AFL-CIO will be hosting two powerful Book Club events in Washington, D.C., that will help explain the current state of the U.S. economy, income inequality and the politics of austerity. On Monday, April 15, Nobel Prize-winning author Joseph Stiglitz will be discussing his book The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. On Tuesday, April 16, Robert Kuttner will talk about his book Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

In case you missed it, AFSCME President Lee Saunders and AFSCME members who were part of the sanitation strike in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968 were interviewed on "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." 

Watch the video in the blog and check out the USA Today column, Renewing King's Fight for Black Justice, by Saunders, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III. 

This is an excerpt from a column in The Huffington Post.

I have been following all of the news about the number of elected officials, especially U.S. senators, who are "coming out" in support of marriage equality. It is clear progress is being made and there is much celebration amongst members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. I also recognize that marriage equality has been an entry point for many allies into the LGBT movement.

Retired ironworker Travis Witt from Local 301 (Charleston, W.Va.) shared the photo, left, on the Ironworkers' Facebook page of a car he designed with the union's logo. 

Stephen Coats, executive director of the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP) and a longtime global worker rights activist, died yesterday morning in his sleep. In 1987, Coats founded the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project, which later became USLEAP.

Harry Kelber, a union activist for nearly 80 years who was never shy about criticizing the union movement’s leadership—constructively, he maintained—died Sunday in New York. He was 98. On his 98th birthday in June, Kelber had announced he planned to run for the AFL-CIO presidency at the federation’s upcoming September convention.

If you're running out to the store today to get food for your Easter and Passover meals (or want to find some sales), don't forget to check out our two union-made in America holiday shopping guides:

Made in America: Union-Made Passover

Made in America: Union-Made Easter

Today is the 102nd anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York's Greenwich Village. This tragedy took the lives of 146 young immigrant garment workers. Most were trapped and died behind the building’s locked doors and others plunged to their deaths as they jumped from windows from the eighth floor and above.

It also galvanized a movement to raise workplace safety standards and enact other labor law reforms.

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. 

The National Labor College (NLC) is now accredited to offer an Associate of Arts degree. An Associate of Arts degree is the first two years of college and will provide students with the foundation to succeed in NLC's bachelor's degree programs or at any other four-year college or university.

Applications for the Associate of Arts degree for the fall semester, beginning Sept. 3, 2013, will be available shortly. If you would like to be immediately notified when the applications are available, sign up here.