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By Joe Maniscalco

This weekend’s New York City Labor Day Parade saw municipal retirees fighting to retain their Medicare coverage tangle with the heads of both the state AFL-CIO and NYC Central Labor Council over the duo’s opposition to Intro. 1099 — the City Council bill aimed at shielding traditional health insurance from Medicare Advantage and privatization.   

By Steve Wishnia

A National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] decision expanding when employers must recognize unions might be a landmark with far-reaching effects — but it is already being contested in the federal courts.

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

By Bob Hennelly

On Sept. 11, 2001, 749 residents of New Jersey perished in the attack on the World Trade Center. Today, over 10,000 first responders and survivors from the state are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program as a consequence of their exposure to the air in lower Manhattan and portions of western Brooklyn.

By Joe Maniscalco

A letter sent to New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and signed by 35 retired union leaders — largely from the uniformed services — is calling further BS on claims that pending legislation aimed at protecting municipal retiree healthcare from privatization would somehow impinge on collective bargaining rights.

By Bob Hennelly 

As hundreds of thousands of students returned to school in New York State and New York City this week, Governor Kathy Hochul told reporters the state’s teachers still face major challenges as a consequence of the COVID mass death event that killed 1.1 million people including over 77,000 in New York.

By Joe Maniscalco

Let’s be honest, wherever you’re working today — behind a computer, up on an I-beam, in front of classroom or the back of a delivery bike — how much time have you actually spent thinking about auto workers and their impending strike against the Big Three automobile manufacturers?

By Bob Hennelly

New York State employers will no longer be able to force employees to attend so-called “captive meetings,” which corporations like Starbucks and Amazon use to undermine union organizing.   

Work-Bites Network

Artificial Intelligence is here. But despite some lofty talk about the supposed potential benefits of AI for working people — what we, and every striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA member, now understands — is how multi-national corporations are using AI to maximize profit and minimize — or eliminate  — one of their most irksome business liabilities: the people they employ.

By Bob Hennelly

This Labor Day, the most pressing question we in the labor movement can ask ourselves is how to reverse the historic decades-in-the-making decline in the percentage of workers represented by a union.

By Steve Wishnia

AUSTIN, Tex.—On Aug. 30, at the end of a summer in which the temperature in Austin topped 100° for a record 45 consecutive days, a local judge ruled unconstitutional a new state law intended to nullify local ordinances that require water breaks for construction workers.

Courtesy of People’s World

By John Bachtell

In The Man Who Changed Colors, storyteller Bill Fletcher Jr. offers readers a many-layered political suspense thriller that had me enthralled from cover to cover. The story, told through the eyes of David Gomes, an undaunted reporter for the Cape and Islands Gazette, is set in Cape Cod, Mass., in the late 1970s and unfolds amid the dynamics and tensions of the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities, the latter of which Gomes is a part.

Who Do You Trust More? 

By Bob Hennelly

By Friday, all of the striking nurses at New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital will lose their employer healthcare coverage. No new talks are scheduled.

By Joe Maniscalco

Retired NYPD Lieutenant Jack LaTorre, 68, rode his bike over from Bay Ridge to Sunset Park Monday afternoon, hoping to ask New York City Mayor Eric Adams why he insists on trying to strip municipal retirees like him of their traditional Medicare benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.

By Bob Hennelly

It’s the Strike Summer Edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour as we talk with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on why the nurses' strike at Robert Wood Johnson University in New Brunswick, New Jersey is of national significance in the battle over safe staffing that puts people ahead of profits.

By Joe Maniscalco

A few weeks after losing another case in court, the heads of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] now want City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to believe efforts to stop them from privatizing retiree health care hurts collective bargaining rights. But how’s that work? No one — including members of the MLC — appears to know.

Work-Bites Network

On the latest episode of Labor This Week, host Mark Harrison interviews New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola and attorney Jake Gardener about what to expect in the ongoing fight against the privatization of municipal retiree healthcare in NYC.

By Ryn Gargulinski

The worst boss I ever had was a robot. Well, not a robot in “The Terminator” sense that would blow your head off if you didn’t hand in an assignment on time. But a robotic time-tracking software that recorded and shared my every single move.

By Steve Wishnia

Sometimes I see my role as a journalist as being a forensic scatologist: What kind of s—t is falling towards us? Whose butt is it coming from? What pathogenic bacteria does it contain?

By Joe Maniscalco

The next great general strike to captivate the United States will not be organized — it’ll be organic. And it could be the most transformative general strike this country has ever seen

By Steve Wishnia

It was not an AI-generated crowd scene. It was all humans.

This week in New York City, hundreds of striking actors and screenwriters, joined by supporters from numerous other unions, packed two blocks of Tenth Avenue, across from the offices of HBO and Amazon in the plutocratic slab of Hudson Yards. It was part of a national day of solidarity with the strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers’ Guild of America.