By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week reiterated his support for full pay parity between the FDNY EMS workforce, which is mostly composed of women and people of color — and the firefighting side of the department, which is mostly white males.

By Bob Hennelly

The Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour marks the second week of Women’s History Month by welcoming New York City Council Member Alexa Aviles (D-38th District), who talks about the decades-old gender and race-based pay discrimination that still plagues the FDNY’s EMS workforce.

By Joe Maniscalco

Here it is, another Women’s History Month — the officially sanctioned time of year when, after enough decades have passed, we’re all encouraged to enthusiastically applaud the achievements of marginalized working class heroes from a safe and non-threatening distance.

By Steve Wishnia

Subway station agent Benjamin Welcome was working in the 2/3 line part of the Wall Street station on Feb. 16, the day Noreen Mallory, a station agent in the 4/5 line section, got her eye socket broken by an enraged man who punched her repeatedly in the face until passengers on an arriving train intervened.

“If the train hadn’t come in, she would have been on the tracks,” he told Work-Bites.

Dear President Biden,

My name is Marianne Pizzitola. I am a retired member of the FDNY EMS and participant in the 9/11 World Trade Center Health Program. For the last few years, I have been president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees that we organized when New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee and then Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to force 250,000 retired civil servants off of our traditional Medicare and onto a predatory for-profit Medicare Advantage Plan.

'Operational Security’ Trumps the Right to Know

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week dismissed concerns the NYPD’s encrypting of its radio communications will undermine transparency and the ability of the press to report on breaking news — but did say he would look into issues raised by the union that represents FDNY EMS officers about the initial rollout of encryption in Brooklyn North precincts.

By Joe Maniscalco

Angry municipal retirees do not care what AFSCME Retirees Director and newly-appointed DC37 Retirees Association Administrator Ann Widger says — the union’s decision to put the retirees chapter in receivership last month, they insist, is retribution for fighting back against ongoing efforts to privatize their health care.

Plain and simple.

By Bob Hennelly

We’re starting off this year’s Women’s History month with a candid conversation with FDNY firefighter Regina Wilson, president of the Vulcan Society — the African American support group for the New York City Fire Department. Regina updates us on the FDNY’s last minute cancellation of its Black History Month commemoration and the premiere of a documentary the FDNY produced on the life of Robert O. Lowery, the FDNY’s first Black fire commissioner who was promoted by Mayor John Lindsay in the 1970s.

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.