This is a cross-post from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's CoLab Radio blog by Paul Garcia, a recent University of California, Los Angeles, grad working with the California Construction Academy, a project of the UCLA Labor Center.

This past June, I walked across the stage in front of thousands of students and family members to receive my bachelor’s degree from UCLA. There was a sea of black robes behind and in front of me, and as I set my feet on the stage and saw the crowd, I felt a rush of excitement. With the diploma in my hand, I felt the weightlessness of unlimited opportunity. Yet I knew that I didn’t get here alone. Two generations before me struggled to give me this chance.

Robert M. Schwartz, author of several popular union labor law guides, has written a new book entitled Just Cause: A Union Guide To Winning Disciplinary Cases.

Based on more than four years of research into 15,000 arbitration awards, and the author's long experience representing unions, the book p...

Hugh J. Campbell of the United Steelworkers (USW) sends us "The Corporate Class War’s Smoking Gun." 

The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, the companion article to Moyers & Company’s The One Percent Court, tells how the response to business getting its clock cleaned was the mobilization for political combat. Four decades later, the middle class has had its clock cleaned as a result of the undeclared class war that began in 1971.

Hugh J. Campbell of the United Steelworkers (USW) sends us this blog. 

In the article "You Built That: How Mitt Romney Shook Down American Taxpayers for His Welfare Olympics," Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele say Mitt Romney’s take-take-take mentality is nothing more than the old-fashioned double standard: If it enhances the standard of living of his cronies, it’s business as usual.

Travis Thompson of the Oughtism Too blog sends us this. 

Compromise refers to adjusting one’s political position to be someplace between two beginning positions of opposing sides. In a murder trial, the extremes are not guilty and the death penalty, so perhaps a compromise would be pleading guilty to a lesser crime and either no prison term or a short term. In American politics, the problem with compromise is that the right end of the political continuum has moved far further to the extreme right than at any time in the nation’s history. None of the founders imagined a country run almost entirely by major corporations, as is the case today.  

Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360. Craig sends us this.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the GOP are at it again, fishing for union votes with the same old social issues sucker bait.

Retired Plumbers and Pipe Fitters leader Larry Sanderson of Paducah, Ky., calls it “the three Gs con job,” as in “God, Guns and Gays.”

For most of us who lived in the blue-collar and lower socioeconomic areas bounded by Buckeye Road, 93rd Street, Lee Road and Miles Avenue (John Adams High School district) in Cleveland, Labor Day was a major holiday—a day filled with celebrations, fireworks, parades with marching bands, veterans and labor union members wearing their union logos (e.g., Teamsters, AFL-CIO, Steelworkers). 

Hugh J. Campbell of the United Steelworkers sends us this blog. 

For three decades, attempts to undermine Social Security and Medicare have been considered “touching the third-rail” because the two programs are valued by our middle class and aspiring middle class. But to the financial elite, these safety-net programs have been the bane of their existence.

Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360. 

Hundreds of Labor Day events are happening all over the country. Find a Labor Day event near you. 

Most Labor Day parades have one grand marshal, but the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Labor Day Committee decided 15 was more like it.

“That’s how many we’re having in our parade this year, and they are all women who belong to unions,” said Brandon Duncan, president of the non-profit, all-volunteer committee, which sponsors Paducah's annual holiday processions.

Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360. Craig sends us this.

Buddy Cutler has some free legal advice for supporters of "right to work" for less laws:

You’re guilty of false and deceptive advertising.

“'Right to work' laws should be called the ‘right to freeload,’” adds the Louisville, Ky., labor lawyer.

Kentucky is not a "right to work" state. Cutler wants to help keep it that way.