Migrant workers face tremendous pressure and exploitation in dynamic and wealthy South Korea, reports the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Timothy Ryan.

In one of the richest and the most Internet-wired countries in the world, you might assume that workers’ and migrants’ rights are respected. You’d be wrong.

Elizabeth Boomer of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department sends us this report in conjunction with the Solidarity Center.

Two years after a massive earthquake destroyed much of Haiti’s capital and surrounding towns, the Haitian people are still struggling to recover from the disaster and the entrenched poverty that it has exacerbated.

Elizabeth Boomer of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department sends us this report.

Protestors rallied outside the World Bank building in Washington, D.C., yesterday in support of Nigeria’s nation-wide strike opposing the soaring price of fuel. After the government ended fuel subsidies Jan. 1, prices doubled overnight. Today in Nigeria, tens of thousands marched in the streets across the country.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us another in a series of reports on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us another in a series of reports on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

AIDS and HIV remain a major public health issue around the world, and so does workplace discrimination against people with AIDS/HIV.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us the first report on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

The 17th annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) opened in Durban with a speech by South African President Jacob Zuma that stressed the need for dialogue, green jobs and investment. As trade unionists, we are here in force to ensure that these goals are met and that any climate agreement includes workers’ voice.  

Exiled Mexican mine workers union leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia will be honored with the AFL-CIO’s 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award tonight at a ceremony at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Kenneth Bernstein, a National Board Certified Social Studies teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt. Md. sends us this report.  He is a nationally known as a blogger on education and other topics as “teacherken”

Yesterday, Oct. 5, was World Teachers Day.  As you can see at UNESCO’s website, the annual celebration honors “the essential role of teachers in providing quality education at all levels.”   The day is the anniversary of the 1966 signing of The Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers adopted by the Special Intergovernmental Task Force on Teachers.

The global union movement is calling on the labor ministers of the world’s top economies, known as the G-20, to create millions of new jobs around the world. In a statement prepared for the labor ministers meeting next week in Paris, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) and Global Unions say 110 million jobs are needed by 2015 just to return G-20 countries to pre-crisis levels. That’s 22 million new jobs every year. Read the global unions’ statement here.