By Steve Wishnia

Bronx residential-building workers voted March 21 to authorize a strike if the Bronx Realty Advisory Board landlord trade group reopens their contract and demands concessions.

“The BRAB, they’re crying broke,” 32BJ SEIU secretary treasurer John Santos told more than 200 workers at a rally outside the Bronx Supreme Court building. “Are we ready to roll back wages?”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams can continue sitting on the “No More 24” bill and saying there’s nothing she can do to stop bosses from forcing home health aides to work around-the-clock — but working class New Yorkers are increasingly connecting the dots about what’s really going on here: lots of kowtowing to the bosses at everyone else’s expense.

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, Denise Romero Gonzalez, striking administrative assistant with Mobilization for Justice and the Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA), UAW Local 2320, calls striking the most powerful tool for change working people have — and urges solidarity with NYC home health aides forced to work 24-hour shifts.

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, Zoe Hu, chair of the Professional Staff Congress’ Graduate Center calls the mandatory 24-hour shifts home health aides are forced to work a “crime” — and says every worker and union in NYC needs to stand in solidarity with them.

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, NYC Taxi Workers Alliance President Bhairavi Desai denounces the New York City Council's "unbelievable moral failure" to pass legislation protecting home health aides from mandatory 24-hour work shifts, and pledges solidarity with the mostly older women of color being exploited. 

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, NYC Council Member Chris Marte challenges the City Council's so-called "progressive" bona fides, while denouncing the legislative body's continuing inaction on ending mandatory 24-hour work days for home health aides.

By Bob Hennelly

At the end of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ weekly media availability on March 19, decorum went out the window as photographers swarmed him in the hunt for the image that might capture the essence of what had just gone down during the high stakes press conference.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we’re honoring the life of Labor Historian Jane LaTour, author of “Sisters in the Brotherhoods,” and we’re also examining the enduring Gender Pay Gap.

By Joe Maniscalco

Nope. The hearing ostensibly called to decide if AFSCME President Lee Saunders acted appropriately in taking over control of the DC 37 Retirees Association and suspending its officers in February has only sparked more questions about the contentious action and the legitimacy of the subsequent hearing process itself.

By Phil Cohen

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy – William Shakespeare

During the spring of 1995, ACTWU (now Workers United) scheduled a blitz of nonmembers at the unionized Cone Mills textile plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. Organizers, accompanied by an activist from one of Cone’s three union shops, would be issued house-call packets containing addresses and information regarding workers that would be visited in specified neighborhoods.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

It’s everywhere and impacting everything and yet we rarely discuss it because we have come to accept it as the natural order of things, a kind of Machina ex Deus conveyor belt to a “profitable” tomorrow no matter how miserable that future might be. Yet, we still have free will and when something isn’t working, or it could work better, we have to summon the character to act.

By Steve Wishnia

Seeking concessions from hundreds of New York City building-service workers, the trade group representing Bronx landlords has threatened to terminate its four-year contract with 32BJ SEIU — but it has agreed to delay doing so for 30 days beyond the original deadline of March 31

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.