By Bob Hennelly

February 11, would have been Eduardo “Eddie” Granado’s 57th birthday. But he didn’t make it. Instead, Granado died in his sleep a week before Christmas from an aggressive form of rectal cancer he contracted after his occupational exposure to the highly toxic air that permeated in and around lower Manhattan for the months after the 9/11 attack.

By Bob Hennelly

As Long Island voters in New York’s 3rd Congressional District cast their ballots in the special election to fill out the unexpired term of former Representative George Santos, Republican control of Congress hangs by just a few votes.

By Joe Maniscalco

Right now, there are people in industries across the United States working very hard to raise their families, but who are openly worrying they have…maybe…one year left before AI takes their jobs. 

By Phil Cohen

During 1993, the Kmart Distribution Center in Greensboro, North Carolina became the company’s first hard goods warehouse to be organized. The newly-opened facility offered lower wages and benefits than its Northern counterparts and unlike them, the majority of workers were nonwhite. Focusing on economics and racism had given ACTWU (now Workers United) a decisive organizing victory, led by Assistant Southern Director Ernest Bennett.

Editor’s Note: The following letter from Charles Komanoff, a NYC safe-streets activist and mathematician whose traffic modeling has been influential in congestion pricing advocacy, comes in response to last week’s Work-Bites story about labor opposition to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan.

To the Editor:

You reported last week (NYC Unions Reject MTA Congestion Pricing, Call for Ending Stock Transfer Tax Rebate Instead) that most of the 102 unions making up the Municipal Labor Committee were joining the federal lawsuit against the MTA’s congestion pricing (CP) program filed last month by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew and Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella.

By Bob Hennelly

A bi-partisan group of 40 Republicans and 21 Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N-NY) has just signed onto a glowing letter endorsing Medicare Advantage — the increasingly controversial profit-driven health insurance program that now enrolls some 32 million seniors and individuals with disabilities nationwide.

By Steve Wishnia

Just days before the start of Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, Nevada’s Culinary Union announced a drive to organize the about 1,500 nonunion workers at Allegiant Stadium, site of this year’s gridiron showdown between the 49ers and Chiefs.  

By Bob Hennelly

On this first Monday of Black History Month, we explore the civil rights movement and how it functioned as the conscience of the American labor movement with Firefighter Regina Wilson, president of the Vulcan Society, the African-American support group within the New York City Fire Department.

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.