By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees have spent nearly three years battling the most powerful public sector union heads in the city and now two separate mayoral administrations who together have shown themselves to be hellbent on tearing apart what a “good city job” used to mean in this town.

Like you, that all sounds absolutely crazy to City Council Member Charles Barron [D-42nd District], too.

By Joe Maniscalco

New Yorkers across the five boroughs elect 51 City Council members to represent them — but only one of those people actually calls the shots. If you didn’t already know it, there’s a “protocol” in place inside the hallowed halls of the New York City Council where members do not cross the will of one person — Speaker Adrienne Adams.

By Steve Wishnia

Five current or retired home health-care aides are demanding the state Department of Labor reopen its investigation into their wage-theft complaints. In a class-action suit filed in late August, they allege the department’s decision to end its probe after four years was “arbitrary and capricious,” says Carmela Huang of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, one of the lawyers representing them.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, Rev. Dr. William Barber joins Sara Nelson, president of CWA’s Association of Flight Attendants, in full support of United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 on strike for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ since Aug. 4.

The hospital’s parent RWJBaranabas, which is self-insured, terminated the nurses’ health insurance earlier this month and has embarked on an expensive anti-union drive.

Is a major occupational health issue for essential workers just being ignored?

By Bob Hennelly

For only the second time since the FDNY absorbed the city’s EMS workforce in 1996, the average response time for a city ambulance to answer a life-threatening emergency exceeded ten minutes. At 10:43, that response time was 36 seconds longer than the previous year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report [MMR] looking at fiscal year 2023 — and a 1:21 longer than what was reported four years ago.

By Steve Wishnia

Two massage workers at a New York City spa are trying to get their jobs back after the National Labor Relations Board formally accused their employer of having fired them illegally last November.

“They have consistently treated us unfairly,” Tian Xiao May Qing, speaking through a translator, told reporters outside Liangste Wellness at 150 East 55th St. on Sept. 19. “When we complained, he fired us.”

By Bob Hennelly

Striking nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey have voted overwhelmingly to continue their job action even after the self-insured nonprofit hospital chain cut off their healthcare.

By Joe Maniscalco

Something ugly and very troubling recently happened on the picket line outside the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey that should tell us a lot about the ongoing strike at that particular institution.

But more importantly, it should also serve as a sobering warning about the class struggle working people throughout this country now face — and have, indeed, always faced when they collectively stand up to the bosses. 

By Timothy Sheard

Dear nursing sisters and brothers,

You have to be tender and tough if you are going to stay in the nursing profession for very long. Tender, because our patients are so vulnerable. So at risk of injury and death. So afraid.

And tough, because the work is so demanding, the bosses so disrespectful, and the pain of losing a patient so deep.

By Bob Hennelly

A month-and-a-half into the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 strike for safer staffing at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey and a settlement continues to be elusive as the rhetoric is heating up on both sides.

Video follows story…

By Joe Maniscalco

This weekend’s New York City Labor Day Parade saw municipal retirees fighting to retain their Medicare coverage tangle with the heads of both the state AFL-CIO and NYC Central Labor Council over the duo’s opposition to Intro. 1099 — the City Council bill aimed at shielding traditional health insurance from Medicare Advantage and privatization.   

By Joe Maniscalco

A letter sent to New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and signed by 35 retired union leaders — largely from the uniformed services — is calling further BS on claims that pending legislation aimed at protecting municipal retiree healthcare from privatization would somehow impinge on collective bargaining rights.

By Bob Hennelly 

As hundreds of thousands of students returned to school in New York State and New York City this week, Governor Kathy Hochul told reporters the state’s teachers still face major challenges as a consequence of the COVID mass death event that killed 1.1 million people including over 77,000 in New York.

By Bob Hennelly

New York State employers will no longer be able to force employees to attend so-called “captive meetings,” which corporations like Starbucks and Amazon use to undermine union organizing.   

Who Do You Trust More? 

By Bob Hennelly

By Friday, all of the striking nurses at New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital will lose their employer healthcare coverage. No new talks are scheduled.

By Joe Maniscalco

Retired NYPD Lieutenant Jack LaTorre, 68, rode his bike over from Bay Ridge to Sunset Park Monday afternoon, hoping to ask New York City Mayor Eric Adams why he insists on trying to strip municipal retirees like him of their traditional Medicare benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.

By Joe Maniscalco

A few weeks after losing another case in court, the heads of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] now want City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to believe efforts to stop them from privatizing retiree health care hurts collective bargaining rights. But how’s that work? No one — including members of the MLC — appears to know.

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s awarding of a $432 million dollar no-bid contract to handle the city’s influx of undocumented migrants last spring to DocGo, a for-profit medical services company, is just the latest example of municipal government outsourcing its response to a crisis — even as it cuts or leaves vacant tens thousands of civil service jobs.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we revisit the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 strike against the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ as it enters its third week. The union is pressing its demands for an accountability mechanism for staff to patient ratios. Local 4-200 Union President Judy Danella and Debbie White, RN, president HPAE, New Jersey largest nurses’ union, talk about legislation pending in Trenton which would create a state standard for nurse staffing that would put patients ahead of hospital profits.

By Steve Wishnia

Almost 3,000 occupational and physical therapists [OT/PT] in New York City public schools are in the process of revoting on a contract they rejected by a 2–1 margin last month.