As we continue this week’s launch of the AFL-CIO’s new online hub @Work, today we are spotlighting “Collaboration,” one of the seven featured categories of the new site.

This is a cross-post from Huffington Post's Spanish-language site Voces by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. 

Christian Hurtado’s story shows the potential of the new workers' rights movement. It's a story worth telling this month, days after we celebrated Labor Day and as we prepare to celebrate Latino Heritage Month.  

When his father Angel died in a work-related accident in 2004, Christian's life took an unexpected turn. Christian, 29, and his family don’t know the exact details of the accident, which happened while his father, an independent construction worker, was doing work inside a small warehouse in Austin, Texas. Christian’s family was devastated, especially his mom Victoria. 

Cristina Tzintzun, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, and Michael Cunningham, executive director and secretary/treasurer of the Texas State Building and Construction Trades Council, send us this. 

Few construction labor leaders have ever thought of Texas as an easy place to organize. The state legislature is controlled by a super majority of Republicans that are sternly anti-immigrant and anti-worker. Construction business interests have a firm grip on the legislature. The biggest Republican donor in the state is Bob Perry, of Perry Homes, one of the largest home builders in Texas. That is why the efforts of unions and community groups to reform the construction industry in the state are so significant.

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.

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.

The Santa Fe, N.M., community and immigrant rights group, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, recently opened a new Worker Center. Somos worked closely with the Northern New Mexico Central Labor Council, the New Mexico Federation of Labor (NMFL) and Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) in establishing the center, which will be vital to the group’s mission to promote worker and racial justice.