By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

As expected, this last election voter turnout was abysmal and I suspect that in New Jersey, where elected officials have been known to look to get their family members into office, the power structure likes to keep it that way.

By Joe Maniscalco

Underneath the fight municipal retirees are waging in New York City and other places around the country to save their traditional Medicare benefits from the onslaught of privatized Medicare Advantage plans lies a systemic defect in today’s labor movement that if not finally corrected guarantees some harder times ahead — for retirees and active workers alike.

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. Plus, we take an up close look at military spending and the Move the Money campaign…

By Bob Hennelly

New York City’s dual homelessness and migrant crisis could be poised to get much worse as the Adams administration presses ahead with mid-year austerity measures as federal COVID aid dries up and tax revenues lag.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, Retired FDNY EMT Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees updates listeners on her group’s campaign to prevent the Adams administration and the heads of the MLC from forcing 250,000 retired civil servants off traditional Medicare and onto a predatory Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan.

Noted labor historian Joe Wilson, who also joins the discussion, notes  how tens of thousands of city employees who worked in lower paying titles like FDNY EMS, rely on their existing retiree healthcare to get by.

By Joe Maniscalco

“If I hear the damn stabilization fund one more time, I'm going to scream,” New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees recently told Work-Bites.

Pizzitola was reacting to CWA Local 1180 President and Municipal Labor Committee trustee Gloria Middleton’s recent assertion that the Covid depleted New York City’s Health Stabilization Fund — thereby ostensibly leaving privatization and Medicare Advantage the only viable way for the City of New York to cover the health care costs of its municipal retirees.

By Steve Wishnia

Frustrated by management’s rejection of their proposal for annual pay increases after more than a year of contract talks, workers at Scholastic’s Magazines+ division held a one-day strike Nov. 1.

“We’re here about wages. There’s a hypocrisy involved,” production editor Alison Colby told Work-Bites as about 30 workers picketed outside the back entrance to Scholastic’s Soho offices, circling on the sidewalk between an inflatable Scabby the Rat and a banner of Clifford the Big Red Dog hanging from above the children’s publishing company’s bookstore.

By Joe Maniscalco

Hi, Mayor Adams. If you haven’t already seen it, we’d like to invite you to Thursday night’s encore performance of “Honorable But Broken - EMS in Crisis” at Cinema Village over on E. 22nd St. We saw it this past weekend as part of the Workers Unite! Film Festival and you’ve gotta see it, too. We know a guy there, and can probably get you in for nothing.

By Ryn Gargulinski

“Deck the halls, my ass.” That used to be my attitude toward the holidays, and I was lucky enough to find another person who felt that way. So we’d get together in December and mope.

Then she mentioned how the thought of moping all December made her depression creep into November. So we started commiserating even earlier.

By Steve Wishnia

Under a gray sky on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront, several dozen Teamsters picketed Amazon’s new delivery station Oct. 30 in solidarity with striking workers in Southern California.

The 84 drivers and dispatchers from Amazon’s DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, have been on strike since June. Amazon refused to recognize a contract that their union, Teamsters Local 396, had reached with Battle-Tested Strategies, a “delivery service partner” the company hires to deliver packages for the “last mile” to customers.

By Bob Hennelly

Say what? We are in the midst of an unprecedented global climate crisis — so, how is it that U.S. military spending continues at an obscene rate with a wanton disregard of the consequences for the planet and every living thing on it? 

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we speak with John Braxton, a longtime Philadelphia-based labor and peace activist, who has launched Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities,  a national grassroots movement campaign in support of HR 1134 — legislation sponsored by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan to cut the Pentagon budget by $100 billion, or roughly 11 percent.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

America’s hospitals are in the throes of a workforce crisis that’s driven by the lack of safe nurse to patient ratios that’s forced tens of thousands of veteran nurses to flee the profession and one in five new nurses to leave in their first year, according to witnesses who testified before a field hearing convened by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Oct. 27,  on the New Brunswick’s Rutgers University campus.

As a consequence, even though hospitals are scrambling to find nurses, over one million nurses are opting to stay sidelined with just half of New Jersey’s 140,000 licensed nurses choosing to work in the state’s hospitals.

By Steve Wishnia

New House Speaker Mike Johnson has an “atrocious” record on labor issues, major unions said after he was elected to the post in a strict party-line vote Oct. 25.

“It is absolutely shameful that every single Republican member of Congress voted for this unqualified, anti-worker extremist,” Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement Oct. 26. “Among other things, Johnson has called the PRO Act an ‘outdated way of thinking,’ co-sponsored the National Right to Work Act, endorsed overturning the ban on company unions, and proposed raising the retirement age and lowering COLAs for Social Security beneficiaries.”

By Bob Hennelly 

Under the terms of the tentative contract between the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) members will see an 11 percent increase in their pay upon ratification, a significant down payment on what will be a 25 percent boost in pay over the four years term of the deal. More recent hires, who in the past were sacrificed by the union to fund the raises of more senior workers, will see their pay nearly double over the term of the deal.

By Joe Maniscalco

Season 12 of the Workers Unite! Film Festival opens in New York City on Friday and even though it’s been around for more than a decade, its organizers are still thinking fresh with a sharp eye on cultivating the next generation of labor-conscious activists.

By Bob Hennelly

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union  [BCTGM] Local 390G have been on strike at International Flavor & Fragrance [IFF] in Memphis for nearly five months. On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we welcome Local 390G President Cedric Wilson — as well as Local 4-200 President Judy Danella; Council Member Chris Marte; and NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola.

By Joe Maniscalco

There’s a very old and somewhat esoteric proverb you might have heard that goes something like this: S—t rolls downhill. And in this case, New York City home health aides, predominantly elderly immigrant women of color performing indispensable jobs, are the ones standing at the bottom of that hill — and they’ve been there for a very long time now.

By Robert Ovetz

Courtesy of the author

The recently ended 148-day-long Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike by 11,500 Hollywood screenwriters is one of the most important strikes in decades because it tamed the Hollywood corporate beast

By Joe Maniscalco

Protesters demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza were still being handcuffed outside Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s Third Avenue offices in New York City on Friday night when Work-Bites talked to a 17-year nursing veteran about her feelings around the ongoing violence and the prohibitions against speaking out about it at work. 

By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This story has been revised to include a statement from Speaker Adrienne Adams.

Protesting home health-care aides put a twist on the 19th-century labor slogan for an eight-hour day Oct. 18: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Many carried signs in 1880s-style imagery with a triptych of a woman at a loom, a person sleeping, and a couple reading a newspaper on top—and below that, a woman helping a gray-haired elder with a walker and the legend “24 Hours for Work, None for Rest, None for What We Will,” in Chinese, Spanish, and English.