Have reservations for a romantic dinner this Valentine’s Day? You are not alone. Valentine’s Day is the highest-grossing day for the $600 billion restaurant industry. This year, when you eat out on Valentine’s Day, you can share the love with the folks who will be feeding and serving you—and you can tell the world about it.

It’s time for Southwest Airlines to share the “LUV,” and that’s the message the airline’s ground workers in contract negotiations with the airline will deliver to Southwest management Wednesday on “LUV” Day.

Members of Transport Workers (TWU) Local 555, representing Southwest’s 9,000 ground workers, will be joined by TWU Local 556 members, representing Southwest’s 11,000 flight attendants, to deliver special Valentine’s Day cards wishing executives a happy “LUV Day,” with a message about serving customers, ensuring a solid future, negotiating fair contracts and keeping the “LUV” alive.

Edith Lauterbach, the last founding member of the first union for flight attendants, died earlier this week in San Francisco. She was 91. In a statement, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA ) said:

The flight attendant community lost our hero, our guiding light….As our heavy hearts remember our friend and trailblazing founder, we reflect on Edith’s contributions to our profession and our union each and every day.

By a better than 2-to-1 margin, the teachers, counselors and social workers at César Chávez Academy, the largest charter school in Detroit, voted Thursday to join the Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Michigan ACTS), an affiliate of AFT Michigan.

A new investigation finds “compelling evidence” that Palermo’s Pizza’s firing of 90 workers at its Milwaukee plant is directly tied to the company’s anti-union practices and was illegal under both U.S. and international labor standards. The report, by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), says Palermo's Pizza should reinstate—with full back pay—the fired workers and begin negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement.

The Longshoremen (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance have reached a tentative agreement covering some 14,000 workers in 15 East Coast ports, the Federal Mediation Service and Conciliation (FMCS) announced late Friday. The two sides had faced a Feb. 6 strike deadline.

In an article at the American Prospect, writer Josh Eidelson takes a look at workers organizing in industries that are often exempt from labor law.

Thousands of engineers and technical workers at Boeing Co. plants in the Pacific Northwest will begin voting next week on the latest contract offer and whether to authorize a strike, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)/IFPTE Local 2001 announced Thursday.

Two investment firms have been chosen as the bidders to beat for the Hostess Brands snack cakes division that includes the iconic Twinkies and that is being auctioned off as part of the Hostess bankruptcy proceedings.   

The two firms are Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo Global Management LLC. Known as “stalking horse” bidders, other firms must beat their $410 million bid to acquire the division.

As the landscape of the American workforce changes, the union movement is continuously finding ways to evolve and meet the demands of working families in the 21st century. The Labor Innovation Fund for the Twenty-First Century (LIFT) seeks to create a space to do just that. A true product of the intersection of collaboration and innovation, LIFT brings philanthropic resources to building greater alignment and synergy between the union movement and community organizing. As a collaborative project of the AFL-CIO with the Ford Foundation, the Solidago Foundation and the New World Foundation, through grants to partnership projects, conversations around common agendas between foundations that support worker issues, the union movement and worker centers are made possible.