103 Students Set to Graduate from National Labor College
Rachelle Honeycutt works at an oil refinery in Washington State. Sam Schaffer is a skilled sheet metal worker from West Virginia. Javier Almazan organizes workers in south Florida and Cathy Merkel is a registrar in Maryland. They’re all union members. And in a few days, all four will be graduates of one of the crown jewels of the labor movement: the National Labor College.
With a 46-acre campus just outside Washington, D.C., the nation’s only labor college is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and grants bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The college evolved from the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, created in 1969, and now partners with the University of Baltimore and George Mason University for its graduate degree programs.
On Saturday, 101 students will receive B.A. degrees and two others will be awarded M.A. degrees, as the Labor College graduates its 11th class in a ceremony on the Silver Spring, Md., campus. U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will give the commencement address.
Progressive Change Needs Strong Civics Education
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More than 100 years ago, a commission, charged with examining how well high school students were being taught about government, politics and citizenship, found that a poor civics education linked to the plethora of bad politicians and weak public servants dominated turn-of-the-century American government.
Today, says Andrea Batista Schlesinger in a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, a renewed and strong emphasis on civics is even more vital in the 21st century.
We have to start caring a lot more about civics. If we want to ensure that a pro-worker progressive movement is in our future, we need to raise a generation of young people who feel connected to the institutions of their democracy, who understand how to navigate them and who understand from an early age that it is their right—and their responsibility—to question them.
Schlesinger is the author of The Death of Why: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy. She is on a leave of absence from the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, where she served as executive director.
Working America Takes Us to Main Street
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Take a stroll down Working America’s new Main Street…Main Street Blog that is.
The just-launched blog by the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate for workers who don’t have a union, features news and information about the issues that Working America’s 2.5 million members say they are most concerned about—the economy, health care, jobs, education, retirement security, the mortgage and housing crisis and other issues.
Congress Passes Obama’s ‘Transformational’ Budget
On the 100th day of the Obama administration, the U.S. House (233-193) and Senate (53-43) approved President Obama’s budget blueprint that rejects the failed economic policies of the Bush administration, makes a major down payment on comprehensive health care reform and signals significant investment in education, clean energy and green jobs.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called the budget resolution a
transformational blueprint for growing the middle class and making the economy work for everyone again. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that we build an economy that works for working Americans.
Obama Unveils Budget for America’s Working Families
President Obama’s first budget proposal is a 180-degree turn from the past eight years. It’s aimed at rebuilding the middle class, reforming the nation’s health care system and helping working families educate their children, while asking the nation’s wealthiest to begin paying more of their fair share and ending tax breaks for corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the fiscal year 2010 budget shows Obama is “serious” about repairing the economic damage of the past eight years and correcting the incredible imbalance between those very few at the top and the rest of us.
President Obama’s proposed budget takes us in the right direction toward creating an economy that works for everyone. The budget sets out ambitious—but achievable—proposals for bold new reforms in energy, health care, education and infrastructure, while also laying out a concrete plan to fund these programs over the next decade.
Obama Puts Jobs, Health Care at Top of National Agenda
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Last night, as the doors opened into the halls of Congress, America’s working families breathed a sigh of relief as we heard these words:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!”
What a difference a year makes. Although our economic condition is dire, hearing those words about our new president instills confidence that our leaders are listening to our deep concerns and are up to the task of putting us back on track. Ninety-two percent of those polled who watched President Barack Obama’s first address to Congress last night approved of the speech, in which he was both realistic in the assessment of the challenges we face and optimistic about the solutions to those problems.
As he acknowledged often during the campaign, Obama noted that the problems in our economy didn’t start with the housing crisis or the stock market collapse last year; for too many of America’s working families, the economy hasn’t been working for much longer than that.
Time to Think Big, Push for Progressive Government Action
President Obama’s economic stimulus package is just the beginning of a long-overdue public investment in rebuilding our nation’s economy. And now is the time to seek broad solutions—to think big about what can be done.
Today at the Thinking Big/Thinking Forward conference, hundreds of progressives took the first steps to building a movement to coalesce public support for a more activist, progressive government to rebuild our nation’s economy.
The one-day conference in Washington, D.C., was co-sponsored by The American Prospect, Institute for America’s Future, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Focus on Working Families, Win a College Scholarship
High school and college students hoping to make the world a better place have an opportunity to advance their education and get the word out about the needs of working families this year through the annual Ottilie Markholt Memorial Scholarship essay contest.
America in Solidarity, a grassroots campaign educating on working family issues, is sponsoring the contest, with a focus on the Employee Free Choice Act and other vital political issues facing working families and our economy. Through the Ottilie Markholt Memorial Scholarship, America in Solidarity has awarded nearly $15,000 in scholarships since 2005.
The scholarship is open to high school seniors and current college students who are residents of the United States and planning to attend accredited colleges and universities in the United States.
AFT Mobilizes for Smart Investments in Economic Recovery Package
AFT members are mobilizing in the union’s just-launched campaign, Fight for America’s Future: It’s Dollars and Sense, to build support in Washington and back home for the far-reaching economic recovery plan making its way through Congress that helps rebuild the nation’s schools, roads, bridges and more, and protects vital services threatened by shrinking state budgets.
AFT President Randi Weingarten says the campaign
isn’t just about dollars, but about the kind of smart investments that will help slow the economic free-fall and strengthen education, healthcare and public services in order to preserve opportunity in this country.
In addition to urging their lawmakers on Capitol Hill to craft a substantial recovery plan, AFT members also are working at the local level where, says Weingarten, essential services are “too often the first on the chopping block.”
More U.S. Children Face Poverty
Last year, the number of poor children in the United States increased by nearly half a million, to 13.3 million—and 5.8 million of those are living in extreme poverty. Nearly 9 million children have no health insurance. Those numbers are sure to rise as the nation plunges further into recession, says the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in its recently released report, The State of America’s Children 2008.
According to the CDF report, children in the United States lag behind those in almost all industrialized nations on key indicators. Our nation has the unwanted distinction of being the worst among industrialized countries in relative child poverty, the gap between rich and poor, teen birth rates and child gun violence. In addition, the United States is first in the number of incarcerated persons.
