Elizabeth Boomer of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department sends us this report in conjunction with the Solidarity Center.

Two years after a massive earthquake destroyed much of Haiti’s capital and surrounding towns, the Haitian people are still struggling to recover from the disaster and the entrenched poverty that it has exacerbated.

Emmelle Israel, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, sends us this.

At the current rate, pay equity between men and women won’t occur for another 45 years, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

Emmelle Israel, an AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, is taking part in the Next Up Summit and sends us this report.

A poll among young people attending the 2011 AFL-CIO Next Up Young Workers Summit shows their highest priorites are economic security, job security and government action to improve the nation’s economy.

How appropriate. We’re drowning in rain here in the nation’s capital, while outside the Beltway, America’s working families are drowning in one disastrous economic wave after another. A few recent nuggets.

President Obama spent Labor Day in Detroit speaking with working families in an event sponsored by the Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other top union leaders joined Obama, who asserted his strong support for workers’ freedom to seek a voice at work through a union.

The U.S. economy added no jobs in August—that’s ZERO jobs—and the nation’s unemployment rate remained at 9.1 percent, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data out this morning.

So, even as there are still 4.7 workers for every one job, the jobs that are being created are primarily low-wage—and the wages in those jobs have fallen disproportionately, according to a new report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, the most recent data available, lower-wage occupations grew by 3.2 percent, with retail salespersons, office clerks, cashiers, food preparation workers and stock clerks topping the list. Mid-wage occupations, including paralegals, customer service representatives and machinists, grew by only 1.2 percent, while higher-wage occupations declined by 1.2 percent, which includes occupations like engineers, registered nurses and finance workers.

The nation gained a stunningly small number of jobs in June–18,000–while the U.S. unemployment rate rose from 9.1 percent in May to 9.2 percent last month, according to Department of Labor data released this morning. Analysts had predicted jobs would grow by 100,000 in June. This is the third consecutive month the unemployment rate has worsened and the worst unemployment rate of the year. Hiring by companies, which excludes government agencies, was the weakest since May 2010.

It’s not enough that Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder took away basic democratic rights of cities and towns by imposing a “financial martial law” that can virtually abolish a local government in favor of an unelected Snyder appointee.

It goes like this—“We’re going broke we can’t afford it.” It’s almost a mantra from the crowd of lawmakers and policy “experts” who are loudly and continually claiming the nation must make drastic cuts in family-help government programs; cut wages, pension and health care for public-sector workers and who also suggest working families should be satisfied with three decades of stagnant wages.