By Steve Wishnia

SALAMANCA, N.Y.— Sandra Lamacchia, a licensed practical nurse at a nursing home in Salamanca, about 60 miles south of Buffalo, says she wishes her employer would hire temporary laundry workers.

By Bob Hennelly

Citing a 96-percent compliance rate from the municipal workforce, the City of New York will no longer require civil servants to get the COVID vaccine Mayor Eric Adams announced today. The vax mandate resulted in the termination of 1,780 municipal workers and sparked multiple lawsuits which are ongoing.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, when he announced his support of a plan to push municipal retirees into a privatized Medicare Advantage program last year, said “the city has had, and will continue to have, your best interests at heart.” 

Why then does convening a Blue Ribbon Panel where those interests would be directly represented by retirees themselves appear to be the last thing Hizzoner wants to talk about?

By Bob Hennelly

The deadline for the City Council to change its Administrative code that covers how the city provides healthcare insurance for its active-duty workforce and retirees came and went last month without the Council opting to act after a marathon Jan. 9 public hearing where scores of city retirees blasted the proposal.

By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a two-part Work-Bites report

If the Supreme Court’s far-right majority wants to rewrite labor law, it can’t simply do it by fiat. Even “if they don’t care about stare decisis,” the general principle is that to overturn an established precedent, they have to establish that it was “egregiously wrongly decided,” explains West Virginia University Law School professor Anne Lofaso, a former National Labor Relations Board attorney.

By Bob Hennelly

Here’s a quick look at this week’s Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour - listen to the entire show below!

By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part report

With six justices on the Supreme Court, the extreme right wing now has a majority to rewrite American labor law substantially — and there is an extensive and well-financed network developing legal arguments and filing lawsuits for it to do just that.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ.com

It’s a tough fact of life but ignoring it won’t change it, whereas, confronting it head on just might. Unions continue to be at a distinct disadvantage in a system where corporations use the legal system and their vast wealth to violate labor law with impunity.

By Joe Maniscalco

The Twitter office cleaners billionaire owner Elon Musk marked for termination in both New York and California last month, are part of a group of essential workers who, just a minute ago, were rightly being lauded as pandemic heroes responsible for helping to keep the economy going while many were too afraid to go outside the house.

By Bob Hennelly

The miraculous rescue of 18 children from an aggressive fire at an illegal daycare center in Queens this week is helping to highlight a national crisis that’s only gotten worse with the closure of 16,000 licensed childcare centers across the country.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite the roughly $340 million employers spend each year to crush their unionization efforts, American workers are filing more union petitions than they have at any time since 2016, and they’re winning more than 70 percent of workplace elections. So, how come most still don’t have a signed union contract after more than a year of trying?

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour we explore the continuum of COVID and the occupational health implications for America’s essential workforce with Dr. Gounder, senior fellow and editor-at-large for Public Health at Kaiser Health News. Topics include the lack of an accounting for the work exposure related deaths of essential workers during the pandemic and the longterm challenges of long COVID as potentially disabling.

By Joe Maniscalco

Their chief antagonists may happen to be some of the most influential union leaders in New York City — but municipal retirees refusing to be stripped of their traditional Medicare health insurance and pushed into a scandalous for-profit Medicare Advantage program are exercising as much labor power as any Amazon warehouse worker or Starbucks barista — and that’s how they ought to be celebrated this week.

By Bob Hennelly

The City Council will not advance a controversial bill being pushed hard by Mayor Adams and the Municipal Labor Committee to change the city’s Administrative Code 12-126 that covers how the city covers its 300,000 active-duty employees and 250,000 retirees.

BY RILEY JAMES

When my daughter was in second grade, she appeared in a school play as a member of the White House Press Corps. She could have tried out for the role of president, or vice president, or Secret Service agent, but she knew the role she wanted, because she wanted to be a journalist just like me, and she got it.

By Timothy Sheard

Editor’s Note: Tim Sheard is the founder of Work-Bites’ publishing partner Hard Ball and Little Heroes Press. We’re happy to share this little vignette of old-time New York City with you. Have a great work week!

My dad was a New York City newspaper reporter in the 1940's and 50's. On most mornings, he and his fellow reporters would clock in at work, and then go to the pub to start drinking.

By Steve Wishnia

Along with multiple vows to investigate the “weaponization” of federal agencies against the peaceful tourists who visited the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, another ritual of the Republicans taking control of the House this month was once again changing the name of the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

By Joe Maniscalco

Last week’s New York City Council hearing on changing Administrative Code 12-126 made two already obvious things a helluva lot clearer. They are as follows:

By Bob Hennelly

Several New York City Council members at the Jan. 9 Civil Service and Labor Committee hearing on the future of healthcare for the city’s active and retired civil servants appeared to stump the expert panel sent by the Adams administration who repeatedly had to commit to following up later with their answers.  

By Bob Hennelly

The tentative agreements reached between the New York State Nurses Association, Mt. Sinai and Montefiore Hospitals include a 19.2 percent pay raise over three years as well as groundbreaking and enforceable patient nursing staffing ratio requirements. The 7,000 union nurses, on strike since Monday, headed back to work today as details on the deals, that still need to be ratified, continued to emerge.