News

Check Your Voting Status Quick & Easy

Not sure if you are registered to vote? Or maybe you just want to check your voting history over the years. It's quick and easy with a few simple steps.

The House Must Stand Up for Labor

Support for the labor movement is the highest in nearly half a century, yet only one in 10 workers are members of unions today. How can both be true?

Ivanka Trump's Future of Work Isn't for Workers

Ivanka Trump took the stage at CES on Tuesday to muted reception. Forty minutes later, she left to robust applause.

KS AFL-CIO LEGISLATIVE UPDATE AT TURNAROUND

Get Labor's take here on the 2019 Legislative Session and find the bill numbers your KS AFL-CIO Officers are tracking for the Labor Movement. It's the half-way point and have you made contact with your legislator? We make it easy right here to get informed and contact legislators to weigh in on Labor's issues.

2020 KANSAS AFL-CIO Legislative Objectives

The KANSAS AFL-CIO has adopted the following legislative objectives for the 2020 Kansas Legislative Session. Our platform is not limited to this agenda, but instead this represents some of our priorities of focus for a diverse workforce of affiliates. The Kansas AFL-CIO represents white collar and blue collar professionals including Machinists, Industrial Unionists, Public Employees, Teachers and Building Construction Trade Crafts.

KS AFL-CIO Annual Golf Tournament

Sponsor us, or join us for a day of fun on the golf course! The purpose of our event is to continue our mission on behalf of the hopes and aspirations of the working people of all America, but specifically for Working Kansas Families; to the achievement of higher standards of living and safe working conditions; to the attainment of security for the rights, recognition, dignity and respect to which they are justly entitled; and finally, the enjoyment of the leisure for which their skills make possible. Our event is to be held on September 14, 2019.

AFL-CIO Sues Feds Over Coronavirus Workplace Safety

With states reopening for business and millions of people heading back to work, the nation's largest labor organization is demanding the federal government do more to protect workers from contracting the coronavirus on the job.

What's happening: The AFL-CIO, a collection of 55 unions representing 12.5 million workers, says it is suing the federal agency in charge of workplace safety to compel them to create a set of emergency temporary standards for infectious diseases.

How States and Cities Can Protect Workers During the Pandemic

Even Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s recent letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, intended to defend his agency’s performance, offers little in terms of real enforcement. The word “guidance” and its variant “guidelines” appear nine times, as well as the observation that “employers are implementing measures to protect workers” (emphasis in original). Absent from the letter: the word “citation.” The word “penalty.”

As Businesses Look to Reopen, Democrats and Advocates Want More Rules to Protect Workers

“This isn’t just about infection control, which is how the CDC looks at it, this is about exposure assessment,” said Rebecca Reindel, safety and health specialist with the labor organization AFL-CIO. “You look at how people are exposed. Your main source of exposure is other people and so where you’re mainly running into other people right now is the workplace.”

Crisis Communications Case Study: AFGE

Every labor communicator is responding to minute-by-minute changes in policies and practices affecting workers’ livelihoods. ILCA members are challenged to process, manage, and disseminate essential information to both internal and external audiences. Just by doing our work, labor communicators are producing real-time, textbook examples of crisis communications case studies. In this new series, we’ll profile national newsmakers who are amplifying labor’s call to protect the physical and economic health of workers.

Trumka Proposes Universal Federal Jobs Payments

Sticking to a here-and-now solution to coronavirus-caused joblessness, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka proposed the federal government guarantee paid employment – by actually shelling out the money – for all workers. Employers would be a pass-through, nothing more. In a 13-minute speech posted on the federation’s Facebook page, Trumka said that with unemployment at highs unseen since the Great Depression and with the future clouded by millions of jobless people, now is not the time for partisan politics. Instead he declared, lawmakers should unite, as some already have, behind federal subsidies straight into workers’ pockets, and not to CEOs or Wall Street. Trumka also warned, as public health specialists have, against reopening the economy too soon. Right-wing pressure has forced some states to yield and start reopening businesses, even without enough coronavirus testing, a lack Trumka pointed out. Doing so, he declared, could put us right back down again. “If we reopen before we’re ready, if we reopen because we’re impatient, if you send workers into unsafe workplaces, if you send consumers into an unsafe community, we’ll be reopening an economic wound that will make it much harder to heal down the road."