Contrary to recurring predictions of the demise the American labor movement, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told a Wayne State University audience in Detroit yesterday that the ”labor movement has a rich and vibrant future.”

Some 700 members of UAW Local 2069 will return to work next month at Volvo Trucks’ New River Valley plant in Virginia after being laid off for three years. Under a new contract ratified over the weekend, some 100 workers will return May 2; more than 250 are scheduled to report back May 9, and more than 350 will return May 16.

Members of the UAW ratified a new six-year contract with Caterpillar Inc. covering 9,500 workers at plants in Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

UAW  leaders condemned Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s decision yesterday to eliminate collective bargaining rights for home-based child care providers.

Indiana AFL-CIO field communications coordinator Mike Uehlein sends this report.

For the 11th straight day, working families will converge at the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis to protest the General Assembly’s anti-worker agenda.

This is a cross-post from Portside by Kathleen McElroy, UAW Local 1981 National Writers Union from Madison, Wis.

Folks from outside Wisconsin are contacting me and asking how to help with the battle to save collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. (Additional information on the current status of things here is at the end of this letter.)

UAW President Bob King says he and the union’s members fully support Wisconsin workers’ “courageous efforts”:

to fight back against this thinly veiled, purely partisan effort to destroy unions in favor of a system [Gov. Scott]Walker and his well-heeled political pals will control.

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.

Companies that do not allow union elections violate human rights, said Bob King, president of the UAW, which is talking with some foreign auto companies that have plants in the United States about a set of principles aimed at ensuring fair elections. Such principles are necessary, King said, because National Labor Relations Board procedures are outdated and allow companies to intimidate workers and spread misinformation. Transplant companies are foreign-owned companies that have plants in the United States.