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

As the launch of the AFL-CIO’s new online hub @Work continues, today we are highlighting union members’ commitment to producing the highest quality of products and services. This is one of the seven categories of the new site.

Join Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen at 2 p.m. EST for a Twitter chat on the future of the union movement. Follow the hashtag #U1Nation to follow the chat. 

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.

Let’s be honest. Sometimes, outside of election campaign seasons, even progressives wonder what’s so great about unions. Sure, we had a role to play before job safety laws, the eight-hour day, Social Security and civil rights laws were passed. But today?  

Even our friends aren’t immune to the relentless attacks on unions from the right and the stereotypes that come with them: union thugs, lazy workers, relics of the past, self-absorbed, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Union members have been called many stereotypes over the years: thugs, relics, selfish—the list goes on. But the truth is union members are people who work and make contributions to their communities every day. Union members are innovating on the job and training the next generation of skilled workers, among many other things.

Do you really eat ethically? Author Saru Jayaraman challenges frequent restaurant-goers with that question in her newly released book, Behind the Kitchen Door. Jayaraman will be at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, Feb. 20, from noon to 2 p.m., for a signing and book discussion. 

This year's winner of the Electrical Workers' (IBEW's) annual photo contest, Bill DeClement, from Folsom, N.J., Local 351, took home first place for his photo of two IBEW members riding in a "window rig at about 7 a.m. one morning in Atlantic City when a blanket of fog rolled in, swaddling the ocean and city below." The photo was taken from the highest Atlantic City building, the Revel Casino. 

Gloria Johnson, 85, a founding member and former president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), died Feb. 13 at Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton, Md. She also served as an AFL-CIO vice president. Says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:

Gloria’s values and unapologetic stance for the full inclusion of women and minorities in the workplace and society will continue to inspire and improve the lives of working women and men….The barriers she broke and the foundations she helped lay will undoubtedly live on in history.

Want a reason to support unions? A union may help keep you alive.

Your chances of surviving a hospital stay after a myocardial infarction—also known as a heart attack—are higher if your nurses are in a union than if they’re not.

That’s the conclusion of a study by academics at the University of Massachusetts and the University of California. It’s also part of a much larger picture that the media ignore, that might give even right-wing Republicans a reason to support unions, and that makes the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics evidence of a dwindling union presence bad news for all of us.