By Ryn Gargulinski

As I was sloshing through the extraordinary amount of junk mail that somehow makes it into my email inbox these days, I saw one that was a big red flag.  

The message started: “Dear Amazon Prime Member.” Uh oh. Anytime there’s an email starting with a “Dear” followed by a “Member” it usually means whatever you’re a member of is jacking up the rates. 

By Joe Maniscalco

Photojournalists and reporters documenting the tiny white bundles being set down solemnly on the sidewalk near West 40th Street and Broadway on Thursday afternoon were warned the numbers would soon grow into the hundreds and quickly fill the space.

By Bob Hennelly

Nothing says depression and anxiety like being New York City parents of three small children and having to deal with an eviction notice that’s effective between Christmas and New Year’s Day when the rest of the world is celebrating abundance.

By Steve Wishnia

Commercial-building cleaners in New York City and hospital and university service workers in Rochester have won significant raises and averted threatened strikes this week.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Angels and demons ride the rails and New Jersey Transit conductors and collectors have to collect tickets from them all. And on too many occasions, the rail workers get verbally and physically abused in the process.

Work-Bites News Network

Courtesy of Madison Labor Radio

Happy Yuletide Season, everyone - check out this exclusive report on the “breakthrough” labor deal recently secured just before Christmas Day:

By Steve Wishnia

Just before 3 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas, workers at the Barnes & Noble flagship bookstore on Union Square walked out for two hours to protest management’s refusal to bargain with their recently formed union. Shoppers approaching the store’s dark-green doors got greeted with chants of “Picket Line Means Don’t Cross!”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City home health aides would like to brand City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as a “Grinch” or a “Scrooge” this holiday season for stubbornly suppressing a bill outlawing exploitive 24-hour work shifts — but they really can’t.

Both of those twisted characters had a change of heart come Christmas Day. Adams’ heart will likely remain two-sizes too small this year because of…machine politics.

By Steve Wishnia

“We have had four bargaining sessions and made no progress,” 32BJ SEIU president Manny Pastreich told a a sea of purple wool hats and yellow banners and signs that filled half of Sixth Ave. for several blocks south of West 50th Street on Dec. 20. “Time is running short for them to make a deal.”

By Bob Hennelly

Editor’s note: This story has been revised to reflect the latest developments in TWU Local 100 Retirees’ fight to obtain a Temporary Restraining Order and stop the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits. 

In a legal reversal for TWU Local 100 retirees hoping to head off being forced into an Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan, a New York State Judge has rolled back a TRO he issued Dec. 18 which prohibited the MTA and the union from advancing their plan which the retirees lawyer says kicks in on Jan. 1. In an order issued Dec. 21 vacating the TRO, Judge Shahabuddeen A. Ally referenced filings he received from the legal team representing the union and the MTA in response to the TRO filed on Dec. 20.

By Steve Wishnia

Almost 5,500 workers in the U.S. died from on-the-job injuries in 2022, the highest number in the past 10 years, according to a report released Dec. 19 by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The bureau’s 2022 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries counted 5,486 deaths from “sudden workplace trauma,” a 5.7% increase over 2021. The rate of deaths, 3.7 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, was also the highest recorded in the past 10 years.

By Bob Hennelly

Late last week, United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 voted overwhelmingly to ratify their contract with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and should be back to work in the first week of January after a bitter four month strike for safer staffing.

By Joe Maniscalco

When the United States government finally decides to an end the systemic slaughter of Palestinian people in Gaza, it’ll largely be because the American labor movement has finally decided to flex its collective muscle and fully reclaim its role as “the conscience of America.”

By Bob Hennelly

New York City is a complicated place where several million people make life work for themselves and their families every day. It’s a place where on the same day a seven-story apartment building can collapse with no one injured, and a few hours later an 11 year-migrant boy can hang himself with his shoelaces.

It’s a mélange of the miraculous and the despairing.

By Robert Ovetz

One of my unions’ current CBAs has a new form of compensation for excess workload. This new language recognizes that faculty, counselors, librarians and coaches are performing unwaged labor “mentoring, advising, and outreach, to support underserved, first-generation, and/or underrepresented students” and provides temporary release time to do the work.

By Steve Wishnia

New York City’s 20,000 commercial-building cleaners will vote Dec. 20 on whether to authorize a strike, 32BJ SEIU announced Dec. 13.

“This is a very challenging negotiation,” 32BJ vice president Denis Johnston says of the union’s contract talks with the owners of 1,300 commercial buildings. “There’s a different tone.”

By Bob Hennelly

This week on the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we visit with Antoinette Miles, the interim director of the New Jersey’s Working Families Alliance. Last month, she was the master of ceremonies at a rally in front of the Legislative Annex down in Trenton that drew a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protesting Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on corporations that make more than a million dollars in annual profits—not exactly your small businesses. 

By Steve Wishnia

Two massage workers at a midtown Manhattan spa who were fired after they complained to their boss about pay and scheduling have won their jobs back.

Under a settlement agreement overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, Xiaoqing Tian and Shulian Feng, who were fired from Liangtse Wellness in November 2022, have been reinstated and will get “almost all” of the pay they lost,

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: In case you missed it, here’s Part I and Part II of this special “War Stories” series.

On February 21, I attended a labor management meeting with plant manager Justin Scarbrough and the Local 294-T committee to discuss Jessie’s situation. Sometimes, it’s easier to resolve certain issues during an informal meeting before the polarizing impact of a grievance hearing.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

The parking below the Trenton State House that accommodates all of the legislature’s late model SUVs and cars was filled to capacity on Nov. 30 during a jam packed lame duck session day. Out in front of the Legislative Annex a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protested Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on entities that post more than a million dollars in annual profits.