The term “banana scanner” sticks in Jackie Gitmed’s throat. It’s what she and other members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 770 were called during the strike and lockout nearly 10 years ago.

“They said we were ignorant and overpaid and didn’t deserve any better,” Gitmed says, as she and three friends, all of Local 770, first drew and then painted a life-size image of a grocery bagger on cardboard in one of the Monday action sessions at the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles.

“If we fight, we win,” shouted Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) near the end of her keynote speech on the opening evening of the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention. “Real reform isn’t easy,” Warren said to loud applause. “Uphill battles? You bet!”

How do we truly build a labor movement that is inclusive to young workers, people of color and the LGBT community? It's more than just holding a meeting or attending a conference, says Tahir Duckett, national young worker coordinator at the AFL-CIO, at a pre-conference diversity summit at the AFL-CIO 2013 Convention.

“My voice is kind of going. I’ve got to get used to this!” says Antonio Elizondo, a 23-year-old Union Summer intern from Los Angeles.

Elizondo is one of about 30 interns who converged on the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., this week for workshops and classes on activism and union organizing as the start of Union Summer, the AFL-CIO’s national program that introduces interns to the labor movement on union organizing campaigns.

She said she’d get a Mohawk. She got a Mohawk.

“I’m sporting a new ‘do,’” says Alice Phillips, business manager for Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 483 of Tacoma, Wash. “It feels…light. It’s different.”

The shaved head and spiked hair came about because Phillips wanted her union local to double last year’s donation of union-made peanut butter as part of the Letter Carriers’ (NALC's) National Food Drive. The 21st annual drive to combat hunger is the nation’s largest single-day food drive and is held annually on the second Saturday in May in 10,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2012, letter carriers collected 70 million pounds of food donations along their postal routes.

Alice Phillips of Tacoma, Wash., is a union leader who’s willing to create a little buzz.

At least, that’s the sound the clippers will make when Phillips, the IBEW business manager, fulfills her pledge to get a Mohawk haircut if the members of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 483 would double last year’s donation of union-made peanut butter as part of the Letter Carriers’ National Food Drive. They brought the jars. So she’s on the hook.

Cost-sharing, which is mistakenly embraced as a reform tool by some health care economists, will neither make care more affordable nor improve public health, says an important new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Under a white, wintry sky, nearly two-dozen union members volunteered to rebuild a 100-foot wooden bridge on a public trail in the Black Hills.

“When you’ve got skilled workers with the right tools, the work goes quick,” says Dana Garry, who manages the 109-mile Mickelson Trail for South Dakota’s Department of Game, Fish and Parks. In two days, the volunteers rebuilt abutments and replaced the bridge surface and railing. “It was just amazing,” she said. “These volunteers fill an important need.”

On a bright, chilly Friday before the Martin Luther King Day weekend, Lapronda Eason wheeled a garbage can through the gleaming halls of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Eason has been a caretaker, literally, of American history for almost 13 years. She’s a janitor, a custodian, or a BSW, as the job is called at the Smithsonian, a building service worker.

The distinctive timbre of Dr. King’s voice could be heard in the museum’s gleaming entryway. It was his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he gave in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The speech recording is part of an exhibit called "Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and the March on Washington, 1963."

Check out an excerpt of the AFL-CIO's new Innovators website feature, "No Depression: Pharmaceutical-Labor Alliance Flourishes."

“I certainly admit going in with an attitude of let’s-see-what-this-is-about,” Johnson & Johnson Vice President Donald Bohn says about cooperating with labor unions. “It turns out we have a lot more in common than you might think.”

And that’s why, about four years ago, Johnson & Johnson joined the Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association (PILMA), a growing coalition of pharmaceutical industry giants and the major building trades unions. Its goal is to foster good jobs in the domestic pharmaceutical industry while increasing access to affordable medicines.