In his latest piece at Salon, Josh Eidelson talks about a planned walkout by fast-food workers in Chicago. 

The walkout began, the Chicago Tribune reports, at 5:30 a.m. local time with workers from some McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts stores walking off the job. The ultimate goal of the walkout is to support the Fight for $15 campaign, whose goal is to secure a wage of $15 per hour for workers. Also expected to join the walkout were workers from Subway, Macy's, Sears and Victoria's Secret.

Tragedy struck again in Bangladesh this morning when a building that housed several garment factories collapsed, killing at least 194 people, mostly garment workers, injuring hundreds of others and trapping an unknown number of people in the rubble. A number of shops were also in the building.

The Healthy Families Act, a federal bill that would allow workers to earn seven paid sick days a year, was just introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Rosa DeLauro. Portland, Ore., was the most recent city to pass an ordinance granting workers earned paid sick leave. Will New York follow suit?

Visit the MomsRising/AFL-CIO blogger carnival. 

In most of the developed world, when people get sick or have a sick child, they take a sick day and take care of themselves and their families, keeping their co-workers, customers and clients safe. And they rest comfortably, knowing that getting sick won’t mean they can’t pay the rent or provide their children with needed school supplies. That’s the way it should be. In most of the advanced world, paid sick days are a right that protects working families, while at the same time boosting businesses and the economy.

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that in 1965, and African Americans still hear his quote ring.

A new report, Blacks in Unions: 2012, by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education, finds that black workers are 19% more likely to be in unions than non-black workers. In the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan areas, African Americans are 42% more likely than non-blacks to be in unions.

Despite a widespread pattern of state legislatures attacking the voting rights of Americans, the Brennan Center for Justice shows, in a new report, that states have actually been much more likely in 2013 to seek to expand voting rights than to limit them.

The West, Texas, fertilizer plant, where a fire and explosion last week claimed at least 14 lives—including 11 firefighters and EMTs—and injured more than 200, was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1985.

You don’t often read headlines about environmentalists joining forces with coal miners. Environmentalists want to shut down coal plants that pollute our air and water, while miners understandably fight to keep and defend the jobs that the coal industry provides. Between these two forces, there sometimes appears to be little common ground.

You could not find a more striking physical contrast than that between AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Nohra Padilla. Trumka's a big, strongly built son of the coal fields; Padilla a slight, waif-like woman from Bogota, Colombia.

The Ironworkers are committed to green training and consider themselves the "original recyclers." Learn more from California Ironworkers Apprenticeship Director Dick Zampa in this video the Ironworkers sent us.