New York City workers will receive, starting next year, five paid sick days a year to care for themselves or an ill family member under a measure the New York City Council passed (45-3) this afternoon. The vote culminates a four-year effort by a powerful coalition of workers, unions and community groups.

After Medicare deductions, Marty Alvarado has about $950 left in her monthly Social Security check. The Alliance for Retired Americans members from Dallas told a Capitol Hill Hands Off Social Security summit of Alliance members, lawmakers, senior activists and Social Security advocates:

As you might imagine that’s very difficult to live on. I cannot afford to lose any of my benefits due to the chained CPI cut in benefits. This is especially important to me as a woman. Women represent 57% of all Social Security beneficiaries. Chained CPI would hit female beneficiaries especially hard because we tend to live longer.

In 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a commonsense and evenhanded rule that said employers must post a notice in the workplace to inform workers of their rights. Simply put, the 11 x 17 poster should inform workers of their right to join a union and their right not to join a union.

Yesterday, a trio of Republican-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the NLRB rule violated the employers’ right of free speech. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the courts’ ruling “absurd.” 

Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who fund a number of extreme right-wing organizations and are major contributors to the tea party and bankrollers for a host of anti-worker state ballot initiatives and legislation, now have their sights set on building a major media empire.

As we get ready for the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention in September, we’re asking people like you what we can do together to make a better future for working people and to build a bigger and stronger labor movement. Daily Kos labor editor Laura Clawson gets the discussion going on the just-launched AFL-CIO 2013 Convention website with this question:

The sustained war on workers from the right has left unions trying to prevent rights from being weakened rather than setting the agenda. Where are the opportunities to play some offense?

A bill pushed by the Republican leadership in the U.S. House that will let employers make you work more for less pay will be up for a vote on Wednesday.

Call Congress today and tell your representative to oppose H.R. 1406: 1-888-866-2561.

Today, 150 people will likely be killed on the job or die from job-related illnesses and disease. That deadly toll will continue tomorrow and the next day and the next until the nation “renews the commitment to protect workers from injury, disease and death,” and makes it a high priority, says the 2013 edition of the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.

Last week, Walmart said it would speed up its plan to hire returning military veterans that it had announced in January. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Walmart’s latest move “is more about public relations than honoring our heroes.”

We owe it to our returning veterans to make sure they are treated as the heroes they are, rather than as symbols used to ‘greenwash’ Walmart’s eroding brand. After facing enemies abroad, is an $8.81 an hour part-time job the best we can offer returning veterans?

Why does America’s union movement support commonsense immigration reform that includes a road map to citizenship? Because of hardworking people like Neidi Dominguez’s mother. Watch this new ad from the AFL-CIO that is appearing on Univision in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Austin, Texas.   

Visit www.aflcio.org/citizenshipnow.

Bucking a trend that has seen private equity firms buy business to bleed then shut down, United Steelworkers (USW) members at three Wisconsin paper mills and KPS Capital Partners have reached a new four-year collective bargaining agreement that workers ratified today.