Labor

LAS VEGAS — Over 3,000 Steelworker delegates filled the Las Vegas Bally Hotel convention center last week with raring-to-go enthusiasm for “taking back America for working people” in the 2008 elections. One delegate described it as more like a strike vote than a convention. “The membership is fired up and ready to go. We don’t have to be rallied by the leadership, they just need to turn us loose and tell us where to be,” she said.

Only a handful of auto workers at the Lordstown, Ohio plant showed up for a meeting that management arranged for those who wanted to meet Republican presidential candidate John McCain when he toured the plant June 27.

FARMERS BRANCH, Texas — The Unite Here union struck a blow June 24 against some particularly vicious anti-immigrant ordinances in place in a Texas town.

The AFL-CIO officially endorsed Barack Obama for president on June 26.

House backs paid leave for federal workers

Supreme Court kills company neutrality law

Mine safety mandates yet to be instituted

Working mothers hit McCain on sex discrimination bill

A mother holds a baby boy on her lap. She says: “Hi, John McCain, this is Alex, he’s my first.

The candidates who demonstrate to voters that they value families will win in the November elections. That’s quite a reversal from the 1980s, when the conservative agenda began to be packaged as “family values.”

Dramatic TV ads are only part of what AFSCME has in its arsenal for the election battle. The union plans to mobilize more than 40,000 of its own members as activists in the fall campaign for Obama and will commit $50 million to campaign activity.

CLEVELAND — Delegates to the North Shore (Cleveland) AFL-CIO Federation of Labor erupted in cheers and applause when President Loree Soggs, referring to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, opened his report to the June 11 meeting saying, “We now have a candidate.”

The International Trade Union Congress, which met June 9-11 in Geneva, assailed the lack of workers’ rights in the United States, and called on the World Trade Organization to take up the issue at its biannual review of U.S. trade policy.