By Bob Hennelly

A growing coalition of New York City’s unions are speaking out against  the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plans to impose a  congestion pricing fee on vehicles entering Manhattan with several labor leaders suggesting Albany should instead start collecting the state’s Stock Transfer Tax that it has been rebating back to Wall Street since the early 1980s.

By Steve Wishnia

A group of retired New York City transit workers is again seeking a court order to restore their access to traditional Medicare.

The group, TWU100R, is filing an amended petition before State Supreme Court judge Shahabuddeen A. Ally, challenging Transport Workers Union Local 100’s 2023 contract, which eliminated the about 22,000 retirees’ option to keep traditional Medicare. Instead, they were required to enroll in one of two profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans run by Aetna as of January 1. Much like other retirees across the country fighting similar battles, they are arguing that the change illegally diminishes their health-care benefits.

By Ryn Gargulinski

Since language is supposedly what sets people apart from animals, you’d think we’d be ideal specimens for exceptional communication. But we’re largely not.

In fact, lack of communication is a common enough bother in the workplace to rank as one of the top reasons people hate their job.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor RadioHour, we hear from Kelly Smith, with the New York State Poor Peoples Campaign and Rachel Dawn Davis from the New Jersey Poor Peoples Campaign about rallies on  March 2, in Albany and Trenton, as well as is dozens of other state capitals around the country as part of a mass mobilization of low-wage voters for 2024. 

By Joe Maniscalco

New preliminary findings recently released by the National Transportation Safety Board looking into January 4’s subway collision on the No. 1 line near the 96th Street station in Manhattan corroborate statements from outspoken Transit workers who tell Work-Bites the system in rife with radio “dead spots.”

By Joe Maniscalco

This is gonna be the year the City of New York finally steps up, passes the “No More 24” bill, and ends the round-the-clock workdays steadily grinding home health aides — predominantly older women of color — down to the bone right before everyone’s eyes.

If not, they vow to go on hunger strike to make it happen.

By Bob Hennelly

“The bosses wear Prada, and the workers get nada!” chanted hundreds of News Guild CWA workers out on a one-day strike against Conde Nast, the publishing juggernaut that owns iconic titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Bon Appetite. The boisterous picket line at the base of One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on a damp day January 24, drew a cacophony of honking horns whizzing by on West Street.

By Steve Wishnia

In 2008, I covered the New Hampshire primary for a small New York biweekly, traveling across the state from Manchester, a gentrifying industrial city with a 1940s-neon downtown, to the Ivy League college town of Hanover, talking to voters and going to candidates’ rallies. Driving into Claremont, a town of 13,000 on the Connecticut River, was like going back to the South Bronx of 1982. The road winding uphill from the bridge was lined with the dark, broken-brick ruins of mills and factories.

By Bob Hennelly

This week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour is all about Healthcare! Healthcare! Healthcare! Tomorrow, voters in New Hampshire will head to the polls in the first-in-the-nation 2024 Presidential primaries — and the corporate news media is doing what it always does — focusing on the horse race that fixates on personalities and the amount of cash that’s been amassed by the candidates.

By Phil Cohen

During the 1980’s, Cone Mills was one of America’s largest textile corporations with plants sprawled across the Carolinas, manufacturing denim for Levis and other jean companies. In 1984, a hostile takeover by Western Pacific was thwarted through a leveraged buyout by 47 Cone executives who acquired all shares of stock and took the company private.

By Joe Maniscalco

Between trying to chase down cagey MTA spokespeople to quiz them on potentially deadly working conditions in the subways, and various local elected officials on why they seem all too happy to sell out New York City municipal retirees and steal their healthcare — I lean back, pick up my cheap Squier Mustang, and appreciate a little band from Seattle playing through the laptop speakers.

Mudhoney. Great stuff.

To the Editor: With the settlement of more than 90% of City labor union contracts, the New York City Managerial Employees Association (NYC MEA) has called on the City to grant similar retroactive across-the-board pay raises and one-time bonuses for City managers. Subject to the New York State Taylor Law, managerial employees cannot unionize and are not bound by collective bargaining contracts.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

This past Monday night, as I was watching MSNBC’s hyped up coverage of the Iowa Republican caucus and Steve Kornaki offering a county-by-county breakdown of how former President Donald Trump had carried the day with around 56,000 votes, not even ten percent of the state’s 752,000 registered Republicans, I flashed back to another GOP primary night here in New Jersey almost twenty years ago.

By Bob Hennelly

The 9/11 responder and survivor community are mourning the death of retired North Arlington, New Jersey Police Chief Joe Zadroga, a powerful voice in the campaign to pass and then to extend the James Zadroga 9/11 WTC Health and Compensation Act, named for his son, an NYPD Detective who died in 2006 as a consequence  of his exposure to the air in lower Manhattan in the months after the attack.

By Bob Hennelly

In this special Martin Luther King Jr. Day edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we examine the essential role that the MLK played in the American labor movement and how his 20th century campaign based on disciplined non-violent collective action laid the  foundation for the 21st century revival of the American labor movement.

By Joe Maniscalco

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day again, and what’s uppermost in my mind right now is how he’s not here. He could be. Sure, he’d be 95, but Martin Luther King, Jr. could still be around walking the earth today. Instead, he’s long since dead — gunned down — murdered before even making it to 40.

By Bob Hennelly

This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s been dubbed “the year of the strike” because in 2023 there were well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers willing to take the risk of walking out on their employer, a 900 percent increase from just a few years earlier.

By Robert Ovetz

Although I do not make new year’s resolutions, I do set goals. My goals this year are focused on the workers movement. If we are going to build on the momentum of the labor movement over the past two years and bring about real change, we need to radically alter our perspective.

By Steve Wishnia

More than 200 Carpenters Union members picketed the Manhattan offices of an Australian real-estate developer Jan. 11, demanding that it stop using nonunion labor on a massive luxury development on the Brooklyn waterfront.

“It’s not only that it’s a nonunion contractor,” Michael Piccirillo, area standards manager for the New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters, told Work-Bites. “It’s someone who in the past defrauded a union pension fund.”

By Bob Hennelly

This week, after two independent agencies flagged the accuracy of the Adams administration’s budget projections and reporting on critical data like the number of homeless, Mayor Adams reversed course on several controversial budget cuts that were part of his November austerity budget plan to close what he said was a $7 billion budget shortfall.