We hear a great deal about the future of work. Gig economy. Deprofessionalization. Temp, part-time and on-call work. Technology. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Digitization. Deindustrialization. Unfair trade policy and offshoring. While these changes and trends take hold, we are living in an era where the rich and powerful have rigged our economy against working families through well-financed campaigns to weaken workers’ bargaining power, pass perverse “right-to-work laws” and use the courts as a pawn to hollow out the labor movement. If the question is how we push back these ominous trends, the answer is through strong unions.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opened the second day of the AFL-CIO 2017 Convention talking about the importance of unions to democracy:

Millennials have never lived in an America where wages are growing, or worked in an economy where hard work and productivity blazed a trail into the middle class. They have never experienced an economy where more than 1 in 10 workers have the freedom to belong to a union and bargain together. The American idea that anything is possible if you work hard and play by the rules simply does not exist for many young people.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha addressed the delegates at the AFL-CIO Convention today on the Flint water crisis. Here are some excerpts of her remarks:

It's an honor to be here today at the AFL-CIO's 28th Constitutional Convention.

My mom was a proud union teacher. My dad was a General Motors employee, benefiting from the contracts between the UAW and GM. My brother is a labor lawyer at a Washington, D.C., labor law firm. We are a union family.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is the country’s largest student labor solidarity organization, with more than 150 university locals campaigning for union rights alongside campus workers, community members and garment workers producing college apparel overseas.

Students chanted, “Whose university? Our university!” as they stormed their president’s office on a sunny spring day.

Today, more than 1,200 union delegates and convention attendees joined together in St. Louis for the first day of the AFL-CIO 2017 Convention. Here are some of the key moments from the AFL-CIO Convention in St. Louis.

The convention delegates unanimously re-elected Richard Trumka (Mine Workers) as president, Liz Shuler (Electrical Workers) as secretary-treasurer and Tefere Gebre (United Food and Commercial Workers) as executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. In addition, delegates elected 55 vice presidents who will serve as the Executive Council for a four-year term.