This April 28 marks the 24th Workers Memorial Day, and around the country workers, workplace safety activists, community and faith leaders will honor the men and women killed on the job and renew their commitment to the continuing campaign for strong job safety laws and tough enforcement of those laws.

The theme this year is “Safe Jobs, Save Lives. Make Your Voice Heard.” You can prepare for Workers Memorial Day with fact sheets in English and Spanish, posters and other materials available here. Also local unions, central labor councils and other labor groups soon will be adding their events to our Local Action calendar. Be sure to keep an eye on that. 

In hundreds of rallies in large cities and small towns, postal employees, other union members, community supporters and others rallied Sunday to preserve Saturday mail delivery.

In many cases, the participants protesting Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe‘s decision to suspend Saturday mail delivery beginning Aug. 5 exemplified the “neither rain nor sleet or snow…” postal motto by braving a major spring storm barreling across the nation’s mid-section.

A bill that creates a commonsense immigration process for America's 11 million aspiring citizens is in jeopardy because of Republican demands for poverty wages.

Key Republican senators in the "Gang of Eight", negotiating on the behalf of the business community, corporations and the extreme right-wing, rejected adding language to the bill that would ensure new W-visas would only be issued when employing foreign workers would not hurt wages and working conditions of workers already in the United States.

This language is already a longstanding law for temporary worker programs including the H-2B and other visa programs. The Chamber of Commerce in negotiations with the AFL-CIO already agreed to including this language.

We already covered how sequestration cuts will affect your state, but here's an update on the pain these cuts are causing in communities across the country since they went into effect March 1. 

Think these cuts aren't painful? Think again. Here are some highlights on the sequester's reign of terror after the jump.

I encourage transportation workers everywhere to support the Letter Carriers (NALC) this Sunday for its Day of Action to educate and mobilize Americans in support of continuing six-day mail delivery from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s reckless, unilateral move to end Saturday delivery will disproportionately harm those who need it the most—our nation’s poor, elderly, people with disabilities and those in rural areas. It will hurt small business, cut jobs and send the USPS on a severe downward spiral.

In case you missed it, here are some important reads from the past week:

A growing chorus of voices across the country is calling for President Obama to replace the acting director of Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Edward J. DeMarco. DeMarco, a holdover from the Bush administration, is responsible for overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. President Obama’s nominee to replace him in 2010 was blocked by Republicans.

DeMarco has prohibited Fannie and Freddie from providing responsible homeowners who are struggling to keep up with their mortgages with access to principal reductions. He has even refused to allow them to participate in the Obama administration’s principal reduction program (HAMP PRA), despite FHFA analysis showing that participating in the program could save $3.6 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and $1 billion for the taxpayers.

This Sunday, you can rally and tell Congress to strengthen the U.S. Postal Service for the future and protect six-day mail delivery. The coalition Delivering for America is organizing hundreds of rallies across the country to save Saturday delivery, which Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says he will end Aug. 5. Find a rally near you.

In recent weeks, there has been notable GOP floundering on the issue of creating a road map to citizenship as part of an overall immigration policy bill. From Rand Paul and Jeb Bush, who both struck a vague position on the issue, to those like Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), who has previously come out in support of a legalization program without a citizenship option, Republicans are struggling to find a coherent position on their level of support for citizenship for 11 million new American immigrants.

Calling sequestration “just a fancy word for a dumb idea,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the 750,000 job-killing, across-the-board budget cuts and other moves toward fiscal austerity will “further weaken the economy and cost jobs” and make even worse “the crisis of mass unemployment. Millions of Americans who want to work cannot find jobs.”

Writing in a special report in The Hill on jobs and the economy, Trumka says:

On some days, it seems like all of official Washington is racing to embrace the most destructive consensus since the Iraq war.