Quick, what's the first thing you think of when you hear about a boxer who holds the World Boxing Council international light heavyweight championship and who sent boxing legend Bernard Hopkins into retirement with a TKO that literally knocked Hopkins out of the ring? You certainly wouldn't think of Joe Smith Jr., the boxer who ended Hopkins' career and who is an active member of Laborers (LIUNA) Local 66.

In the first week of May 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced a painful dilemma as he sought to conclude the great Birmingham, Ala., campaign. The labor movement helped solve this dilemma and a great civil rights victory was won. Jerome A. "Buddy" Cooper, my mentor in the Birmingham union law firm where I worked years later, told me and others of his small but fascinating role in these events. It’s a story of how our labor movement has sometimes lived up to its role in the larger civil and human rights movement.

Our latest roundup of worker wins begins with a hard-fought victory at The New School. Other successes include the growing trends of digital media newsrooms organizing and progressive organizations living up to their professed values by voluntarily recognizing employees who choose to join together for collective bargaining purposes.

Today, we commiserate Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. The gap between the earnings of black women and white men is so large that, essentially, up to today black women have been working for free. Think of it as the modern-day equivalent of the constitutional count of slaves as three-fifths of a person.

Sometimes failure is a good thing. That was especially true last week when the U.S. Senate failed to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It meant that Congress was stopped from taking health care away from tens of millions of Americans, at least for now.