The Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW) program in New York City prepares women for careers in construction and related industries through an innovative training and placement program that guides low-income women toward a meaningful career and solid financial footing.

Apprentices develop, and experienced workers refresh, skills at the International Union of Operating Engineers' state-of-the-art training center in Wilmington, Ill. The Local 150 center houses classrooms, testing labs, welding facilities, an equipment simulator lab and an indoor training arena large enough for 18 pieces of equipment to be used simultaneously.

In this video, meet the apprentices who now hold a promising future and the employers eager to receive a trained workforce.

Today’s military veterans face one of the toughest job markets in decades, and their unemployment rate is significantly higher than the population at large. But thanks to the Helmets to Hardhats program, which connects veterans with quality career training and employment opportunities within the building and construction industry, many veterans are now on ascending career paths.

A recent Philadelphia Inquirer feature focuses on two U.S. Marine Corps veterans who are putting to work the training and opportunities provided by Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) Local 19 in South Philadelphia.

Over the next few months, we'll be following the story of Hannah Cooper, an apprentice with Electrical Workers (IBEW). Check out her first entry below:

My entire life my mother has been a union electrician—a fact of life I never thought to question. It was where she spent her days while I was growing up, and it gave her the means to support our family. Although I understood and in my own way appreciated this fact, it never once occurred to me when considering potential career paths. I had this idea that I was going to make a career for myself in the arts and spend my time traveling the world as a dancer—maybe do some part-time modeling for supplemental income—acquire a bachelor's degree at a four-year university back East and maybe try to join a dance company. This was the plan anyways, from my early years of childhood up through the first half of my senior year of high school, when I realized I didn’t want to be a dancer anymore. I stopped showing up to my college auditions, completely throwing a wrench in the plan.

“Training” is the spotlight category today, as the launch of the AFL-CIO online hub @Work continues.

On the evening of May 1, 2010, firefighters from Uniformed Fire Officers Association Local 854 in New York City got a call about a car fire in Times Square. Six minutes later, Lts. Mike Barvels and John Kazan arrived on the scene to find an SUV parked with one wheel on a curb, hazard lights blinking. The firefighters spotted a number of warning signs, most importantly the white, slow-moving smoke coming from the vehicle. They knew typical car fires involve dark, billowing smoke. Barvels and Kazan decided not to use their fire hose on the truck and instead called for experts to come investigate.

During the past few years, as Republicans have taken control of state legislatures and governors’ offices, the attacks on workers and their unions have gone from the extreme we saw in Wisconsin and Michigan to the more subtle, as we are seeing today in Virginia.

Legislation in the state House and Senate, that anti-worker lawmakers had hoped would fly under the radar, would reduce labor representation on the 29-member Virginia Workforce Council (VWC) to just one person.

Check out the AFL-CIO's new In Our Communities website feature, "Cardinal Rule: Louisville's Building Trades Train Next Generation of Workers."

It only took a couple years of college for 26-year-old Muhammad Al-Bilali to realize that spending four years racking up thousands of dollars in student loans wasn't for him.

"More than anything, I was looking for a skill," says the Louisville, Ky., resident. "I wasn't getting that in college."

Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360. Craig sends us this.

Pittsburgh Steelers partisan and union radio guy Charles Showalter is happy the union refs are back on the field.

But Showalter thinks unions should use the lockout as a teaching moment. So does Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO. Says Showalter, host of “The Union Edge: Labor’s Talk Radio” show:

The NFL referee lockout is a complete disaster—something that’s obvious to everyone except (supposedly) the people keeping the referees locked out. Much ink has been spent on decrying the replacement referees and how they’re ruining football (never mind how they’re putting players’ safety at risk). What hasn’t gotten much attention in this lockout is symbolic of a much bigger issue: Training for a high-performing workforce matters.

The union movement is the largest workforce trainer of adults outside the U.S. military.