As the election rapidly approaches, union members are working hard to make sure that Sen. Barack Obama becomes the next president. On health care, jobs, retirement and the economy, Obama is proposing the solutions that will turn around America for all of its working families.

Diana Butsch of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), Bill Taylor of the Utility Workers (UWUA), Helena Lampropolous of AFSCME and Arthur Prouse of the Postal Workers (APWU) are just four of the millions of union members around the country who will be supporting Obama this fall.

Here's a Happy 100th Anniversary shout out to the Oswego County (N.Y.) Labor Council. The council, with more than 30 unions and some 10,000 members, marked the anniversary last month.

Just this week, the Syracuse Post-Standard highlighted the council's milestone and its fight to keep good jobs with good benefits in the central New York county.

This week, in the midst of Sen. John McCain’s misleading assaults on Sen. Barack Obama, his campaign let slip yet another revelation of exactly where their priorities are. One of McCain’s top advisers this week said that as president, McCain would cut $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid.

That’s “trillion.” With a “T.”

More than 10 years, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin told the Wall Street Journal, McCain would pay for the high costs of his health care proposal by taking a hatchet to health care coverage for the elderly, people with disabilities and lower-income families. A Center for American Progress study finds that McCain’s plan would force big cuts in benefits or eligibility for these vulnerable populations.

McCain’s call for radical cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will undermine their vital role in our health care system, putting affordable health care out of reach for millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income families, and driving up the cost of health insurance for everyone else.

Are you a union member who wants to turn your energy and enthusiasm into votes? There are nearly 4,000 events around the country you can take part in between now and Election Day. With the AFL-CIO online event tool, you can find walks, phone banks and other events near you and sign up to get involved.

Also, check out the individual state pages on our Working Families Vote 2008 site to find out about early voting dates, key races and other important local information.

Through the AFL-CIO’s Labor 2008 political program, thousands of volunteers are educating and mobilizing millions of union voters to elect Sen. Barack Obama and other pro-working family candidates and turn around America.

Join us in making a difference by taking part in a union member-to-member walk, phone bank or leaflet. Click here to get the details in your area.

With the world’s financial markets in a deepening tailspin, the global union movement is calling on the world’s leading industrial nations to launch a major recovery plan to stabilize global capital markets, stave off the devastation of a global recession and get back on the track to create decent work.

In an open letter to the G7 finance ministers meeting in Washington, D.C., the leaders of three global workers’ organizations call for transparency in the recovery process and insist that governments look out for the public interest:

As large parts of the financial system are being supported by the public taxpayer, we insist that governments should take equity stakes and act as activist investors to protect the public interest and ensure that taxpayers are eventually reimbursed.

With just 25 days to Election Day, you can feel the momentum building as working people and their unions go all out to reach every union member. From AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to the newest rank-and-file members, workers are spreading the word that the stakes in this election are huge for working people and we must take this opportunity to turn around America by electing leaders who support workers’ issues such as good jobs, affordable health care, retirement security and the Employee Free Choice Act.

You can see the enthusiasm and excitement at phone banks in local union halls—including AFL-CIO headquarters—and in community walks across the country, where union members by the hundreds of thousands are delivering the same message: The nation cannot afford another four years of Bush/McCain.

Dana Kennedy, communications director for the Arizona AFL-CIO, describes a recent rally in Phoenix where nearly 800 union members highlighted the struggles of working families and their fight to unionize. As Arizona AFL-CIO President Rebekah Friend said: "The Arizona Labor movement is united in making sure that we walk and talk to union members about the candidates that support working family."

In one of the largest union rallies the state of Arizona has ever seen, more than 800 members from AEA, AFA-CWA, AFGE, AFT, APWU, ARA, ATU, BAC, BLE, BMWE, CWA, IAM, IATSE, IBEW, IBT, Iron Workers, IUEC, IUOE, IUPAT, LIUNA, NALC, NATCA, OPEIU, Plumbers and Pipe Fitters, SMWIA, UAW, UMWA, UNITE HERE and USW joined forces to commit to get Sen. Barack Obama and every pro-labor state legislator and congressional candidate elected Nov. 4.

As Sen. John McCain runs for president, he’s using his own service to cast himself as a friend to war veterans. The truth is, although he served honorably in uniform 40 years ago, his much more recent Senate record on veterans’ issues is very different than his rhetoric.

In contrast, Sen. Barack Obama has a voting record that lives up to this nation’s promise to support those who have served. Obama supported the 21st Century GI Bill, while McCain, who had announced his opposition to the bill, didn’t show up for the vote.

In a new mailer, the AFL-CIO is reaching out to some of the more than 2 million union members who are veterans. The mailer features Walter Springs, a Vietnam vet and AFT member who supports Obama.

John McCain hasn't fought for veterans in Congress, and he won't fight for them as president. As a veteran, I want to do what's best for veterans. That means I'm supporting Barack Obama.

Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin can’t have it both ways. She should either denounce Sen. John McCain’s anti-worker policies or stop bragging about her husband’s union membership, says United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard.

When McCain introduced Palin as his running mate, he boasted that her husband, Todd, was a USW member. Palin later has said that her family had no health insurance until she and Todd got union jobs. Yet Palin supports the agenda of McCain, who has opposed practically every pro-worker issue to come up for more than two decades.

With the economy topping the list of the public's concerns this fall, AFSCME is reaching out to union members with information on Sen. John McCain's support for the Bush administration policies that led to this debacle.

The union's new mailer, going out to 12 key states as the election approaches, highlights McCain’s support for outsourcing jobs, taxing health benefits and privatizing Social Security as examples of how the Bush-McCain agenda just doesn’t work.

Even as the financial market began a steep downturn in September, McCain repeated the Bush mantra that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong." In fact, he’s been calling the economy “fundamentally strong” all year—proving how out-of-touch he really is.

Barely three months before the Bush administration turns over the keys to the White House, Bush and his cronies continue their unmitigated disdain for the nation's workers.

Yesterday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said America's jobless workers should forget about any extension to unemployment insurance (UI). Her advice for workers struggling with the longest long-term unemployment in decades?

Get back to work.

In a new radio ad, AFGE President John Gage urges union members to keep their focus on how eight years of Republican economics have slammed working people while the rich get richer—rather than become divided by divisive issues of race and gender. (Click on the audio clip to hear the entire ad.)

In the ad, which will air nationwide, Gage says he is “white enough to pick up on the code words of prejudice,” but we cannot let those words sway our vote.

In these economic times, every American worker should be hopping mad. Working families have been left behind like never before. Gender bias, racism, they’re not free. The real issues—Wall Street, health care, jobs, Iraq, gas prices, Social Security—have serious financial consequences for all of us.

Ed Sills, director of communications for the Texas AFL-CIO, follows up on Tuesday's presidential debate and highlights Sen. Barack Obama's campaign speech in Indiana, which demonstrated his statesman-like approach to our economic crisis.

Sen. Barack Obama did just fine in Tuesday night's debate with Sen. John McCain, and he scored—or benefited from—the points that will stick in people's minds.

Most anyone in the union movement would have just about jumped out of his or her chair when McCain called health care a "responsibility" and Obama joined the AFL-CIO in proclaiming health care a "right." Couple this with McCain's plans to tax health care benefits and to cut (or "reduce the cost" of) Social Security and Medicare, and the contrast was made nicely. It didn't hurt, either, that commentators seized on McCain's finger-pointing use of the phrase, "That One" to describe Obama.

Fueled by Wall Street greed and Bush-McCain deregulation fever, today's crashing economy, tumbling home prices and stock market nosedive has cost American workers as much as $2 trillion in retirement security savings during the past 15 months.

Yesterday, several witnesses told the House Education and Labor Committee that 401(k) plans are taking a tremendous battering that could force many people to work longer and retire poorer.

Said Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.):

Nicole Lowe’s 5-year-old son has asthma. Like any other parent of a child with a chronic illness, she has spent many anxious hours in the emergency room.

A member of UAW Local 140 in Warren, Mich., Lowe worries that her union-negotiated health care benefit could be taxed under John McCain’s health care plan, an extra expense she cannot afford. She could even lose health care coverage under McCain’s plan.

Says Lowe:

Now Lowe and Joel Blatchford, a member of UAW Local 5960 in Lake Orion, Mich., are taking to the airwaves to deliver the message that we can’t afford a McCain presidency that will continue the disastrous policies of George Bush. The two workers appear in a newly launched television, radio and Internet advertising campaign by the UAW’s Voluntary Community Action Program (V-CAP). (See videos.)

Seems Sen. John McCain never heard of America's middle class. At least that's the impression a viewer could get from watching last night's presidential debate.

Despite the economic house of cards falling all around us, with working families reeling from hits to their pension funds, credit lines and home mortgages, McCain didn't use the words "middle class" even once during the first presidential debate two weeks ago or the second presidential debate last night. Not. Once.

In contrast, Sen. Barack Obama offered details of his plans to revitalize America's working and middle class and turn around America. Obama stated firmly how aid to struggling homeowners, expanding access to health care and investing in a new energy economy would take immediate priority in an Obama presidency.

The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which has its own cervical cancer awareness program, Cervical Cancer Prevention Works, is joining the National Council of Women’s Organizations' (NCWO's) new campaign to spread the word to older women that they may benefit from the same advanced cervical cancer screening technologies as younger women.

This year, women aged 65 and older will account for 20 percent of the new cervical cancer cases and they are 35 percent more likely to die of the disease than younger women, according to the National Cancer Institute. Worldwide, more than 500,000 women are diagnosed each year with the disease and more than 230,000 die from it.

It seems as though Sen. John McCain has given up any pretense of addressing substantive issues in his run for the presidency.

Over the past few days, McCain aides have been increasingly clear that they plan to stop talking about real issues—especially the economy.

“We’re looking forward to turning the page on this financial crisis,” McCain aide Greg Strimple told The Washington Post. “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose,” an unnamed aide told the New York Daily News.

McCain thinks he can run for the highest office in the nation without addressing issues that top the concerns of working families, like jobs or the economy.

Ben Waxman, Labor 2008 state director for Ohio, sends us this report on the start of Ohio AFL-CIO President Joe Rugola's walk around the Buckeye State to highlight the failed economic policies John McCain embraces that have destroyed jobs.

On Sunday in Youngstown, Ohio, Joe Rugola, Ohio AFL-CIO president, set out on a 300-mile trek around the state to bring attention to the toll of the past eight years of Bush-McCain economic polices—more than 180,000 Ohio jobs lost and nearly 1,100 plants, factories and other workplaces closed forever.

Rugola says he is walking to underline Ohio’s great need for a responsible national economic policy and a focused effort by our next president to rebuild America's economy and restore jobs to our country. He says the nation needs to get on the road to economic recovery and is telling the union voters he meets on his statewide walk that Sen. Barack Obama will help lead us down that road.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain offers only more of the same policies that have left Ohio with a 7.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in 16 years.

A year after voting for the union, some 1,000 Illinois state government administrators have become members of AFSCME Council 31.

The majority of the new union members work in the departments of Children & Family Services and Human Services, according to Council 31 spokesman Anders Lindall. Others are in the departments of Public Health and Aging, as well as some smaller departments.

Says Council 31 Executive Director Henry Bayer:

AFSCME is pleased to welcome these dedicated public servants into our union family. We are proud to stand and fight for them and the essential public services they provide.