When this article was written last Sunday, the hunger strike was on its third day and workers were set to be fired the following Monday and Tuesday, April 8 and 9.  As of today, the hunger strike has ended as planned and the Hilton Mission Valley hotel has not yet fired the workers, although that may still occur.

We are three days into a five-day hunger strike that was called to save the jobs of nine immigrant workers at the Hilton Mission Valley hotel in San Diego. I, along with six others, have refused to eat since Friday morning. The nine workers we are supporting [were] set to be fired on Monday, April 8, and Tuesday, April 9, because after they tried to organize a union, Evolution Hospitality decided to use E-Verify. This is a program that checks immigrants' documented status—a program that isn't even mandatory with the federal government.

California’s second-largest city has a progressive mayor, former Democratic U.S. House member Bob Filner, who beat his Republican rival by three points in November.

The 70-year-old Filner spent 20 years in Congress. A reliable and articulate liberal—with high marks on his AFL-CIO, ADA and Sierra Club scorecards—he’s a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and was a “Freedom Rider” during the early 1960s civil rights movement, spending two months in jail for “disturbing the peace and inciting a riot.”

This Thanksgiving, Leslie Martes, program and outreach director at The Voter Participation Center, is thankful her father, John, had access to union retiree health care benefits. Without that health care plan, it's likely John wouldn't have lived to celebrate the holiday with his family.  

Lorena Gonzalez is the secretary-treasurer of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council. Gonzalez and Mikaiil Hussein, president of the United Taxi Workers of San Diego, also issued a statement together upon the affiliation of the independent taxi workers with the labor council. You can read that statement here.

At the Labor Council, our mission is to create more jobs, better jobs and better lives for all of San Diego's workers—union and nonunion. For years, we have proudly worked on policies that bring up the standard for our entire community; things like a living wage ordinance, paid family leave, worker retention policies and health care access for working families.

Union members and the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council (SDICLC) dropped off a stack of petitions (almost 90,000 signatures) to Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront on Monday, calling for a fair trade deal that works for Americans. U.S. Trade Representative Carol Guthrie accepted the petitions on behalf of the negotiators. TPP should promote job creation, respect labor and human rights, protect the sovereign right of nations to make public interest policy and preserves the ability to Buy American. 

This weekend thousands of California union members, working families and community leaders marched in Los Angeles protesting Walmart’s plan to open a store in the historic Chinatown neighborhood.