There’s too much going on this week to focus on one topic. So here’s a rundown from the world of working people and their unions.

-Hilda Solis made her first public appearance as labor secretary during the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Miami, where she toured an Electrical Workers (IBEW) union training facility and held a meeting in the inner city with 700 community members.

In Lafayette Park, just in front of the White House, more than 70 guest workers rallied in the cold rain to demand fundamental changes in the nation’s guest worker program, which President Bush is trying to expand. They also want a congressional investigation of their former employer, Signal International, a marine construction company they say held them in modern-day forced labor in its Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard.

The workers, who traveled to Washington, D.C., carried signs stating: “I Am A Man.”