Despite a slate of state legislation attacking the rights of voters, a number of states are advancing legislation that would enhance the ability of U.S. citizens to exercise their right to choose their representatives. Among the most likely advances in voting rights in the states:

Members of the Reagan High School band stopped rush hour traffic yesterday in front of the federal building in Austin, Texas, along with hundreds of advocates, community leaders, families and construction workers, as they celebrated the Workers Defense Project’s (WDP's) biannual Day of the Fallen.

The nation’s broken immigration system is creating a crisis for workers and employers in the Texas construction industry. A new study by the Workers Defense Project (WDP) and the University of Texas finds that as many as half of the Lone Star State’s construction workers may be undocumented. Says WDP Executive Director Cristina Tzintzun:

Our immigration policies are broken. They’re not working for businesses, they’re not working for our workers and they’re not working for our state.

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.

Unions and organizations that advocate for workers are teaming up to improve the conditions of all workers in Texas. The Workers Defense Project and the Texas State Building and Construction Trades Council have seen quite a bit of success in their collaboration on behalf of the working families of the Lone Star State.

While most states saw a decline in union membership in 2012, California bucked the trend as 100,000 new workers joined collective bargaining units. Pushing the growth were Latino workers and nurses, the Los Angeles Times reported today. Overall, 11.3% of America's workers are current union members, which is a smaller percentage from 2011, but in California, the number is closer to 18% and is growing. Other southwestern states, such as Nevada and Texas, are also seeing growth in union membership.

Construction workers and others in the Austin, Texas, area are celebrating a coalition victory this week after Travis County commissioners approved a first-ever economic development policy that includes a living wage requirement.

The policy requires contractors asking for tax incentives to move into the county to pay all employees at least $11 per hour. It’s a significant improvement over the prevailing construction hourly wage of $7.50.

In a major win for nurses, patients and three Texas communities, registered nurses (RNs) in El Paso, Corpus Christi and Brownsville gave final approval to contracts yesterday in first-ever collective bargaining agreements, reports National Nurses United (NNU). 

One of the important consumer protections of the Affordable Care Act—the health care reform law that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to repeal—is that health insurance companies must clearly tell people what their policies cover and what they don’t when it comes to treatments, services and providers. 

In Texas, the withdrawal, by the state insurance commissioner, of new rules that would have helped consumers know if they were facing huge out-of-network costs when they are hospitalized shows why those protections in the Affordable Care Act are needed.

Cristina Tzintzun, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, and Michael Cunningham, executive director and secretary/treasurer of the Texas State Building and Construction Trades Council, send us this. 

Few construction labor leaders have ever thought of Texas as an easy place to organize. The state legislature is controlled by a super majority of Republicans that are sternly anti-immigrant and anti-worker. Construction business interests have a firm grip on the legislature. The biggest Republican donor in the state is Bob Perry, of Perry Homes, one of the largest home builders in Texas. That is why the efforts of unions and community groups to reform the construction industry in the state are so significant.