By Joe Maniscalco

Was there ever a sweeter day in grade school than when somebody from the principal’s office walked into class holding a cardboard box and announced the Scholastic books everybody ordered were finally here? 

The roughly 80 Scholastic Union workers who’ve now spent a solid year trying to bargain for a living wage sure wish the “world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books” would get off the pot and extend some of that sweetness to them — right away!

By Bob Hennelly

The day before close to 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in several states hit the bricks in the largest healthcare strike in American history, the Washington Post reported the results of an explosive year-long investigation that revealed the country’s life expectancy was cratering in large measure thanks to premature deaths due to chronic illness.

By Robert Ovetz

The August Cemex ruling by the National Labor Relations Board has stirred up hope among the labor movement. After 40 years, the board finally responded to employer union-busting by requiring that the company recognize the union and begin bargaining.

By Ryn Gargulinski

Krissie was easily Boss Man’s most favorite employee – and by far my least. We worked side-by-side at a New York City ice cream shop in the early 1990s. She was blond, perky and went to NYU. I was gruff, brunette and went to the bar. I also had dirt under my nails and liked to wear ripped-up tank tops to work.

By Bob Hennelly

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contract workers are on edge this week with just a few days to go before a possible federal government shutdown engineered by former President Donald Trump’s most ardent partisans in the House of Representatives. 

By Joe Maniscalco

One night, just before Halloween, Rachel Rivera heard an alarming crack come from her 4-year-old daughter’s bedroom. She immediately raced in, scooped up the child in her arms and got out quick — right before the ceiling fell in on their Brooklyn apartment. Hurricane Sandy killed some 50 New Yorkers in 2012. Rivera and her daughter Marisol just missed being counted among the deceased.

By Bob Hennelly

The United Auto Workers strike against the nation’s big three automakers is a high stakes gambit that comes at a time when an increasing number of Americans support the union movement but the percentage of them actually in one is at an all time low.

By Steve Wishnia

A National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] decision expanding when employers must recognize unions might be a landmark with far-reaching effects — but it is already being contested in the federal courts.

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

By Bob Hennelly

On Sept. 11, 2001, 749 residents of New Jersey perished in the attack on the World Trade Center. Today, over 10,000 first responders and survivors from the state are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program as a consequence of their exposure to the air in lower Manhattan and portions of western Brooklyn.

By Joe Maniscalco

Let’s be honest, wherever you’re working today — behind a computer, up on an I-beam, in front of classroom or the back of a delivery bike — how much time have you actually spent thinking about auto workers and their impending strike against the Big Three automobile manufacturers?

Work-Bites Network

Artificial Intelligence is here. But despite some lofty talk about the supposed potential benefits of AI for working people — what we, and every striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA member, now understands — is how multi-national corporations are using AI to maximize profit and minimize — or eliminate  — one of their most irksome business liabilities: the people they employ.

By Steve Wishnia

AUSTIN, Tex.—On Aug. 30, at the end of a summer in which the temperature in Austin topped 100° for a record 45 consecutive days, a local judge ruled unconstitutional a new state law intended to nullify local ordinances that require water breaks for construction workers.

Courtesy of People’s World

By John Bachtell

In The Man Who Changed Colors, storyteller Bill Fletcher Jr. offers readers a many-layered political suspense thriller that had me enthralled from cover to cover. The story, told through the eyes of David Gomes, an undaunted reporter for the Cape and Islands Gazette, is set in Cape Cod, Mass., in the late 1970s and unfolds amid the dynamics and tensions of the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities, the latter of which Gomes is a part.

By Bob Hennelly

It’s the Strike Summer Edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour as we talk with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on why the nurses' strike at Robert Wood Johnson University in New Brunswick, New Jersey is of national significance in the battle over safe staffing that puts people ahead of profits.

By Ryn Gargulinski

The worst boss I ever had was a robot. Well, not a robot in “The Terminator” sense that would blow your head off if you didn’t hand in an assignment on time. But a robotic time-tracking software that recorded and shared my every single move.

By Steve Wishnia

Sometimes I see my role as a journalist as being a forensic scatologist: What kind of s—t is falling towards us? Whose butt is it coming from? What pathogenic bacteria does it contain?

By Joe Maniscalco

The next great general strike to captivate the United States will not be organized — it’ll be organic. And it could be the most transformative general strike this country has ever seen

By Steve Wishnia

It was not an AI-generated crowd scene. It was all humans.

This week in New York City, hundreds of striking actors and screenwriters, joined by supporters from numerous other unions, packed two blocks of Tenth Avenue, across from the offices of HBO and Amazon in the plutocratic slab of Hudson Yards. It was part of a national day of solidarity with the strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers’ Guild of America.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite some very strange efforts to obscure the fact, Medicare remains one of organized labor’s all-time greatest achievements 58 years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson first signed it into existence with Harry and Bess Truman proudly standing by.

By Bob Hennelly

It is said that history is written by the winners. But when it comes to big wins by organized labor, the corporate news media, itself fighting unionization at all costs, tends to ignore unions even when they are shaping history.