By Joe Maniscalco

Forcing older immigrant women of color to work punishing 24-hour shifts as home care workers is not fair and should stop, the head the agency responsible for assigning many of those same jobs told Work-Bites this week.

By Joe Maniscalco

All eyes in NYC’s Medicare Advantage fight should be on Mayor Eric Adams today, after UFT President Michael Mulgrew’s announcement over the weekend that he’s reversing course and no longer supporting the plan to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance program.

By Steve Wishnia

Workers at four rural nursing homes in Western New York voted to ratify a two-year contract, 1199SEIU announced June 21. The agreement, reached just before a strike deadline of June 13, covers about 300 workers at facilities in Allegany, Aurora Park, Orchard Park, and Westfield operated by the for-profit Absolut Care/RCA Servicer  chain.

By Bob Hennelly

Earlier this month, rank and file members of HPAE—New Jersey’s largest nurses’ union working at three different hospital systems—voted to authorize strikes if they didn’t get provisions in their contracts guaranteeing safer staffing ratios.

By Joe Maniscalco

Nope, contrary to what some of the most powerful union leaders in the country would have working people believe—organized labor does not have to abandon the Medicare benefits it fought so hard to achieve in favor of profit-mad Medicare Advantage health insurance plans [MAPs].

By Steve Wishnia

More than 300 workers at four for-profit nursing homes in western New York State will go on strike June 13 if they can’t reach a contract agreement. The main issues, according to workers and the 1199SEIU union, are chronic understaffing and unfair labor practices such as the owners imposing their contract offer on June 2.

By Bob Hennelly

Did the elites just not get who actually runs New York City?

In a surprise reversal, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has put the brakes on the MTA’s congestion pricing plan just a few weeks before it was scheduled to start on June 30. The announcement was made via a video announcement.

By Bob Hennelly

In America, healthcare delivery to patients and hospital finance are strategically compartmentalized to limit transparency. This is done to keep the consumer in the dark about pricing before services are rendered—all so that providers and profit-driven insurers can make a killing.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

It was more than a year ago that President Joe Biden declared the national emergency sparked by the Covid mass death event over—but here in New Jersey, and throughout the nation, our local Emergency Management Services find themselves in a deepening crisis as professionals leave this vital profession.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may believe the highest court in the state will still let him push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Aetna Medicare Advantage health insurance plan if he asks the judges nicely enough, but City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams says it’s time for “closure.”

By Joe Maniscalco

The City of New York’s decision to keep trying to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan following yet another crushing court defeat on Tuesday has convinced many in the fight that Mayor Eric Adams and his privatization allies must be crazy.

By Joe Maniscalco

Propaganda session? Some kind of weird one-way webinar where attendees agonizing over the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits were first encouraged to go get a flag and recite the pledge before getting any answers?

By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, New York City municipal retirees fighting the City of New York’s campaign to push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance plan pledge their solidarity with home health aides demanding Speaker Adrienne Adams allow the “No More 24” bill to come to the floor for a vote.

By Joe Maniscalco

Intro. 615 — the bill aimed at freeing local home health aides in New York City from mandatory 24-hour workdays — has enough votes to sail through the New York City Council if it were put on the floor for a vote today. All Speaker Adrienne Adams has to do is get out of the way and let it happen.

By Bob Hennelly

On the same day labor unions gathered in lower Manhattan to memorialize workers who died on the job the previous year, the AFL-CIO released an alarming new report finding workers of color are dying on the job at increasingly higher rates — and fatalities for Black workers hit the highest level in nearly 15 years.

By Bob Hennelly

New York State’s $237 billion dollar budget is a kind of Rorschach test. What you see in it depends very much on who you are. For the unions that represent essential workers, it’s a barometer of their clout in Albany a year after COVID was declared over — and after it sickened or killed so many of their members.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City municipal retirees fighting to retain the Medicare coverage they were promised when they entered civil service rode Albany-bound buses for more than 150 miles and plied the halls of state power for over two hours on April 15, all in support of legislation aimed at protecting what they’ve already earned.

Dear Scott:

Earlier this year, you filed papers with the New York City Campaign Finance Board to form an exploratory committee as you consider another mayoral run (I received an email from “Team Stringer” asking for a donation).

By Bob Hennelly

Unions representing the mostly women and people of color who comprise the majority of FDNY EMS first responders in New York City tell Work-Bites efforts by the City Council to better protect the workforce from deadly attacks on the job only underscores the pay and benefit disparity between them — and the mostly white males who constitute the bulk of FDNY firefighters.

By Joe Maniscalco

Problematic policing in the subways and a chronic inability to care for emotionally disturbed New Yorkers in need of help are the major reasons why MTA employees are going to work fearing attack, according to those Work-Bites spoke to recently.