Work-Bites…huh?
Yes, it does. Come on…nobody really likes their job. And even if you’re amongst the fortunate few who actually does — there’re always things that could and should be better. But getting there requires struggle, and if American workers have been engaged in anything for far too long now — it’s struggle. We work more, earn less and die sooner. We fear for our children, our parents and ourselves. We constantly seek out news and information to help us make sense of it all, and instead find ourselves callously managed, misinformed and misdirected. Somehow, all the vital shop floor issues and workweek challenges that define so much of our daily everyday lives gets lost is muck.
Work-Bites is a registered 501c3 nonprofit news outlet and we’re taking a bite out of all that. We’re a team of dedicated labor writers with decades of combined street cred covering every facet of the American Labor Movement, and dedicated to upholding the public’s inalienable right to know. Like the rest of our working class sisters and brothers, we’re fed up with powerful people playing the rest of us like chumps. We’re resolved to applying the highest standards of journalistic integrity to chronicling workplace injustices — spotlighting exploitation — revealing criminality — and heralding the truly heroic.
If the worldwide corona virus pandemic has done anything, it’s obliterate the outdated notion the bosses have any concern for us or our families. Despite the elites, we remain essential — and we know it. Work-Bites is dedicated to telling those stories and telling them to you straight.
Meet Your Work-Bites Team…
❏Joe Maniscalco
Joe Maniscalco is a journalist and freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in a variety of news outlets ranging from the NewYorkPost.com to CommonDreams.org. He’s collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston at DCReport.org where he’s covered the abuse of Amazon warehouse workers, the plight of migrant farmworkers, the assault on the USPS, and more.
Joe’s devoted the last decade of his career exclusively to the American Labor Movement, workplace justice issues and steadfastly avoiding well-paid corporate media gigs. He is a proud member of the International Workers of the World Freelance Journalism Union.
❏Steve Wishnia
Steven Wishnia is a longtime labor reporter, for publications including LaborPress, the Village Voice, Hell Gate NYC, Salon, Labor Notes, and the Indypendent. He was the last writer published in the original Voice, and has won two awards for his coverage of housing issues. Possibly the only person ever to work as an editor at both High Times and Junior Scholastic, he’s written on subjects as far-ranging as African soccer and the Supreme Court voiding sodomy laws. Author of the novel When the Drumming Stops, he was bassist in the 1980s punk band False Prophets.
❏Bob Hennelly
Bob Hennelly is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist focusing on labor, public health, national security, the economy, public finance and the environment.
He is the New York City Hall reporter for Work-Bites and his weekly Monday morning radio program on WBAI closely tracks the latest local, regional and national labor movement news.
Hennelly is also a regular contributor to InsiderNJ, Salon, the Village Voice, Raw Story and City & State.
For over a decade, he was a reporter for WNYC covering New Jersey, New York and national politics. For several years, he was also the City Hall reporter for the Chief Leader newspaper, and a regular contributor to WBGO, the NPR jazz affiliate in Newark, NJ.
His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, CBS Money Watch, and dozens of other publications both in the United States and overseas.
He’s worked as a freelancer for CBS 60 Minutes, WPIX-TV, WNET and has appeared on PBS’s News Hour, C-Span, the BBC as well as the CBC.
His book “Stucknation: Can the US Change the Course of Its History of Chosing Profits Over People” was published in 2022 by Democracy@Work.
Hennelly attended Ramapo College and entered journalism through the loading dock of the Ridgewood Newspapers in Bergen County where he worked as a compositor and took on news reporting assignments. His first full time reporting job on a daily newspaper was with the Hudson Dispatch.
Over the half century plus of his working life, he has worked as a professional classical ballet dancer, arts administrator, carpenter, mason, roofer, agricultural worker, labor organizer and store detective, as well as a crew caller for the now defunct Erie Lackawanna Railroad.
He lives in Monmouth County, NJ with his wife Debbie and their dog Leo. They have three grown daughters Emily, Abigail and Rebecca, as well as two grandsons.
❏Ryn Gargulinski
Ryn Gargulinski (Rynski) is an award-winning author, artist and Reiki master who helps you live in the magic through her books, illustrations, creativity and play. She holds a BFA in creative writing and an MA in English literature from Brooklyn College, with a thesis on the folklore of NYC subway workers. While on-staff of a variety of newspapers across the nation, her favorite beats were crime, animals, and all those weird stories that no one else would touch with a 10-foot pole.
Creative non-fiction is Ryn’s forte, and her awards include Best Humor Column in New Mexico and Best Feature Column in Arizona. Author and illustrator of more than a dozen books, she’s open to freelance work of all shapes and sizes. She currently lives in Florida with her two big dogs, one happy beau and way too many crystals. More at RynskiLife.com and RynskiJoy.com.
❏Tim Sheard
Veteran nurse Timothy Sheard is a writer and lifelong labor and social justice activist. After publishing 11 novels and over 50 short stories, he founded Hard Ball & Little Heroes Press in order to bring grownups, children, parents and educators stories that engage the reader in the most important issues of their lives: immigrant and labor rights, gender equality, the climate crisis and the value of sharing and caring for others.
During the 2-year Covid lockdown, Timothy attended virtual music lessons with a teacher in New Orleans. Out of those lessons and his love for theatre cam his first musical: Listen to the Wind. Once he has finished recording near-studio quality versions of the 25 songs, he will begin submitting the work to theatre groups around the country…and the world.
❏Bill Hohlfeld
Bill Hohlfeld is a retired NYC Reinforcing Ironworker with 32 years of service with his local. For his final twelve years of service he held a staff position with his local as the Coordinator of the Local 46 Labor- Management Cooperative Trust. While in that position, he wrote for several trade publications. He was also an instructor in the apprenticeship program, where he taught Labor History, various OSHA certification courses, Post-tensioning Theory, Math for Ironworkers, and Foreman Training. During that time he was recruited by the Ironworkers International to be an instructor in the annual Ironworker Instructor Training Program, which trains Apprenticeship Instructors from all across the U.S. and Canada.
After retiring from his local, he spent three years co-hosting the weekly radio program, Blue Collar Buzz with Joe Maniscalco on AM 970. Currently, Bill is teaching composition and literature courses in the English department at Rockland Community College, where he served as an Executive Board member of the Rockland Community College Adjunct Faculty Association, three years of which he was president. He has also taught at Westchester Community College, the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Relations, SUNY and Lehman College in the Bronx.
To date, he has one published novel and several published poems.
