This Mother's Day, we’d like to wish every mother a Happy Mother’s Day. Today is the day we show how much we appreciate the innumerable contributions that mothers have made to our lives and our country in a big way. This is one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants, florists and the phone companies.

But here's something lawmakers and corporate bosses can give moms they can really use—time off from work with pay so they can spend time with their children, whether they are newborns or are just suffering from childhood ailments.

The United States doesn’t make it easy for mothers to raise their children. First off, if a mother works, she likely is going to get paid less than a man in the same job—about 77 cents for every $1 a man makes to be exact. And paid time off after a child is born is available in many western nations—but not here. In the United Kingdom, for example, a new mother can take a year off from work and be paid for about nine months. In Norway, she can take 26 weeks and about 20 weeks of that is paid.

More than 200 high school seniors received scholarships from the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.

Higher education is no longer a far off dream parents once had for their children but a necessity in today’s economy—and an expensive necessity at that. Recent studies show workers with a college degree earn 45 percent more than those with a high school diploma. Yet college tuition costs are at an all-time high, making it harder for working families to afford it.

The union movement has historically been a strong supporter of educating workers to create a better life for themselves, their families and communities. Many unions, state federations and central local bodies and labor groups sponsor scholarship programs, including Union Privilege. Click here to learn more about Union Privilege’s scholarship program.

The union movement also created the National Labor College, the nation’s only accredited institution of higher learning dedicated to educating union members.

Wellington Chibebe

Yesterday, the two top officials of Zimbabwe’s union movement were arrested by Zimbabwe police and charged with “inciting people to rise against the government and reporting falsehoods about people being killed.” Arrested were Lovemore Matombo, president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and Wellington Chibebe, ZCTU general secretary.

Zimbabwe and its president Robert Mugabe have a long record of worker and human rights violations. In the aftermath of the controversial presidential election in March, which observers say Mugabe lost, but which he is contesting, the Mugabe government has unleashed a new wave of violence and arrests against unions and other opponents in the past several weeks.

The nearly 600 adjunct faculty at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., made a strong statement this week for better pay and benefits by voting for the Adjunct Faculty Organization (AFO), an affiliate of AFT.

The faculty members are concerned about low pay scales that maxed out at $1,700 a course, lack of job security and health insurance and no access to office space for preparation work or to meet with students.

Even though AFT represents regular faculty at the college, Henry Ford officials fought the adjunct faculty’s desire for a voice, says Mary Beck, AFO’s interim president. But the workers overcame the school’s anti-union campaign the old-fashioned way: with shoe leather and door knocking.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president.

The union, which represents 600,000 federal and District of Columbia government employees, made the endorsement after extensive member polling and a meeting of its national Executive Council.

John Gage, president of AFGE, says Obama’s energetic campaign and support of working families will mobilize voters around the country and help pro-working family candidates up and down the ticket in the fall. Gage said Obama would tackle the challenges facing the federal workforce and all working families, including job privatization and underfunding and understaffing of Social Security and veterans’ programs.

• Housing crisis? What housing crisis? Looking out the White House window, Bush can't see one, so it must not be there. Because why else would he threaten to veto Democrats' housing rescue plan, aimed at preventing foreclosures and stabilizing the housing market? Even congressional members of his own party are signaling support for the measure (not that it's an election year or anything). Yet the Lame Duck-in-Chief is calling the plan to help troubled homeowners "a burdensome bailout that would open taxpayers to too much risk." Unlike the $5 trillion experts predict we'll spend on the Iraq war. Or the $30 billion bailout to Bear Stearns.

• If Bush doesn't think the nation's homeowners and consumers need help getting by, maybe he should talk with retiree Josephine Powe, a member of the Alliance for Retired Americans. Says Powe: “An extra dollar or two per gallon may not seem like a lot of money to a big oil executive, but to a senior on a fixed income, it is everything. When our costs go up and our income does not, that dollar means you don't know if you're going to have enough money to buy food after you fill up the tank.” Powe testified this week on Capitol Hill in favor of the Consumer-First Energy Act, introduced by Senate Democrats, which would lower prices by placing a 25 percent windfall profit tax on any energy company that doesn’t invest in new energy sources and end $17 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil.

The mine manager and other senior staff at the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah hid information from federal mining officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face criminal charges, a congressional committee said today. Last August, six miners and three rescue workers died after the mine collapsed.

In a report released today, the House Education and Labor Committee says the mining company’s plan to remove coal was flawed and should never have been submitted, and that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) should never have approved it.

The committee referred its findings to the U.S. Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecutions. Click here to read a summary of the report by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the committee chairman.

Sen. John McCain is used to getting softball questions from his fans in the media. At his town hall meeting yesterday in Michigan, however, he finally took a tough, smart question from an unexpected source.

When a 14-year-old girl attending the meeting got to ask a question of a presidential candidate, she took the opportunity to ask why he skipped out on voting on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

McCain said he agreed with the minority of senators who filibustered the bill, which would give targets of workplace discrimination the chance to fight for equal pay. He claimed it wouldn’t help women. Here’s what he had to say:

I don't believe that this would do anything to help the rights of women, except maybe help trial lawyers and others in that profession.

      A few items have been piling up in my inbox that need to be shared. Workers who pick tomatoes have been seeking a penny a pound increase in wages to help address their egregiously low wages. Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell and other chains, has agreed to do so. But Burger King Corp. refuses. Now, it turns out Burger King hired a private security firm to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance, one of several groups seeking to improve the lives of migrants in Florida. At a recent Senate hearing, witnesses described how the workers sometimes are held against their will, beaten and forced to work for little or no pay—21st century slavery. (Click here to sign the petition to eliminate modern-day servitude in America’s produce fields.) If Burger King thinks slave-like working conditions are OK, guess spying is, too.

With the busy summer travel season fast approaching, the nation’s air traffic controllers are alerting the public that a combination of short-staffing, fatigue and faulty equipment in control towers is a "recipe for disaster."

Just this week, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) issued warnings about several near misses at two of the country’s major airports—Atlanta and Cincinnati. In Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, the number of incidents when planes have gotten too close has already exceeded last year’s total—and the situation is getting worse. In Cincinnati, three such serious incidents have occurred in the past six weeks.

Jeremy Bishop, executive director of Pride At Work, describes how we can assist laid-off flight attendants at Aloha and ATA airlines.

Recently, thousands of flight attendants at Aloha Airlines and ATA Airlines have been laid off after their respective companies went out of business. As any working person can attest, this is a terrible time to be unemployed.

Once covered by contracts negotiated by the Flight Attendants-CWA, these flight attendants were forced to leave stable wages, health care benefits and a path to retirement behind for the unemployment line.

If you are a working woman, are you worried about finding a job that pays your bills and provides benefits? Or concerned about the rising cost of health care? Maybe you're frustrated you can't find time to do your job and spend time with your family. Or are you tired of working as hard as your male counterparts and not getting paid as much?

The AFL-CIO and Working America’s just-launched online 2008 Ask a Working Woman survey enables you to share workplace concerns about issues such as equal pay and stronger family and medical leave laws. Click here to take the survey and here to share it with other working women.

The recent headlines about an FBI raid on the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) finally validates the yearlong campaign by Pride At Work (P@W) to highlight the alleged mismanagement of the office that was created to enforce the civil rights rule and protect whistle-blowers in the federal workforce.

In March 2007, the AFL-CIO constituency group created a special campaign, “Blow the whistle on Bloch” aimed at letting the public know how agency chief Scott Bloch had weakened the office’s mission. Instead of protecting workers’ rights, the office had become a launching pad for partisan attacks on civil and workers' rights, says P@W Executive Director Jeremy Bishop.

Brent Gillette, Labor 2008 director for Michigan, sends us a report on Sen. John McCain’s visit to Michigan.

When Sen. John McCain visited Rochester, Mich., this morning, he was met by a contingent of union members asking him for solutions to the crisis facing the economy.

Some 28 union members gathered in front of the hall where McCain was set to speak and distributed fliers on McCain’s anti-worker record on trade, health care and jobs.

Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO, says McCain’s votes on trade and the economy are proof that he’s out of touch with working families.

John McCain will not likely have a government and an administration that does enough or cares enough about creating good-paying manufacturing jobs here in America.

The failure to enforce even weak U.S. labor laws has created an incentive for many employers to hire undocumented immigrant workers, several experts told a House committee earlier this week.

Bill Beardell, director of the non-partisan Equal Justice Center, told the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee some unscrupulous employers actually prefer to hire undocumented workers. In the absence of effective federal enforcement of worker protections, they know they can easily exploit and silence such workers, he says. During the hearing, Beardell played a chilling audiotape of an employer’s phone message to an immigrant worker who simply wanted to be paid for the work he had done. (See video.)

During the hearing, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), committee chairman, said that with more than 7.6 million unemployed workers in this country, some employers insist they cannot find workers to fill unskilled jobs. Miller makes it clear that Congress needs to enact stronger labor protections to protect the rights of guest workers and U.S. workers. (See video.)

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain gave a speech about his vision for the U.S. Supreme Court and the kind of nominees he’d choose if elected.

McCain said that when it comes to looking for a Supreme Court justice, extremist conservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito meet his standards “in every way” and “would serve as the model” for his nominees if he were elected president.

When you look at the record, though, Roberts and Alito have failed to look out for the rights of workers. Check out some of the cases where Roberts and Alito have provided decisive votes:

• Alito was the author of the May 2007 opinion that ruled against Lilly Ledbetter’s right to challenge the pay discrimination she faced on the job. Roberts joined that opinion, which fundamentally changed the way workers could fight discrimination at work.

In the aftermath of the cyclone, Burmese residents seek fresh water.

With more than 22,000 people reported dead and as many as 1 million homeless after a tropical cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend, the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma (FTUB) has issued an urgent plea to the global union movement for aid in launching rescue, relief and rehabilitation work for victims of the storm.

The cyclone was the worst to hit Asia in almost 20 years, according to weather experts.

FTUB, a partner of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, plans to use relief fund contributions to distribute clothing, medicine, and non-perishable food for displaced workers and their families, build temporary shelters and assist in providing needed counseling and health clinics. Click here to contribute to help Burmese workers.

The success and strength of the union movement derives from the hard work of rank-and-file members whose dedication to improving the lives of America's workers is manifest in their daily actions and in willingness to go above the call of duty. At the AFL-CIO Heart of the Movement, we recognize some of these heroes of the union movement. Here are four union members we've recently profiled. You can click here to read all the stories of these and other Hearts of the Movement.

George Calko
• George Calko, in his late 20s, is part of the future of the union movement. A member of the Steelworkers (USW), he is an organizer in his home state of Ohio for the Blue-Green Alliance, a partnership between the USW and the Sierra Club, which recently launched campaigns for green jobs and joined with Nobel winner Al Gore in the search for a solution to global warming. Calko says the connection between labor and environmentalists makes perfect sense. "We're going to have green jobs, or we'll have no jobs at all,” he says. “And we want clean cities and a healthy environment to raise our children."

This is a cross-post from the firedoglake blog.

Every day, most of us go to work and then come home. Next day: Rinse, repeat.

But some U.S. workers go to work and never come home.

In April 2005, Donald Wilcher Smith was one of them. The 22-year-old central Texas man was electrocuted at the Sanderson Farms processing plant.

This week, his father, Donald Coit Smith, described what it's like to lose his son.

I do not possess the capacity to adequately describe the horror that possesses my soul from my son’s death. To lose him caused me to reflect on faith in my God.

Sen. John McCain is hopping from state to state, touting his new health care plan. And everywhere he goes, union members are there to tell him his plan won't work for working people.

Yesterday, McCain traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, for a town hall meeting on health care, and more than 40 union members and allies gathered outside to let people know about McCain’s proposal and demanding real health care reform.

Outside the town hall, union members, including Iowa Federation of Labor President Ken Sagar, carried signs asking for real solutions to the health care crisis. The action is just one part of the union movement's campaign to turn around Iowa and the country.