By Steve Wishnia

With a bill to end home health-care aides’ punishing 24-hour shifts on hold in the City Council, activists are planning a rally outside City Hall Wednesday, Apr. 12, to push Speaker Adrienne Adams to schedule a vote on the measure.

By Joe Maniscalco

Jane LaTour was a soft but powerful voice — one that the Labor Movement could ill afford to lose in these increasingly hard times. But she’s gone now, succumbing last week, like so many other good people, to the working class scourge of cancer. She was 76.

By Helen Klein

Tehmina Brohi spent several years working in the nonprofit sector before deciding to try something new, founding a small clothing manufacturing company that would bring the centuries-old traditions of her Pakistani homeland to modern American consumers.

By Bob Hennelly

While professional beltway Democrats urge their party to be more moderate as the country steels itself for 2024, there’s evidence the labor movement, which acts as the arms and legs of the party, is growing increasingly militant and more willing to strike to upend the status quo.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we are reflecting on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s pro-union legacy 55 years after his murder in Memphis where he came to support striking sanitation workers.

By Bob Hennelly

This week marks the 55th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King was in Memphis as an act of solidarity with Memphis Sanitation workers who had been out on strike since early February after sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed by their malfunctioning trash compactor.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees urging Mayor Eric Adams to revisit the health insurance contract he just signed with Aetna to include an option for traditional Medicare want Hizzoner to know they’re just as “strong and determined” as millions of French people in the streets protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s grossly undemocratic bid to raise France’s retirement age to 62.

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Council members wasted little time blasting Mayor Eric Adams as “shameful” for signing a pact with Aetna Insurance and pushing the city’s 250,000 retired civil servants into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage healthcare plan.

By Steve Wishnia

New York City has signed a contract with the Aetna insurance company to provide a private Medicare Advantage health-insurance plan to the about 250,000 retired municipal workers. The deal, announced Mar. 30 by Mayor Eric Adams and Office of Labor Relations Commissioner Renee Campion, means retirees will no longer be able to use traditional Medicare unless they pay for coverage themselves.

Work-Bites

On this episode of the “Iron Bill” Hohlfeld Show, Bill welcomes Vermont Labor Council, AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen for a lively discussion about the conflicting streams of thought within the labor movement today, and what might be some ways to resolve those conflicts.

By Steve Wishnia

Michigan has repealed its 2012 law banning the union shop and restored prevailing-wage requirements for public construction projects. But Texas is considering a bill that would void local labor laws that are stronger than the state’s, such as those in Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio that employers must give construction workers 10-minute water breaks every four hours.

By Bob Hennelly

This week on the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we bring you our Women’s Labor History Edition:

By Bob Hennelly

This year’s commemoration in lower Manhattan of the Triangle Factory Fire on March 25, 1911, which claimed the lives of 146 mostly young immigrant female garment workers, drew a larger, younger, and more energized crowd than it has in previous years.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Three years after New Jersey was upended by the COVID virus, a coalition of New Jersey’s healthcare unions are warning that without a legally enforceable nurse to patient ratio, nurses will continue to leave the state’s acute care hospitals already facing a skilled nursing shortage.

By Joe Maniscalco

Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee [CROC] member Julie Schwartzberg was right on the money a few weeks ago in New York City when she called the ongoing campaign to strip municipal workers of their traditional Medicare health benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program a “national issue.”

By Bob Hennelly

Dozens of outraged New York City retired civil servants dialed into a teleconferenced public hearing convened by the city’s Office of Labor Relations on March 21, a legal perquisite to advance the controversial $200 million Aetna Medicare Advantage contract being promoted by the Adams administration and the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC].

Work-Bites

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, host Bob Hennelly welcomes NYCOSH Executive Director Charlene Obernauer and “Democracy Hits Home” host Dr. Harriet Fraad to talk about the state of working women and their families both here in New York State and across the country.

By Steve Wishnia

A group of seven New York City municipal retirees protesting NYC’s plan to privatize their Medicare coverage slipped into the Conrad Hilton hotel today in Battery Park City where the Aetna insurance company was about to hold a session to prepare union staff on how to tell retirees about the company’s Medicare Advantage plan.

On this episode of the “Iron Bill Hohlfeld Show” Bill talks with Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the Catholic Labor Network about “Cathonomics” and what that’s really all about…

By Bob Hennelly

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said that City Council will not take up legislation proposed in a letter from the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees to prevent the city’s retirees from being forced into a controversial Aetna Medicare Advantage plan that was approved earlier this month by the Municipal Labor Committee.