The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.

The UAW applauded Ford Motor Co.’s announcement yesterday that it will invest $400 million in its Kansas City, Mo., assembly plant over the next two years, which will save at least 3,750 jobs at the plant plus thousands of other supporting jobs.

The Obama administration today announced a new rule on how the wage rates employers must pay to H-2B temporary foreign workers will be calculated. But the new rule does not take effect until 2012.

Tomorrow, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will detail the choices elected leaders across the country are facing and outline working people’s vision for the future of the American economy when he delivers a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Every October, Anita’s parents fall into the Medicare prescription drug donut hole, and some of their medications cost $30 per pill. The new health care reform law already has begun to close that gap in coverage and eventually will eliminate it all together.

If  the new health care reform law is repealed—and today, Republican lawmakers are taking their first step toward repeal—more than 129 million Americans would be put at risk of  losing their health insurance.

In his latest book, All Labor Has Dignity, historian Michael Honey brings together 16 of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches on economic justice, many of them unpublished until now. Honey, a professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, edited the speeches and wrote an introduction for the book. AFL-CIO Now senior writer James Parks interviewed Honey about King and his legacy of economic justice.

As more states consider offering paid family leave, state legislators would do well to check out a new guide released last week that offers a primer on the nation’s first paid family leave program, implemented six years ago in California. Published by the Labor Project for Working Families and the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic & Family Security, the guide includes the dos and don’ts other states should consider as they pursue similar proposals.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat—contrary to popular belief, mimes can talk. The silent mime we’re all accustomed to is just one form of the ancient theater art. Not only do mimes talk, they sing and dance in the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “Posibilidad, or Death of the Worker.”

Ohio’s Gov. John Kasich and his allies are attempting to blame and punish low-income workers for the state of the economy. Ohio Field Communications Coordinator Andrew Richards reports on a candlelight march and rally in support of the workers’ right to bargain. 

The light from hundreds of candles lit up the facade of Cincinnati’s City Hall tonight as workers and community members came out to support home health care and child care providers and to protest Gov. John Kasich’s plan to strip away their rights to bargain for a better life. .