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As far as labor leaders are concerned, former Labor Sectary Hilda Solis and her successor, Tom Perez, have delivered. "President Obama has been a good president for working people," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says. Since his days as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama has had close relations with labor unions, and organizations such as the Service Employees International Union were among his earliest and most vocal supporters when he ran for president in 2008.

The National Labor Relations Board's decision on Columbia University graduate students seeking to unionize only applies to private colleges. Organizing rights for graduate students at public colleges depend on each state's labor laws. Graduate students have formed unions in more than a dozen states.

On January 29th, Uber had reduced fares in more than eighty cities in the U.S. and Canada. Drivers in some of those cities, including San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, and New York City, have reacted with strikes and protests.

As more states feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage by their right-to-work neighbors, the pressure only increases to follow suit and enact their own right-to-work laws. And after a while, a national right-to-work law might not be far behind. “I suspect that will happen within the next decade,” says Marquita Walker, an associate professor of labor studies at Indiana University.

If the union wins a dispute over whether two engineers in Miami can join the union that represents more than 25,000 workers at Boeing and other companies, it becomes much easier and less costly for the union to organize workers outside metro Puget Sound. That means the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace has a better chance of re-unionizing the more than 4,000 engineering jobs that Boeing has moved, or plans to move, out of Washington.

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of a lawsuit filed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, every state in the country would essentially turn into an anti-union "right to work" state, which would be a significant blow to public sector unions' collective bargaining efforts and also complicate thousands of existing contracts between organized workers and municipalities, cities, counties, and states across the country.

The 2,135 graduate assistants will become the largest union on the campus, followed by the faculty with about 1,700 members, and the staff union which has about 1,600 members. About 85 percent of UConn’s employees are unionized. “The university has been, and will continue to be, neutral with regard to this effort,” Stephanie Reitz, a spokeswoman for the university, said. “Individual graduate students are free to make their own decision.

The AFL–CIO is a multifaceted institution composed of scores of autonomous unions, so President Richard Trumka’s leadership can hardly turn around this cumbersome vessel all that quickly. But the new emphasis is clear: the unions should ally with progressive partners and devote more energy to make the kind of changes in social policy that can benefit millions of poorly paid and insecure workers.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is set to review a case involving graduate assistants at New York University. If it is favorably reviewed it could reopen the door to unionizing thousands of graduate employees at private universities.