Philip Levine recently completed his yearlong tenure as the U.S. poet laureate, a position that gave nationwide attention to his affinity with working people. With his writing roots deep within the world of work—and encapsulated in his signature poetry collection, “What Work Is”—Levine gave us all in the union movement the opportunity to engage with the art of poetry and understand more about the role of poet laureate.

Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will address scholars, labor activists and workers’ center organizers at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) at Georgetown University on June 12. Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, a magnificent rendition of the great migration of some 6 million black Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West.

If you’re in Washington, D.C., next week, hope you can stop by the AFL-CIO for a discussion on “American Workers in an Age of Austerity.” Panelists will talk about what we can learn from the past as we strategize for the future in the context of labor, progessives and the current U.S. political environment.

Adele Stan, a journalist and lifelong member of the labor movement, reports on a timely forum on inequality and jobs at Georgetown University today.

In Washington, D.C., as in dozens of other U.S. cities, the 99 percent movement is inescapable, even in the politest of venues, as demonstrated today at a forum titled “Jobs, Inequality and the Role of  Government,” sponsored at the Georgetown Law School. The movement’s  chant, “We are the 99 percent,” is meant to draw the distinction between the average American and the top 1 percent who possess 42 percent of the nation’s  wealth.

Seth Newton Patel at the Kalmanovitz initiative for Labor and the Working Poor sends us this report on the organization’s first in a series of Kalmanovitz Initiative events exploring the state and future of collective bargaining, the Collective Bargaining Project.

Georgetown University Aramark workers, students and faculty joined in a panel this week to describe their successful campaign to organize a union of Aramark food service workers with UNITEHERE. Two workers from the union organizing committee, two student activists and Georgetown History professor Michael Kazin (who wrote a piece on the campaign in The New Republic) spoke on a panel moderated by the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s Executive Director Joseph McCartin.