Delegates to the 2008 AFT convention elected a new slate of national officers on July 14 in Chicago, voting to install Randi Weingarten as president, Antonia Cortese as secretary-treasurer and Lorretta Johnson as executive vice president.

Employment Opportunity for Retired Educators a message from AFT St. Louis, Local 420 AFL-CIO and AFT Missouri **** Assessment Administrators

Local 420 and COPE Members Only!!!

Press Release:Embargo Until 5 /6/2008 CONTACT: Mary J. Armstrong 314-781-2077 ST. LOUIS—The Construction Careers Center in St. Louis will become Missouri’s first unionized charter school, a move initiated by the school’s employees to improve working and learning conditions, AFT St. Louis, Local 420, announced today.

High School Student Rights

McElroy Reflects on 'A Nation at Risk' 25 Years Later Twenty-five years ago, the landmark "A Nation at Risk" report put school reform on the front burner and summoned a nation to action. On this important anniversary, AFT president Edward J. McElroy urges Americans to finish what we started: Twenty-five years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released "A Nation at Risk," an honest but bleak assessment of America's edu...

The latest information on CEO salaries from the AFL-CIO shows that even as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has led to soaring numbers of home foreclosures, top executives at the financial companies that helped created the crisis continue to earn outrageous salaries. "When CEOs are paid obscene amounts to make bad decisions, it hurts average Americans who hold mortgages, have bank accounts...

Over a period of just seven weeks, from Jan. 14-March 3, a total of 26,419 people took the online 2008 Health Care for America Survey sponsored by the AFL-CIO and Working America. Most are insured and employed. Most are college graduates. More than half are union members.

This year, many groups with noble sounding names are passing around initiative petitions to bring up issues that the legislature won’t, or knows that their voters would be appalled at.

More than 20,000 paraprofessionals and school-related personnel represented by the Oregon School Employees Association have voted to affiliate with the AFT, marking the largest affiliation of an independent union in AFT history.

In a historic decision on May 29, the Missouri Supreme Court gave public employees, including teachers, the right to bargain collectively with employers. The ruling supports Article 1, Section 29 in the Missouri Constitution, which provides “That employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.”