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By Joe Maniscalco

Here it is, another Women’s History Month — the officially sanctioned time of year when, after enough decades have passed, we’re allowed to enthusiastically applaud the achievements of marginalized working class heroes from a safe and non-threatening distance.

We have until the end of the month to openly celebrate the lives of muckraking, iconoclastic women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mother Jones — and maybe [briefly] reflect on what the heck they were going on about all those years ago, before we’re all supposed to get the hell back to work.

But why settle for merely doing that when there are plenty of living, breathing labor heroines alive right now that working class people can rally around and support — today? 

At Work-Bites, we’re thinking about the truly heroic women responsible for leading the nationwide fight to save traditional Medicare from the onslaught of pre-authorizations, delays, and denials of care that come with the proliferation of profit-driven health insurance plans being sold as “Medicare Advantage.”

As previously cited here, more than half of all Medicare eligible recipients are now enrolled in a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan — despite extensive reporting documenting just how terrible those plans actually are for retirees.

Like the idea of traditional Medicare being there for you after you retire? Then thank these modern day heroines for helping to make sure it’s still gonna be around when your time comes to collect.

We could — and we should — learn all we can about how Lucy Parsons helped the International Workers of the World [IWW] form, how Hattie Canty united diverse groups of workers and led powerful strikes against the industrial bosses, and more.

But we don’t need to reach back into history to experience that kind of heroism in our own lives today, because it’s happening right now in real time, in the fight everyday women are waging against the further privatization of our health care. 

Work-Bites saw it happen inside a Brooklyn High School in October when octogenarian and Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] member Martha Cameron defiantly went toe-to-toe with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and challenged him on his ongoing campaign to herd 250,000 municipal retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan Hizzoner originally dismissed as a “bait and switch.”

Work-Bites saw it happen at last year’s Labor Day Parade in New York City when New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola squared off against New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento and New York City Central Labor Council President Vinny Alvarez, and bravely called out the labor leaders for their role in helping to push retired trade unionists across the state into dangerous, profit-driven health care.

While doing our best to chronicle the Medicare Advantage fight going on across the country, we’ve seen history-making activism from many more everyday women leading the heroic struggle to save traditional Medicare — and we continue to see them. Too many in fact, to adequately cite them all here in this modest space.

Emma Goldman, Kate Mullaney, Francis Perkins — the list of historic firebrands and hell-raisers working people should certainly learn more about during Women’s History Month — and every other time of the year — runs deep, indeed.

But after covering the grassroots fight against Medicare Advantage and the giant profit-driven health insurance bosses over the last three years — Work-Bites is making the case that women like Evie Jones Rich, Roberta Gonzalez, Sarah Shapiro, Michelle Keller, Gloria Brandman, Julie Schwartzberg, Roberta Pikser, Lisa Diller, Karen Peterson, Mary Graham, and many more belong on that list, too.

These are women of a certain age — 90-years-young in Evie Jones Rich’s case — who are spending their retirement years in the streets, in all kinds of weather, showing more backbone, grit, and determination, in this reporter’s view, than anybody else in the entire labor movement.

“Let the word go out to Mayor [Eric] Adams, Speaker [Adrianne] Adams, the MLC [Municipal Labor Committee], to the leaders in AFSCME — that their time is over and we retirees will fight to the end,” Evie Jones Rich declared at a New York City rally for ousted DC 37 Retirees Association officers on March 6.

Anybody feeling despondent about the anemic state of the American Labor Movement in 2024 need only look to these remarkable people to understand what is possible — and to discern the fakers from the real deal. They are setting the bar for other trade unionists to follow.

So, it’s Women’s History Month, again. That’s a great time to pay more attention to the mighty women fighting back against Medicare Advantage — and making working class history before our eyes.