Union members and working people are mobilizing all over the country in labor walks, phone banks and leafletting, getting the word out about what's at stake this election. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler has been meeting with working people and joining labor walks from coast to coast this past week.

On Wednesday, Shuler helped kick off the first local chapter of  Young Emerging Labor Leaders (WA YELL) in Spokane, Wash.

Shuler thanked the young workers’ group for their activism on the Verizon and T-Mobile campaigns and encouraged the group to stay energized for Nov. 6. Shuler reminded the group that good jobs and college loans are on the line this November.

It was the sixth day of the London Olympic Games and Jim and Cecilia Adrian still hadn’t seen their son Nathan for whom they traveled 4,800 miles to watch swim for the United States. Nathan, 23, was competing in his second Olympics. Nathan and his mom were exchanging text messages, but the two hadn’t spoken in-person in days. While waiting to watch the 100-meter freestyle race on Aug. 1, the Adrians chatted with some Australian spectators who were on their way to see a water polo match in the Olympic Park.

“They wished Nathan good luck,” says Jim. “But not enough to come in first…at that point, everyone was predicting [James] Magnussen would win.”

In a dramatic, heart-racing sprint, Nathan, of Bremerton, Wash., took home his first individual gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle swim, beating Magnussen by one-hundredth of a second. 

Nathan Adrian, 23, of Bremerton, Wash., took home his first individual gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle swim in the London Olympic Games last week, winning by a "fingertip," beating Australian favorite James "The Missile" Magnussen. 

The Seattle Times reported:

The margin of victory—one-hundredth of a second—was the tightest at the London Olympics.

Perhaps the swimmer's work ethic can be traced to his upbringing in a union family. Adrian's father, Jim, is a retired nuclear engineer for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and former president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 12. His mother, Cecilia, is a nurse in the Bremerton school district. Check back on the AFL-CIO Now blog next Monday for an exclusive interview with Jim and Cecilia Adrian. 

Check out the AFL-CIO's new Innovators website feature, "Not Your Daddy's Labor Movement," here.

Leave behind what you know about Robert's Rules of Order and structured union meetings. A new generation of emerging labor leaders across the country is bringing young workers together in paintball games, music festivals, trivia nights and pub crawls—all with an activist edge.

This is a cross-post from David Groves of The Stand, a project of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO (WSLC) and its affiliated unions.

In the past decade, 50,000 manufacturing sites closed and six million American jobs were lost because of offshoring and outsourcing. The Kimberly-Clark mill in Everett — which was shut down for good earlier this year, directly costing 750 people their family-wage jobs and impacting thousands more jobs in the community — is yet another example.

This is a cross-post from David Groves at The Stand, a project of the Washington State Labor Council.

OLYMPIA (April 11) — With strong bipartisan support, the Washington state legislature today passed the Infrastructure Jobs Bonds sought by a labor-business coalition to create some 20,000 jobs throughout the state. Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) President Jeff Johnson called it "a great victory for the working men and women of our state, especially those in the construction industry who have suffered from such high unemployment since the beginning of the recession."

Here’s a bipartisan solution: Labor and management working together to create jobs.

Contracts covering more than 1,400 Seattle-area hotel and restaurant workers have expired and UNITEHERE!Local 8 has mounted a campaign of actions across the region to call on management to negotiate fair contracts that provide livable wages, job security and respect on the job.

This is a cross-post by David Groves at the Washington State Labor Council.

Legislation before the Washington State Legislature—pushed by multinational corporations and the notorious billionaire Koch brothers—urging Congress to pass the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has died without a vote in the state Senate. Senate Joint Memorial 8006, sponsored by Sen. Val Stevens (R-Arlington), failed to survive Monday’s cutoff deadline for legislation to pass from its house of origin. Though it could be revived through extraordinary procedural means, it is effectively dead for the session.