Plumbers and Steamfitters (UA) Local 184 and West Kentucky Community and Technical College (WKCTC) earned national recognition for partnering to provide a unique "going green" training program for the union's apprentices and journeymen. The Paducah, Ky., union and school plan to follow up with a two-year college degree program for Local 184 members.

This is a cross-post from the California Labor Federation's Labor's Edge blog.

California was built with a vision that prioritized investments in our future. From creating a world-class infrastructure to seeding innovation through our schools and universities, investments fueled the economic miracle that once was our state. But as those investments dried up in recent years, we’ve risked tearing the very fabric of California.

It’s time to chart a different course.

[On Tuesday], the California Labor Federation and the state Building and Construction Trades Council unveiled labor’s new “Invest in California” jobs plan, which focuses on renewing the state’s commitment to innovation and investments that built an economy of broadly shared prosperity.

As Karoli at Crooks & Liars highlights, presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) said Sunday on Fox News Sunday that the main federal role in education should be "to push back against the federal teachers' unions."

"Those federal teachers' unions have too much power," he said. "In some cases, they overwhelm the states, they overwhelm the local school districts."

If you’re a regular reader of our AFL-CIO Now news blog, you may come to our site without stopping first at the AFL-CIO home page here. If you haven’t been there recently, you’ve missed a couple of additions and new features on how unions and union members are connecting with communities.

Nearly 1,000 union members and supporters gathered at the state Capitol in Phoenix yesterday to protest anti-worker bills going through the legislature this session. In the morning, groups from all over the state lobbied against the package of bills known as "Wisconsin on Steroids."

Union bashing may the popular sport for Republican presidential candidates (click here for more). But a new report looks at some of the real stories about how unions and union members are having positive impacts on jobs, health care, education and their communities.   

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at Democratic Diva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Republican Arizona state Rep. Michelle Ugenti, who represents an affluent district in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, drew quite a bit of attention and criticism on Monday when she flippantly remarked, ”welcome to life” to Arizona college students protesting a bill she sponsored that would require them to contribute a minimum $2,000 per year to their annual tuition at state universities. Students would have to make the contribution regardless of financial need, scholarship eligibility or military veteran status. Students on athletic scholarships would be exempted (make of that what you will). Conservative legislators defended the move by claiming that state college students (the non-athlete ones, anyway) need to have “more skin in the game.”

Jennifer Wright Dorr, director of Strategic Communications at the National Labor College, sends us this.

Registration is open for the summer 2012 term at the National Labor College (NLC). The summer schedule is now available and courses run from May through August.

On more than 120 college and university campuses around the nation, Occupy College activists will hold teach-ins tomorrow and Thursday focusing on vital education issues such as solutions to soaring student debt, reducing the cost of education, improving the quality of education and more. The teach-ins are in preparation for the March 1 National Day of Action for Education.

This is a cross-post from Working America’s Main Street blog.

Working America members, teachers and unemployed Pennsylvanians on both sides of the state delivered more than 1,000 handwritten postcards to Gov. Tom Corbett’s regional offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. We wanted Corbett to know the drastic, widespread and ultimately disastrous results of the budget cuts he enacted last year. We wanted him to make good on the rhetoric used in his first year, which called for “shared sacrifice.”