By Bob Hennelly

Members of the Memphis union on strike since June at a protein processing plant owned by International Flavor & Fragrances are hoping to raise the visibility of their prolonged struggle at a protest held outside the multinational’s 521 West 57th Street headquarters in Manhattan on Oct. 18, at 1 p.m.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we’re talking to striking nurses fighting for safe staffing and the coalition fighting NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ attempt to end the city’s legal obligation to shelter the homeless.

By Bob Hennelly

Tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser Permanente in several states have won a 21 percent pay increase over four years following a three-day strike earlier this month, the largest such action in U.S. history. The tentative deal includes restrictions on outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ response last Thursday night in Brooklyn to municipal retirees challenging his administration’s plan to herd them into a privatized Medicare Advantage health insurance plan clocks in at roughly two-and-a-half-minutes.

But listen close, in that relatively short period of time, Hizzoner manages to declare “what we are doing” and what “we’re going to do” no less than four times when referring to his administration’s ongoing campaign to privatize municipal retiree health care.

By Steve Wishnia

If the minimum wage had gone up as much as event-ticket fees in the past 50 years, it would now be almost $70 an hour.

In 1973, when I was a teenager, the minimum wage was $2 an hour, and tickets were $6.50 to see Frank Zappa at the old Nassau Coliseum or Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls at the theater in Madison Square Garden. There was also a 50-cent fee if you bought them from Ticketron, the pioneering electronic ticket-selling company that was acquired by Ticketmaster in 1991.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams continues to ignore the objections of municipal retirees who refuse to give up the traditional Medicare coverage they were promised at the start of their civil service careers in favor of a Medicare “Dis-Advantage” plan built on lots of insurance industry profits and AI algorithms.

By Steve Wishnia

“A hideous little bundle was slowly lowered from a window of what had been the ninth floor of the scab shop the Triangle Waist Company,” Carrie W. Allen wrote for the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, on March 28, 1911. “It swirled and flapped grotesquely in the wind as it made its lonely journey to the street. Spinning round and round, it kept up a goblin dance as it went down, down, down, and finally lay in eternal quiet upon the ground.”

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour — the UAW strike continues. Some 4,000 UAW rank and file members who work for the Volvo-owned Mack Trucks company overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract. The proposed agreement included a 20 percent wage increase over five years with a ten percent increase in the first year and a guarantee of no increases in workers’ health care insurance premiums for the term of the contract.

By Joe Maniscalco

TWU Local 100 retiree Patricia Jewett put more than 30 years into the MTA New York City Transit. Now at 67, her knees are shot and bronchial asthma makes it hard to breathe.

But Jewett says she remains proud of being the first woman to ever work in the East New York Bus Depot’s Maintenance Division — and she doesn’t understand why she and her fellow retirees are now being stripped of their traditional Medicare coverage and pushed into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.

By Bob Hennelly 

This week, a permanent memorial at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City will be dedicated to the mass casualty event that killed 146 mostly young immigrant women garment workers on March 25, 1911 and sparked a national movement for workplace safety and worker rights.

By Joe Maniscalco

Was there ever a sweeter day in grade school than when somebody from the principal’s office walked into class holding a cardboard box and announced the Scholastic books everybody ordered were finally here? 

The roughly 80 Scholastic Union workers who’ve now spent a solid year trying to bargain for a living wage sure wish the “world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books” would get off the pot and extend some of that sweetness to them — right away!

By Bob Hennelly

The day before close to 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in several states hit the bricks in the largest healthcare strike in American history, the Washington Post reported the results of an explosive year-long investigation that revealed the country’s life expectancy was cratering in large measure thanks to premature deaths due to chronic illness.

By Robert Ovetz

The August Cemex ruling by the National Labor Relations Board has stirred up hope among the labor movement. After 40 years, the board finally responded to employer union-busting by requiring that the company recognize the union and begin bargaining.

By Joe Maniscalco

Yesterday, on the social media platform-formerly-known as Twitter, I noted a few interesting posts from the Work-Bites news feed referencing the UAW’s strike against the Big Three auto giants and a video clip of Starwood Capital Group CEO Barry Sternlicht, in particular, earning his money.

By Bob Hennelly

In part I of this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we look at the 18th day of the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three auto giants. The UAW has just reached a tentative contract deal with Mack Trucks avoiding a work stoppage at that iconic brand that’s now owned by Volvo. Talks were also scheduled to resume between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The 160,000-member actor’s union has been out since July 14. The Writers Guild reached a tentative contract deal last week, which ended their five-month strike. Rank and file union members will be voting on the 94-page contract this week.

By Ryn Gargulinski

Krissie was easily Boss Man’s most favorite employee – and by far my least. We worked side-by-side at a New York City ice cream shop in the early 1990s. She was blond, perky and went to NYU. I was gruff, brunette and went to the bar. I also had dirt under my nails and liked to wear ripped-up tank tops to work.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees have spent nearly three years battling the most powerful public sector union heads in the city and now two separate mayoral administrations who together have shown themselves to be hellbent on tearing apart what a “good city job” used to mean in this town.

Like you, that all sounds absolutely crazy to City Council Member Charles Barron [D-42nd District], too.

By Bob Hennelly

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contract workers are on edge this week with just a few days to go before a possible federal government shutdown engineered by former President Donald Trump’s most ardent partisans in the House of Representatives. 

By Joe Maniscalco

New Yorkers across the five boroughs elect 51 City Council members to represent them — but only one of those people actually calls the shots. If you didn’t already know it, there’s a “protocol” in place inside the hallowed halls of the New York City Council where members do not cross the will of one person — Speaker Adrienne Adams.

By Steve Wishnia

Five current or retired home health-care aides are demanding the state Department of Labor reopen its investigation into their wage-theft complaints. In a class-action suit filed in late August, they allege the department’s decision to end its probe after four years was “arbitrary and capricious,” says Carmela Huang of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, one of the lawyers representing them.