By Joe Maniscalco

There’s a very old and somewhat esoteric proverb you might have heard that goes something like this: S—t rolls downhill. And in this case, New York City home health aides, predominantly elderly immigrant women of color performing indispensable jobs, are the ones standing at the bottom of that hill — and they’ve been there for a very long time now.

By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This story has been revised to include a statement from Speaker Adrienne Adams.

Protesting home health-care aides put a twist on the 19th-century labor slogan for an eight-hour day Oct. 18: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Many carried signs in 1880s-style imagery with a triptych of a woman at a loom, a person sleeping, and a couple reading a newspaper on top—and below that, a woman helping a gray-haired elder with a walker and the legend “24 Hours for Work, None for Rest, None for What We Will,” in Chinese, Spanish, and English.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we’re talking to striking nurses fighting for safe staffing and the coalition fighting NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ attempt to end the city’s legal obligation to shelter the homeless.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ response last Thursday night in Brooklyn to municipal retirees challenging his administration’s plan to herd them into a privatized Medicare Advantage health insurance plan clocks in at roughly two-and-a-half-minutes.

But listen close, in that relatively short period of time, Hizzoner manages to declare “what we are doing” and what “we’re going to do” no less than four times when referring to his administration’s ongoing campaign to privatize municipal retiree health care.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams continues to ignore the objections of municipal retirees who refuse to give up the traditional Medicare coverage they were promised at the start of their civil service careers in favor of a Medicare “Dis-Advantage” plan built on lots of insurance industry profits and AI algorithms.

By Joe Maniscalco

TWU Local 100 retiree Patricia Jewett put more than 30 years into the MTA New York City Transit. Now at 67, her knees are shot and bronchial asthma makes it hard to breathe.

But Jewett says she remains proud of being the first woman to ever work in the East New York Bus Depot’s Maintenance Division — and she doesn’t understand why she and her fellow retirees are now being stripped of their traditional Medicare coverage and pushed into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.

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.