Based on a technicality, a federal judge today rejected commonsense rules making National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union elections fairer.

We don't usually spend time following presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's Etch A Sketch flip-floppery. But this one goes too far to ignore.

Romney, of "Let Detroit go bankrupt" fame, now says he should get credit for the resurgence of the U.S. auto companies.

When Republican candidates ask Americans if they’re better off than they were four years ago when President Obama was elected, here’s what working people will be thinking about, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: Former President George W. Bush lost U.S. jobs during a good economy. Obama has created jobs during the disastrous economy he inherited.

Trumka, questioned on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program this morning by Peter Wallsten of The Washington Post and Melanie Trottman of the Wall Street Journal, challenged viewers to imagine how improved the economy could be today if Republicans in Congress had worked with Obama on job creation rather than pursuing their stated top priority of making him a one-term president.

A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute teamed up on a blunt op-ed in today's Washington Post, which is quite a stunner considering their establishment credentials.

"Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem" is the title.

Former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Peter Schaumber, involved in an ethics probe by the board’s inspector general, no longer is an adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a report in The Hill.

“It’s hardly a coincidence that Schaumber resigned from the Romney campaign the same time that his inside source at the board was notified he was being investigated,” says AFL-CIO spokesperson Alison Omens.

This week’s reports from The New York Times that found “credible evidence that bribery played a persistent and significant role in Wal-Mart’s rapid growth in Mexico” are breathtaking, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a Huffington Post column. 

Nothing like this has happened since the collapse of Enron and Worldcom in 2002. And Wal-Mart is, of course, a more important company than either Enron or Worldcom. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the United States.

Machinists (IAM) members at three Lockheed Martin locations are on strike after voting overwhelmingly to reject a company contract offer that reduced health care benefits and dropped defined-benefit pensions for newly hired workers. Some 3,700 members are on strike in Fort Worth, Texas, Edwards Air Force Base in California and Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland.

A Los Angeles Times column today echoes the AFL-CIO's call to increase Social Security benefits and shut down talk of benefit cuts.

From corporate defections to a challenge to its tax-exempt status, “the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] has gone from a little-known acronym to a political fireball.”

Workers took to the street yesterday as American Airlines’ bankruptcy hearings began in New York City. Members of the Transport Workers (TWU), which represents American Airlines’ mechanics and fleet service employees, rallied with other union and community activists to demand that the court protect American jobs and collective bargaining rights and respect the value of work during the bankruptcy proceedings. Take a look at TWU’s video.