Emergency medical workers, massage therapists, bus mechanics and home health care workers are among the latest workers to choose a voice on the job with AFL-CIO unions. 

In California and Arizona, some 240 emergency medical services professionals voted recently to join United EMS Workers-AFSCME.

The Union Sportsmen's Alliance (USA) Adopt-a-Park initiative is ensuring that outdoor enthusiasts with mobility issues will be able take full advantage of a dedicated trail at Virginia’s York River State Park near Williamsburg.  

Let’s say you want to walk on a tightrope across the Grand Canyon without a tether or a net—in whose hands would you put your life? If you are Nik Wallenda, a Guinness Book of World Records-holder seven times over for acrobatic feats—including walking across Niagara Falls on a similar tightrope—you turn to union members.

Pittsburgh Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 5 members are being credited with saving dozens of local senior citizens from a fire that tore through a nursing home June 25. Community College of Allegheny County instructor Tammy Miller was teaching a class of 24 IBEW members when some of the students spotted trouble at the senior living facility next door. Miller says:

We were on break and some of students were standing outside when they noticed smoke coming from the neighboring building. I then said, ‘Oh my God, that’s a nursing home,’ and they made off like a swarm of bees for the building.

Standing at the center of the “Honoring All Veterans Memorial” that was dedicated Monday in Richfield, Minn., is a bronze statue of longtime Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 292 member and World War II veteran Chuck Lindberg, who raised the first U.S. flag on Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945.

Most of us know the iconic image captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal that was recreated for the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. But earlier that day Lindberg and several other Marines, after four days of bloody combat, were the first patrol to make it to the top of Mount Suribachi.

We’re following the story of Hannah Cooper, an apprentice with Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 11 in Los Angeles. Here’s her latest report and check out her first entry.

For the past year and a half, ­­I’ve had the great fortune of working on the new addition to the Tom Bradley International Terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). In the first two years of my electrical apprenticeship with IBEW Local 11, I worked on small jobs for small shops that had a very limited scope of work, so there weren’t very many aspects of the trade I had exposure to, much to my disappointment.

Over the next few months, we'll be following the story of Hannah Cooper, an apprentice with Electrical Workers (IBEW). Check out her first entry below:

My entire life my mother has been a union electrician—a fact of life I never thought to question. It was where she spent her days while I was growing up, and it gave her the means to support our family. Although I understood and in my own way appreciated this fact, it never once occurred to me when considering potential career paths. I had this idea that I was going to make a career for myself in the arts and spend my time traveling the world as a dancer—maybe do some part-time modeling for supplemental income—acquire a bachelor's degree at a four-year university back East and maybe try to join a dance company. This was the plan anyways, from my early years of childhood up through the first half of my senior year of high school, when I realized I didn’t want to be a dancer anymore. I stopped showing up to my college auditions, completely throwing a wrench in the plan.

In New Orleans this Super Bowl week, there are plenty of fans sporting 49ers' red and gold caps and jerseys and Ravens' purple and black gear. But there also are thousands of union members—including many from unions in the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO (GNO)—who proudly display their union label and are making the game possible and the fan experience in the Crescent City run smoothly.

As part of a strong holiday program, Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 668 puts up the entire holiday lighting display for downtown Lafayette, Ind. Between 25 and 50 volunteers show up weeks in advance of the local holiday festival and install the lights in the downtown plaza and county courthouse rotunda, a tradition the local has taken part in for 65 years. Members continue to make sure all the lights are working and fix any problems that come up throughout the holiday season.

Check out the AFL-CIO's new In Our Communities website feature, "Cardinal Rule: Louisville's Building Trades Train Next Generation of Workers."

It only took a couple years of college for 26-year-old Muhammad Al-Bilali to realize that spending four years racking up thousands of dollars in student loans wasn't for him.

"More than anything, I was looking for a skill," says the Louisville, Ky., resident. "I wasn't getting that in college."