Listen: UAW Contract/Nurses Strike Updates - Plus…Where’s All the Money Going?

By Bob Hennelly

On the latest episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio hour we look at both the  UAW deal, as well as the ongoing United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 strike for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ.

Ray Jensen, Assistant Director for the United Autoworkers Region 9, which includes upstate New York, all of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, shares some of the details in the contracts rank and file members are evaluating now after their six week strike against the nation’s big three automakers.

The tentative deal includes a 25 percent pay hike over the term of the contract as well as a restoration of concessions made back during the Great Recession that helped to save the auto industry along with a massive taxpayer funded bailout.

Judy Danella, president of the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200, brings us current on her union’s strike that’’s had her members out since Aug. 4 for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

In the last half of the show we discuss the grossly destructive impact of the federal government’s obscene military spending that’s now almost nine hundred billion dollars a year. That accounts for 40 percent of what is spent globally and more than the next 10 countries combined.

Tom Gogan, longtime labor and peace advocate with the National Writers Guild discusses the Move the Money Campaign and the push for a New York City Council resolution calling on Congress to cut the military budget and redirect those resources to meeting the unmet basic needs of shelter, food and healthcare felt here in our region and throughout the nation. 

He is joined  by James Henry, investigative journalist and  one of the world’s leading experts on multinational corporate tax avoidance. Henry describes how the debt financing to pay for the  massive military budget further undermines the social welfare of the nation. 

Listen to the entire show below: