By Bob Hennelly

The day after City & State published an analysis of the Adams administration lack of transparency, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams blasted the Mayor’s encrypting of  NYPD radio traffic and his continued suppression of  the City’s 9/11 WTC files that would shed light on what the city knew and when it knew it about the toxic air in and around lower Manhattan.

By Steve Wishnia

“We’re here for one reason. Brooklyn needs Downstate,” United University Professions leader Frederick E. Kowal told a rally of several hundred people outside the hospital Feb. 29. Many in the crowd protesting the state’s plan to close the East Flatbush facility carried signs or wore T-shirts with the same slogan, in the white-on-black team colors and font of the Brooklyn Nets.

By Joe Maniscalco

AFSCME, under union President Lee Saunders, says the emergency decision to suspend DC37 Retirees Association officers and lock them out of their offices on February 22, has everything to do with the group’s problematic finances — and nothing to do with them helping the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees successfully beat back the Medicare Advantage push in town. But does it?

By Steve Wishnia

A group of nine retired transit workers has filed a class-action suit in New York State Supreme Court, seeking to get their access to traditional Medicare restored after they were switched to a private Medicare Advantage plan on Jan. 1.

By Steve Wishnia

“If it keeps going the way it’s going, there’s going to be a murder,” subway-train operator Evangeline Byars tells Work-Bites.

On Feb. 16, a 58-year-old station agent in the Wall Street station suffered a fractured eye socket when she was attacked by a man she’d woken up from sleeping under a bench.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s show, George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU, Rev. Rupert Hall, Kelly Smith and top Democratic Party Pollster Celinda Lake discuss the unrealized power in America’s 85 million low wealth voters in 2024. Panelists discuss the up coming Poor People’s Campaign rallies in Trenton and Albany as well as 30 other state capitals on March 2.

By Ryn Gargulinski

It starts by pretending to be your friend, seeming to make your life seem easier, less stressful and way more fun. In fact, you’re having such a blast that you start to hang out with it more and more. And then some more…

By Steve Wishnia

Two economic statistics, a side topic where I recently encountered them, tell a stark story about the history of this country during the last century.

The share of U.S. income going to the top 10% in 2022 was the highest it’s been since 1940, at 48.3%, according to a report released Feb. 13 by the Economic Policy Institute on right-to-work-for-less laws.

By Joe Maniscalco

Union-busting companies know how to deal with walkouts, sickouts, boycotts — and even limited strikes — pretty handily under existing labor law. But how in the world do they confront a theatrical production that puts their exploitation and worker abuses center stage?

How do they contend with art?

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in The Capitol Hill Citizen and CorporateCrimeReporter.com

By Bob Hennelly

The confluence of ending billions of dollars in federal direct COVID aid — and Governor Greg Abbott [R-Texas] sending tens of thousands of asylum-seeking migrants to New York City — has members of the New York State Legislature calling for an end to the state rebating the one-tenth-of-one-percent Stock Transfer Tax [STT] that was enacted in the early 1900s — but has been refunded back to Wall Street since the 1980s.

By Bob Hennelly

This is the third Monday of Black History Month and we continue to explore how the fight for racial justice in a nation that was built on slavery laid the very foundations for the modern American labor union movement. To this very day, it defines the contours of our struggle.  

By Joe Maniscalco

Former New York City schoolteachers instrumental in beating back the campaign to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance program have launched a bold new campaign to seize control of the UFT’s Retired Teachers Chapter — and put a real check on entrenched union president Michael Mulgrew’s unchallenged power.

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.