By Steve Wishnia

More than 200 Carpenters Union members picketed the Manhattan offices of an Australian real-estate developer Jan. 11, demanding that it stop using nonunion labor on a massive luxury development on the Brooklyn waterfront.

“It’s not only that it’s a nonunion contractor,” Michael Piccirillo, area standards manager for the New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters, told Work-Bites. “It’s someone who in the past defrauded a union pension fund.”

By Bob Hennelly

This week, after two independent agencies flagged the accuracy of the Adams administration’s budget projections and reporting on critical data like the number of homeless, Mayor Adams reversed course on several controversial budget cuts that were part of his November austerity budget plan to close what he said was a $7 billion budget shortfall.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Over the holidays, New Jersey Gov. Murphy, Lieutenant Gov. Way, Senate President Scutari, and Assembly Speaker Coughlin put out a self-congratulatory press release saying how “incredibly proud” they were that the state’s minimum was set to increase to $15.13 an hour with the New Year. In their statement the state’s leaders said that because of a 2019 change in state law the increase was “indexed annually to inflation” guaranteeing that “working families won’t fall behind when prices go up.”

You have to wonder what planet these people occupy.

By Bob Hennelly

Nothing says depression and anxiety like being New York City parents of three small children and having to deal with an eviction notice that’s effective between Christmas and New Year’s Day when the rest of the world is celebrating abundance.

By Steve Wishnia

Commercial-building cleaners in New York City and hospital and university service workers in Rochester have won significant raises and averted threatened strikes this week.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Angels and demons ride the rails and New Jersey Transit conductors and collectors have to collect tickets from them all. And on too many occasions, the rail workers get verbally and physically abused in the process.

By Steve Wishnia

Just before 3 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas, workers at the Barnes & Noble flagship bookstore on Union Square walked out for two hours to protest management’s refusal to bargain with their recently formed union. Shoppers approaching the store’s dark-green doors got greeted with chants of “Picket Line Means Don’t Cross!”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City home health aides would like to brand City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as a “Grinch” or a “Scrooge” this holiday season for stubbornly suppressing a bill outlawing exploitive 24-hour work shifts — but they really can’t.

Both of those twisted characters had a change of heart come Christmas Day. Adams’ heart will likely remain two-sizes too small this year because of…machine politics.

By Steve Wishnia

“We have had four bargaining sessions and made no progress,” 32BJ SEIU president Manny Pastreich told a a sea of purple wool hats and yellow banners and signs that filled half of Sixth Ave. for several blocks south of West 50th Street on Dec. 20. “Time is running short for them to make a deal.”

By Bob Hennelly

Editor’s note: This story has been revised to reflect the latest developments in TWU Local 100 Retirees’ fight to obtain a Temporary Restraining Order and stop the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits. 

In a legal reversal for TWU Local 100 retirees hoping to head off being forced into an Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan, a New York State Judge has rolled back a TRO he issued Dec. 18 which prohibited the MTA and the union from advancing their plan which the retirees lawyer says kicks in on Jan. 1. In an order issued Dec. 21 vacating the TRO, Judge Shahabuddeen A. Ally referenced filings he received from the legal team representing the union and the MTA in response to the TRO filed on Dec. 20.

By Bob Hennelly

New York City is a complicated place where several million people make life work for themselves and their families every day. It’s a place where on the same day a seven-story apartment building can collapse with no one injured, and a few hours later an 11 year-migrant boy can hang himself with his shoelaces.

It’s a mélange of the miraculous and the despairing.

By Steve Wishnia

New York City’s 20,000 commercial-building cleaners will vote Dec. 20 on whether to authorize a strike, 32BJ SEIU announced Dec. 13.

“This is a very challenging negotiation,” 32BJ vice president Denis Johnston says of the union’s contract talks with the owners of 1,300 commercial buildings. “There’s a different tone.”

By Steve Wishnia

Two massage workers at a midtown Manhattan spa who were fired after they complained to their boss about pay and scheduling have won their jobs back.

Under a settlement agreement overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, Xiaoqing Tian and Shulian Feng, who were fired from Liangtse Wellness in November 2022, have been reinstated and will get “almost all” of the pay they lost,

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

The parking below the Trenton State House that accommodates all of the legislature’s late model SUVs and cars was filled to capacity on Nov. 30 during a jam packed lame duck session day. Out in front of the Legislative Annex a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protested Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on entities that post more than a million dollars in annual profits.

By Steve Wishnia

Some 1,800 workers at two branches of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York State will go on strike for 17 hours on December 13, after little progress in more than three months of contract talks.

The main sticking point, 1199SEIU lead negotiator Tracey Harrison told Work-Bites, is that URMC management has so far refused to raise the starting wage at the lowest pay grade, now $15.45 an hour. Management is “not interested in paying a living wage,” he says.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 — on strike since Aug. 4 — have reached a tentative contract deal, the union and hospital confirm.

By Bob Hennelly

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and his chief of staff Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti held a zoom session with the leadership of the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 that’s been on strike for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. It was the first such meeting  with the union that represents 1,700 nurses that have been out since Aug. 4.

By Bob Hennelly

While most all of the nation is at home enjoying the joys of their families at Thanksgiving, members of United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 will be out on the picket line in front of the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey on strike for safer staffing as they have been since Aug. 4.

These 1,700 dedicated healthcare professionals have been stripped of their healthcare coverage by RWJBarnabas, which is self-insured. The multi-billion dollar “non-profit” hospital chain paid its CEO $17 million in the second year of the COVID pandemic, and has shelled out well over $100 million to pay replacement nurses in their full court press to break the union, according to the union.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we zero in on two prolonged strikes in New Jersey, as well as New York City’s ongoing struggle to deliver basic services. The average response time for a city ambulance to answer a life-threatening emergency now exceeded ten minutes. It’s time to start collecting the Stock Transfer Tax  — is it also time to strike, too? 

By Joe Maniscalco

Advocates pushing for passage of the “No More 24” bill in the New York City Council put 200 or more people in the streets outside City Hall on Thursday, Nov. 16, loudly demanding Speaker Adrienne Adams stop blocking the measure or step down. They promise to be back and be even louder — next month.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, and Shèngdàn Kuàilè, indeed, Adrienne!