Want to spend your summer learning about social and economic justice and working for change? The Union Summer internship program just might be the place for you. 

Union Summer is an educational internship in which participants are introduced to the labor movement and organizing. 

Listen to what Union Summer participants have to say about the experience in the video in this blog or here. 

The application deadline is April 30. Click here for more information about Union Summer. 

Apply to Union Summer here. 

After a hot and busy summer, Union Summer intern Olivia Montesano is now back to pursuing a master’s degree in justice studies with a heavy focus on community organizing at Arizona State University. She’s back to reading about people around the world organizing their communities to make a difference.

Meet the faces of Union Summer in our new Innovators website feature. Watch the video in this post or on the website here. 

Union Summer, an educational internship that introduces young people to the labor movement, sent interns across the United States to organize for change. For more information on Union Summer, visit www.aflcio.org/unionsummer. Share the video on Facebook here.  

The next time you take a cab, take a moment to think about the person driving the car. Taxi drivers typically do not have the same benefits as workers in other professions. But the National Taxi Workers Alliance (NTWA) is working to change that. 

NTWA in New York City is the largest taxi driver union in the United States working to ensure that its members can make a living wage. This summer, Sahar Khan, one of the nine New York Union Summer interns, is learning about NTWA's innovative strategies to grow the union's membership.

Organizing and mobilization, in theory, is one thing; it’s a whole different ballgame in practice.

After a week of orientation at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., Union Summer interns in Portland, Ore., are applying the theories they learned to the hands-on work they do on-site.

Intern Lesley Salinas explains:

The time spent in Washington I classify as 'theory’ versus the hands-on training that I have been involved in locally in the community. During the training, I was given a lot of information that has been truly useful during these Union Summer weeks.

Two years ago on Aug. 5., a San José copper-gold mine located in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert, caved in, trapping 33 miners 2,257 feet underground. “The 33,” as they were quickly known around the world, survived a staggering 69 days underground before their rescue.

Check out the AFL-CIO's new Innovators website feature, "Law Students Connect with Workers, Community in Summer of Service" here.

As participants in the AFL-CIO’s Law Student Summer (LSUS) program, Mehta, Callahan and 10 others “are learning, hands-on, how they can make a difference in people’s lives,” says AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Nancy Schiffer, who coordinates LSUS. 

LSUS’ sister initiative, the Minority Outreach Program, taps into the extensive network of some 1,900 union attorneys who belong to the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee(LCC) and encourages law students of color to apply for summer clerkship opportunities at LCC law firms and legal departments throughout the country.

The LSUS and the Minority Outreach Program internships are no fillers for vacationing office support staff. They are all about boots on the ground, with interns fanning out across the country to help workers gain a voice on the job and help unions represent members and contribute to the community.

Click here to find out more. 

Lindsey Lunsford, 21, has a personal connection to the labor movement but didn’t see its relevance to her life until this week, when she participated in the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer training.

When the 45 AFL-CIO Union Summer 2011 interns are asked what they did for their summer vacation, they won’t have any stories about lounging on the beach or backpacking through Europe. But the will tell about making a real difference in people’s lives and about how much that involvement has contributed to their sense of social justice.

Emily Mendenhall, an AFL-CIO Union Summer intern in New Orleans, reports the interns there joined a home rebuilding project in Chalmette, La.

The New Orleans Union Summer team volunteered to spend a day last week joining the St. Bernard Project in rebuilding a house in Chalmette, La.,  just outside New Orleans.