One of the most oft-repeated lessons of the 2012 election is that America's growing population of immigrants is a force to be reckoned with. While many of us in the labor movement have known this for a long time, recently released figures drive this lesson home—bucking the national trend, California has witnessed rising union membership largely due to organizing drives in sectors with high immigrant populations, including home care aides, car wash workers and scientific researchers. This powerful partnership between the labor and immigrant communities is key to strengthening the worker's rights movement and will be a major factor in immigration reform.

We've heard a lot about loss of labor rights in Wisconsin, "right to work" for less legislation in Indiana and now Michigan. We get the impression that laws in those states had somehow required workers to join unions.

Quite the contrary. Unions are the bargaining agent for the employees, negotiating contracts with employers—binding legal contracts, sacred to conservative think tanks everywhere.

This is an excerpt from "An Election Message for the Lame Duck Congress: Fair Taxes, No Cuts," by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

After a hard-fought and divisive election year, it's time to rebuild America's middle class—but to do it we need to make sure the lessons from this campaign stick.

Four years ago, the leadership of the Republican Party made a cynical political gamble—and this year they lost because they bet against Ame

This is an excerpt from the Huffington Post, "Game Changer in Ohio: Cars," by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

This election may come down to cars. That’s right, cars. 

Nothing illustrates the choice between the two presidential candidates better than the 2009 rescue of the auto industry.  And, despite Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s efforts to distort the contrast with patently dishonest claims and a new TV ad, the auto rescue may turn out to be the deciding factor in the presidential election.    

Romney can’t seem to Etch-a-Sketch that now-famous op-ed headline—“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Actor and SAG-AFTRA member Anne-Marie Johnson grew up at the dawn of the Voting Rights Act and the volatile (and sometimes violent) struggle to ensure the right to vote for all people. She writes in The Huffington Post:

As a woman of color, of a certain age, the threat of losing one's right to cast a vote is not some far off, distant memory in some far off foreign land....In several states across the country, the right of Americans to cast a vote is being challenged.

Union and civil rights activists said they were “encouraged” today when German automaker Daimler—one of Alabama’s major employers with its Tuscaloosa County Mercedes-Benz plant—acknowledged it had engaged other businesses and state and federal lawmakers in discussions about Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law, H.B. 56.

Earlier this month, The Newspaper Guild-CWA (TNG-CWA), called on the unpaid writers at The Huffington Post to withhold their work in support of a strike launched by Visual Art Source in response to the company’s practice of using unpaid labor.

Public employees, from nurses to teachers to firefighters and police officers, have made and will continue to make sacrifices to help close budget gaps. But some state leaders have gone too far, says U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Budget sacrifices are one thing; demanding that workers give up their rights as union members—to take away their voice—is another, she says.

The following is a cross-post from The Huffington Post by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee.

The tens of thousands of Wisconsinites who have marched and protested at the state Capitol and throughout the state this past week are American heroes. It is not often in this country that thousands gather to fight for the dignity and the rights of their fellow citizens. Yet for days now, workers and their families, students and retirees, clergy and businessmen, LGBT activists and veterans have joined together to have their voices heard. The people of the Badger State are making history happen.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) claims he has to eliminate the right of public workers like nurses, teachers and EMTs to bargain for good jobs in order to fix the state’s budget. He claims it’s fiscally prudent.