By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: Phil Cohen is a union organizer and author who’s seen a lot during his many years in the labor movement. He has graciously agreed to share some of his “War Stories” with Work-Bites. Here is the first installment in an ongoing series…

On August 11, 2018, I attended a victory picnic in Eden, North Carolina with members of Workers United Local 294-T. We were celebrating the defeat of their employer’s illegal union busting plot at the Mohawk Industries plant where they worked. Committee members tended the grills. Some brought side dishes.

By Ryn Gargulinski

The day came when I absolutely, positively, no-bones-about-it hated my desk. I hated it so much I could no longer even sit there. That day arrived after I parted ways with a work-from-home job that had kept me chained to that desk for 10-hour days with tracking software — for two years straight.

Ugh. My mind was numb. My body was probably showing signs of that sitting disease thing. And my soul rebelled in a big way, refusing to sit at that desk for even a minute!

By Steve Wishnia

Swedish postal workers are refusing to deliver mail or packages to Tesla facilities in order to support a strike by mechanics at the company’s service centers there. It is one of many solidarity actions by Swedish unions that would be illegal under U.S. law.

By Joe Maniscalco

More Americans are taking their demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to the streets — but it continues to be a different story in the workplace where many are feeling pressure from their their bosses — and sometimes, their unions — to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

By Joe Maniscalco

Underneath the fight municipal retirees are waging in New York City and other places around the country to save their traditional Medicare benefits from the onslaught of privatized Medicare Advantage plans lies a systemic defect in today’s labor movement that if not finally corrected guarantees some harder times ahead — for retirees and active workers alike.

By Ryn Gargulinski

“Deck the halls, my ass.” That used to be my attitude toward the holidays, and I was lucky enough to find another person who felt that way. So we’d get together in December and mope.

Then she mentioned how the thought of moping all December made her depression creep into November. So we started commiserating even earlier.

By Steve Wishnia

Under a gray sky on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront, several dozen Teamsters picketed Amazon’s new delivery station Oct. 30 in solidarity with striking workers in Southern California.

The 84 drivers and dispatchers from Amazon’s DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, have been on strike since June. Amazon refused to recognize a contract that their union, Teamsters Local 396, had reached with Battle-Tested Strategies, a “delivery service partner” the company hires to deliver packages for the “last mile” to customers.

By Steve Wishnia

New House Speaker Mike Johnson has an “atrocious” record on labor issues, major unions said after he was elected to the post in a strict party-line vote Oct. 25.

“It is absolutely shameful that every single Republican member of Congress voted for this unqualified, anti-worker extremist,” Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement Oct. 26. “Among other things, Johnson has called the PRO Act an ‘outdated way of thinking,’ co-sponsored the National Right to Work Act, endorsed overturning the ban on company unions, and proposed raising the retirement age and lowering COLAs for Social Security beneficiaries.”

By Bob Hennelly

Members of the Memphis union on strike since June at a protein processing plant owned by International Flavor & Fragrances are hoping to raise the visibility of their prolonged struggle at a protest held outside the multinational’s 521 West 57th Street headquarters in Manhattan on Oct. 18, at 1 p.m.

By Bob Hennelly

Tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser Permanente in several states have won a 21 percent pay increase over four years following a three-day strike earlier this month, the largest such action in U.S. history. The tentative deal includes restrictions on outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

By Steve Wishnia

If the minimum wage had gone up as much as event-ticket fees in the past 50 years, it would now be almost $70 an hour.

In 1973, when I was a teenager, the minimum wage was $2 an hour, and tickets were $6.50 to see Frank Zappa at the old Nassau Coliseum or Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls at the theater in Madison Square Garden. There was also a 50-cent fee if you bought them from Ticketron, the pioneering electronic ticket-selling company that was acquired by Ticketmaster in 1991.

By Steve Wishnia

“A hideous little bundle was slowly lowered from a window of what had been the ninth floor of the scab shop the Triangle Waist Company,” Carrie W. Allen wrote for the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, on March 28, 1911. “It swirled and flapped grotesquely in the wind as it made its lonely journey to the street. Spinning round and round, it kept up a goblin dance as it went down, down, down, and finally lay in eternal quiet upon the ground.”

By Bob Hennelly 

This week, a permanent memorial at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City will be dedicated to the mass casualty event that killed 146 mostly young immigrant women garment workers on March 25, 1911 and sparked a national movement for workplace safety and worker rights.

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.