By Joe Maniscalco

As recently as last week, New York City Council Speaker [D-28th District] Adrienne Adams was repeating her longstanding claim that she supports home health aides fighting to “improve their working conditions” — but that actually ending the 24-hour workdays they’re forced to endure is a state issue, and, therefore, out of her hands.

By Steve Wishnia

Bronx residential-building workers voted March 21 to authorize a strike if the Bronx Realty Advisory Board landlord trade group reopens their contract and demands concessions.

“The BRAB, they’re crying broke,” 32BJ SEIU secretary treasurer John Santos told more than 200 workers at a rally outside the Bronx Supreme Court building. “Are we ready to roll back wages?”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams can continue sitting on the “No More 24” bill and saying there’s nothing she can do to stop bosses from forcing home health aides to work around-the-clock — but working class New Yorkers are increasingly connecting the dots about what’s really going on here: lots of kowtowing to the bosses at everyone else’s expense.

By Bob Hennelly

At the end of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ weekly media availability on March 19, decorum went out the window as photographers swarmed him in the hunt for the image that might capture the essence of what had just gone down during the high stakes press conference.

By Joe Maniscalco

Nope. The hearing ostensibly called to decide if AFSCME President Lee Saunders acted appropriately in taking over control of the DC 37 Retirees Association and suspending its officers in February has only sparked more questions about the contentious action and the legitimacy of the subsequent hearing process itself.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

It’s everywhere and impacting everything and yet we rarely discuss it because we have come to accept it as the natural order of things, a kind of Machina ex Deus conveyor belt to a “profitable” tomorrow no matter how miserable that future might be. Yet, we still have free will and when something isn’t working, or it could work better, we have to summon the character to act.

By Steve Wishnia

Seeking concessions from hundreds of New York City building-service workers, the trade group representing Bronx landlords has threatened to terminate its four-year contract with 32BJ SEIU — but it has agreed to delay doing so for 30 days beyond the original deadline of March 31

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week reiterated his support for full pay parity between the FDNY EMS workforce, which is mostly composed of women and people of color — and the firefighting side of the department, which is mostly white males.

By Steve Wishnia

Subway station agent Benjamin Welcome was working in the 2/3 line part of the Wall Street station on Feb. 16, the day Noreen Mallory, a station agent in the 4/5 line section, got her eye socket broken by an enraged man who punched her repeatedly in the face until passengers on an arriving train intervened.

“If the train hadn’t come in, she would have been on the tracks,” he told Work-Bites.

'Operational Security’ Trumps the Right to Know

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week dismissed concerns the NYPD’s encrypting of its radio communications will undermine transparency and the ability of the press to report on breaking news — but did say he would look into issues raised by the union that represents FDNY EMS officers about the initial rollout of encryption in Brooklyn North precincts.

By Joe Maniscalco

Angry municipal retirees do not care what AFSCME Retirees Director and newly-appointed DC37 Retirees Association Administrator Ann Widger says — the union’s decision to put the retirees chapter in receivership last month, they insist, is retribution for fighting back against ongoing efforts to privatize their health care.

Plain and simple.

By Bob Hennelly

The day after City & State published an analysis of the Adams administration lack of transparency, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams blasted the Mayor’s encrypting of  NYPD radio traffic and his continued suppression of  the City’s 9/11 WTC files that would shed light on what the city knew and when it knew it about the toxic air in and around lower Manhattan.

By Steve Wishnia

“We’re here for one reason. Brooklyn needs Downstate,” United University Professions leader Frederick E. Kowal told a rally of several hundred people outside the hospital Feb. 29. Many in the crowd protesting the state’s plan to close the East Flatbush facility carried signs or wore T-shirts with the same slogan, in the white-on-black team colors and font of the Brooklyn Nets.

By Joe Maniscalco

AFSCME, under union President Lee Saunders, says the emergency decision to suspend DC37 Retirees Association officers and lock them out of their offices on February 22, has everything to do with the group’s problematic finances — and nothing to do with them helping the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees successfully beat back the Medicare Advantage push in town. But does it?

By Steve Wishnia

A group of nine retired transit workers has filed a class-action suit in New York State Supreme Court, seeking to get their access to traditional Medicare restored after they were switched to a private Medicare Advantage plan on Jan. 1.

By Steve Wishnia

“If it keeps going the way it’s going, there’s going to be a murder,” subway-train operator Evangeline Byars tells Work-Bites.

On Feb. 16, a 58-year-old station agent in the Wall Street station suffered a fractured eye socket when she was attacked by a man she’d woken up from sleeping under a bench.

By Joe Maniscalco

Union-busting companies know how to deal with walkouts, sickouts, boycotts — and even limited strikes — pretty handily under existing labor law. But how in the world do they confront a theatrical production that puts their exploitation and worker abuses center stage?

How do they contend with art?

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in The Capitol Hill Citizen and CorporateCrimeReporter.com

By Bob Hennelly

The confluence of ending billions of dollars in federal direct COVID aid — and Governor Greg Abbott [R-Texas] sending tens of thousands of asylum-seeking migrants to New York City — has members of the New York State Legislature calling for an end to the state rebating the one-tenth-of-one-percent Stock Transfer Tax [STT] that was enacted in the early 1900s — but has been refunded back to Wall Street since the 1980s.

By Joe Maniscalco

Former New York City schoolteachers instrumental in beating back the campaign to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance program have launched a bold new campaign to seize control of the UFT’s Retired Teachers Chapter — and put a real check on entrenched union president Michael Mulgrew’s unchallenged power.

Editor’s Note: The following letter from Charles Komanoff, a NYC safe-streets activist and mathematician whose traffic modeling has been influential in congestion pricing advocacy, comes in response to last week’s Work-Bites story about labor opposition to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan.

To the Editor:

You reported last week (NYC Unions Reject MTA Congestion Pricing, Call for Ending Stock Transfer Tax Rebate Instead) that most of the 102 unions making up the Municipal Labor Committee were joining the federal lawsuit against the MTA’s congestion pricing (CP) program filed last month by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew and Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella.