By Bob Hennelly

The UAW’s winning streak, including a lopsided union recognition vote last month at a Volkswagen plant in “right-to-work” state Tennessee, came to an end at a Mercedes plant in Alabama thanks to a flagrantly illegal counter-campaign led by plant management and backed up by a powerful coalition of southern Republican Governors.

By Phil Cohen

In 1976 the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Textile Workers Union of America merged to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. It was a marriage of convenience, rooted in necessity, between very disparate cultures.

By Bob Hennelly

Last weekend, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey where his racist anti-immigrant messaging appears to have drawn thousands. While the Associated Press reported tens of thousands attended, other reliable outlets have put the actual crowd size as much smaller.

By Steve Wishnia

The union campaign at the Bloom Medicinals medical-marijuana dispensary in Akron, Ohio began in the break room early last year. Dispensary agents Krispin Horner and Ev Lindrose were both angry that a coworker had just been fired, Lindrose recalls.

By Bob Hennelly

The Republican Party will hold its national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin July 15 through 18. A month later, August 19 to 22, the Democratic Party will convene in Chicago. So far, the 2024 Presidential campaign has been entirely about President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump—two elderly white guys.

By Joe Maniscalco

Propaganda session? Some kind of weird one-way webinar where attendees agonizing over the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits were first encouraged to go get a flag and recite the pledge before getting any answers?

By Bob Hennelly

Four days before protestors took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on April 30, trapping building service workers from TWU Local 241 inside for a harrowing half-hour to 45 minutes, their union wrote university officials to flag their concerns. 

By Bob Hennelly

We kick off National Nurses Week with an update from Debbie White, RN and president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest nurses’ union, which is in major contract negotiations revolving around getting local hospitals to establish and abide by safe staffing levels. 

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour with Rev. Dr. William Barber & Bob Hennelly, we are on the Atlantic Coast in southeast Florida, a state where over 42 percent of the voters are low wage and low wealth, and who, as Rev. Dr. William Barber reminds us, could change the course of history this year if they mobilize.

By Ryn Gargulinski

It’s all Bitsy Finnigan’s fault. Bitsy Finnigan was a childhood neighbor kid who would come over to our house and wreck things.

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, New York City municipal retirees fighting the City of New York’s campaign to push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan pledge their solidarity with home health aides demanding Speaker Adrienne Adams allow the “No More 24” bill to come to the floor for a vote.

By Joe Maniscalco

Intro. 615 — the bill aimed at freeing local home health aides in New York City from mandatory 24-hour workdays — has enough votes to sail through the New York City Council if it were put on the floor for a vote today. All Speaker Adrienne Adams has to do is get out of the way and let it happen.

By Joe Maniscalco

In 2020, with much of the nation biting its fingernails wondering what to do if Donald J. Trump refused to leave office after losing the presidential election — David Van Deusen, then head of the Vermont State Labor Council, was ready to lead a general strike across his state to help kick him out if needed. It was a bold and defiant move that late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka hated so much, he threatened to take over the VSLC.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Tuesday Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we’re talking about what’s happening at the Columbia University protest; people of color dying on the job; and 1199SEIU waking up Sleepy Hallow Hospital.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour with Rev. Dr.  William Barber, we’re talking about breaking the petrochemical industry’s  death grip on Mississippi, the weekly UAW Update, and New Jersey’s USW Local 6129 on strike against the world’s leading food can maker.  

By Steve Wishnia

The 12 most unsafe employers in the U.S. encompass corporate behemoths like Walmart and Tyson Foods; tech titans Uber, Lyft, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX; and a Wisconsin lumber mill that hired a 14-year-old to run power saws, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

By Bob Hennelly

On the same day labor unions gathered in lower Manhattan to memorialize workers who died on the job the previous year, the AFL-CIO released an alarming new report finding workers of color are dying on the job at increasingly higher rates — and fatalities for Black workers hit the highest level in nearly 15 years.

The Clock is Ticking

We returned to the bargaining table several days later and began by telling management we had nothing further to discuss until they withdrew three additional proposals:

Deleting the guarantee of two Sundays off per month

Forfeiting the right to argue grievances based on past practice

Permitting management to drug test at will without probable cause

By Steve Wishnia

The Supreme Court’s far-right majority seems to be leaning toward narrowing the grounds on which the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] can ask federal courts to order employers to reinstate fired union supporters while their unfair-labor-practice cases are pending.

By Joe Maniscalco

This year’s Labor Notes Conference in Chicago featured workshops reflecting labor’s support for single payer health care. What could not be ignored, however, are those powerful forces within the house of labor itself who not only oppose single payer — but who are actively pushing the privatization of traditional Medicare through so-called Medicare Advantage plans.

Or as one prominent single payer advocate Work-Bites spoke to called it — the “bastardization of Medicare.”