If Julie Garrett wasn’t in her union, she says she would be working a minimum wage job with no benefits, barely able to support her 4-year-old daughter.

Young people need to know what we’re facing…corporations are taking over and workers are losing out. If we didn’t have unions, we’d all be working for minimum wage, or much lower.

Garrett, 35, a member of the Federation of Social Workers (IUE-CWA) Local 81381 in Rochester, N.Y., and an employee in the Monroe County Department of Social Work, is one of 62 young labor leaders who traveled all over the United States to convene at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., for the first Young Worker Leadership Institute this weekend. 

Less than a week remains before the deadline—July 31—to submit nominations for the 2012 Edna, a $10,000 award for young women making a mark in labor, women’s and other social justice movements.

The award honors Edna Berger, a pioneer for women’s rights who rose from a receptionist at The Philadelphia Inquirer to become a writer, editor and the first female organizer in The Newspaper Guild-CWA.

This is a cross-post from The Huffington Post by Amy B. Dean, a fellow at The Century Foundation and co-author of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement.

In 2008, young people in America—including many who voted in their first presidential election—rallied behind a youthful senator from Illinois campaigning on the promise of change and hope. Now the incumbent in the White House, Barack Obama, faces a difficult challenge in recapturing the youth vote for his re-election. Early this month, The New York Times reported that enthusiasm for Obama among voters aged 18 to 24 has fallen sharply since the past election cycle. And many of the young people interviewed in the article spoke of feeling alienated from politics.

So what is behind young people's disaffection? And what must President Obama do if he is serious about winning back the country's youth?
 

Young worker households—those between ages 35 and 44 and age 35 and younger—saw the steepest drop in their net worth between 2007 and 2010, according to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis of last week's Federal Reserve report.

The future of the union movement, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told some 600 members of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC), depends on showing the public that through our actions on the ground we are a:

broad, inclusive, innovative worker-driven organization....We need to build a broader, stronger, more effective movement for all working people—union and nonunion. That means organizing. It means advocacy. It means grassroots mobilization.

Most recent young college graduates are carrying a heavy debt load for their education, and they face a harder time paying it off because their wages have plummeted as well—part of a decade-long decline, according to a new Economic Snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

"For Most Graduates, a Grueling Job Hunt Awaits," The Wall Street Journal writes today. Over the weekend, the New York Times sounded the alarm about employers' growing use of unpaid internships in fields that typically have never exploited free labor.

So, how bad is it for young workers?

Passing along this message from Adrienne Sheares, social media fellow at Young Invincibles, an organization dedicated to ensuring young people have a voice in health care issues.

As you may know, it’s almost graduation time! On May 1, we re-launched an updated version of our Health Care Toolkit in anticipation of all the new graduates who’ll have questions about health coverage. You can find the toolkit at www.GettingCovered.org, including state-specific versions. I would greatly appreciate if your group could help us spread the word about this critical and easy-to-use resource for young adults and families about how they can find insurance coverage, and what they need to know about the revised health care law. 

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) in recent days hit two big milestones: The AFL-CIO constituency group celebrated its 20th anniversary and launched APALA's Young Leaders Council.  

While many know of the AFL-CIO's community affiliate Working America as a high-level field operation that wins on issues and in elections, it has evolved into much more. Employing new tools and strategies, Working America is working with dozens of unions and progressive allies to strengthen ties between communities and local labor to build progressive infrastructure for the long haul. We’re in it to win it. Check out these examples.