Middle America is smoldering. For too long, average citizens worked harder and produced more, yet corporations cut pay and benefits, off-shore community-sustaining factories, kill family-supporting jobs and crush opportunity. 

Workers across the country finished 2015 strong, fighting for and achieving several significant victories to help create a better life for all working families.

Every Sunday, we'll be bringing you a roundup of the important news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here's this week's Working People Weekly List.

The TimesLedger recently featured a pair of Queens, N.Y., Iraq war veterans who transitioned to civilian life through steamfitter apprenticeships in the Helmets to Hardhats program. The program places military veterans and military members in union apprenticeship programs.

Human Rights Day is observed every year on Dec. 10. It commemorates the day that the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which was later supplemented by adoption of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Today, these global compacts form the backbone of international human rights norms, including the rights to freedom of expression, to self-determination, to peacefully assemble and to the freedom of association.

We thought we'd seen everything in the book of tricks used by management to prevent workers from organizing on the job, but Wisconsin-based home improvement chain Menards is going above and beyond. The employment agreement for managers at the chain threatens managers with a 60% pay cut if a union forms under their supervision.

The AFL-CIO Equity Index Fund is shining the spotlight on companies whose CEOs stand to collect a bundle as a result of large stock buyback programs. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares to reduce the number of shares outstanding.