Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will address scholars, labor activists and workers’ center organizers at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) at Georgetown University on June 12. Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, a magnificent rendition of the great migration of some 6 million black Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), architect of the Ryan/Romney/Republican budget-for-the-1% plan, told a TV interviewer this month that his budget blueprint follows and upholds the social teachings of the Catholic Church. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other Catholic leaders disagree. The USCCB says Ryan’s budgets failed to live up to Catholic “moral criteria.” Yesterday, more than 90 priests and faculty members at Georgetown University—a Jesuit school—sent Ryan a letter criticizing his plan.

If you’re in Washington, D.C., next week, hope you can stop by the AFL-CIO for a discussion on “American Workers in an Age of Austerity.” Panelists will talk about what we can learn from the past as we strategize for the future in the context of labor, progessives and the current U.S. political environment.

Tomorrow Today, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., some of the nation’s leading economists, educators and union leaders will take part in a special panel discussion, “Jobs, Inequality and the Role of Government: Improving the Economic Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the U.S.”

Seth Newton Patel at the Kalmanovitz initiative for Labor and the Working Poor sends us this report on the organization’s first in a series of Kalmanovitz Initiative events exploring the state and future of collective bargaining, the Collective Bargaining Project.

Georgetown University Aramark workers, students and faculty joined in a panel this week to describe their successful campaign to organize a union of Aramark food service workers with UNITEHERE. Two workers from the union organizing committee, two student activists and Georgetown History professor Michael Kazin (who wrote a piece on the campaign in The New Republic) spoke on a panel moderated by the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s Executive Director Joseph McCartin.

If you’re in the Washington, D.C., area, the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor is hosting a panel discussion tomorrow on last spring’s successful organizing campaign by Georgetown University’s food service workers with the help of students and the support of sympathetic faculty and administrators.