta; and Northern Virginia have expanded as centers of information and research-based employment. Meanwhile, the South has become increasingly diverse.

A key part of our new website is a redesigned “En Español” section, part of ongoing efforts to engage with bilingual Latinos and provide useful information about workplace rights.

This from Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs.

The AFL-CIO and the National Immigration Forum (NIF) sent a joint letter yesterday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stressing the urgent need to change the Secure Communities program.

More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law instantly intimidated the nine Latino employees of Max’s Delicatessen, owned by Steve Dubrinsky, who says: 

They are good solid people, and I don’t like how they feel right now.

TPM reports that a preliminary Justice Department investigation finds that the redistricting plan approved by presidential candidate and Texas governor Rick Perry (R) appears to have been “adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of diminishing the ability of [minorities] to elect their preferred candidates of choice to Congress.”

Outside the navel-gazing world that has become Washington politics, where deficit-cutting is king and jobless workers ignored (with a few notable exceptions), 25 million are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get work that, in many cases, just doesn’t exist (there are 4.7 workers for every ONE job).

Latinos face tremendous challenges that threaten their prospects for a better life, according to new report.

The report, “Latino Workers in the United States 2011,” released this week by the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), provides an in-depth look at the state of Latino workers.