The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT) announced a $50 million commitment of union pension capital to finance the substantial rehabilitation of the historic Riverside Plaza apartment complex. The investment will modernize the 1,303 housing units at the aging Minneapolis landmark, with work on the $123 million project expected to generate an estimated 635 union construction jobs.

2010 was the inaugural season of the new home of the Minnesota Twins, Target Stadium in Minneapolis. On June 16th, 2010, in recognition of their contributions to the construction of one of the best ballparks in America, representatives of the Minnesota Building Trades were invited to throw out the first pitch before the Twins-Rockies ballgame.

Minnesota Commissioner of Labor and Industry Ken Peterson has appointed Jessica Looman to the position of assistant commissioner for construction codes and labor standards. Looman has worked for the past 10 years as general counsel for the Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota. There she worked on issues including collective bargaining, prevailing wage and unemployment insurance.

In Minnesota, they want to want to end the jobs of 15 percent of the men and women in the state workforce. In Tennessee, they want to take away right of teachers join unions. In Ohio, they want to eliminate collective bargaining rights for home health care and child care workers and restrict the bargaining rights of police officers and fire fighters. Who are they?

The Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration is revising the calculations used to set wage rates for foreign workers who enter the United States under the H-2B temporary nonagricultural worker program, according to a final rule scheduled for publication in the Jan. 19 Federal Register.

“This final rule improves protections for both U.S. and foreign workers by aligning wages with marketplace realities and ensuring that the H-2B program is used as it was intended,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in a Jan. 18 statement.

When newly-appointed Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell  Issa (R-California), reached out to Big Business leaders asking for their two cents on which policy  initiatives were most important in 2011, the National Association of Manufacturers, a notoriously anti-worker body, jumped at the chance to undermine the American laborforce.

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.  But now the right is going after public employees. by Robert Reich

One of the few bright spots in today's U.S. economy is the prospect of growing numbers of “green jobs,“ or those that create renewable energy, improve energy efficiency, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of global warming air pollution. But what constitutes a "good green job?"

A new budget “blueprint” that makes job creation and long-term investments the cornerstones for a sustainable federal budget is a “starting point for the debate over budgeting for broadly shared prosperity,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The proposal is a: