By Steve Wishnia

Under a gray sky on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront, several dozen Teamsters picketed Amazon’s new delivery station Oct. 30 in solidarity with striking workers in Southern California.

The 84 drivers and dispatchers from Amazon’s DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, have been on strike since June. Amazon refused to recognize a contract that their union, Teamsters Local 396, had reached with Battle-Tested Strategies, a “delivery service partner” the company hires to deliver packages for the “last mile” to customers.

By Bob Hennelly

Say what? We are in the midst of an unprecedented global climate crisis — so, how is it that U.S. military spending continues at an obscene rate with a wanton disregard of the consequences for the planet and every living thing on it? 

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we speak with John Braxton, a longtime Philadelphia-based labor and peace activist, who has launched Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities,  a national grassroots movement campaign in support of HR 1134 — legislation sponsored by Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan to cut the Pentagon budget by $100 billion, or roughly 11 percent.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

America’s hospitals are in the throes of a workforce crisis that’s driven by the lack of safe nurse to patient ratios that’s forced tens of thousands of veteran nurses to flee the profession and one in five new nurses to leave in their first year, according to witnesses who testified before a field hearing convened by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Oct. 27,  on the New Brunswick’s Rutgers University campus.

As a consequence, even though hospitals are scrambling to find nurses, over one million nurses are opting to stay sidelined with just half of New Jersey’s 140,000 licensed nurses choosing to work in the state’s hospitals.

By Steve Wishnia

New House Speaker Mike Johnson has an “atrocious” record on labor issues, major unions said after he was elected to the post in a strict party-line vote Oct. 25.

“It is absolutely shameful that every single Republican member of Congress voted for this unqualified, anti-worker extremist,” Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement Oct. 26. “Among other things, Johnson has called the PRO Act an ‘outdated way of thinking,’ co-sponsored the National Right to Work Act, endorsed overturning the ban on company unions, and proposed raising the retirement age and lowering COLAs for Social Security beneficiaries.”

By Bob Hennelly 

Under the terms of the tentative contract between the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) members will see an 11 percent increase in their pay upon ratification, a significant down payment on what will be a 25 percent boost in pay over the four years term of the deal. More recent hires, who in the past were sacrificed by the union to fund the raises of more senior workers, will see their pay nearly double over the term of the deal.

By Joe Maniscalco

Season 12 of the Workers Unite! Film Festival opens in New York City on Friday and even though it’s been around for more than a decade, its organizers are still thinking fresh with a sharp eye on cultivating the next generation of labor-conscious activists.

By Bob Hennelly

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union  [BCTGM] Local 390G have been on strike at International Flavor & Fragrance [IFF] in Memphis for nearly five months. On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we welcome Local 390G President Cedric Wilson — as well as Local 4-200 President Judy Danella; Council Member Chris Marte; and NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola.

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 Robert Ovetz

Courtesy of the author

The recently ended 148-day-long Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike by 11,500 Hollywood screenwriters is one of the most important strikes in decades because it tamed the Hollywood corporate beast

By Joe Maniscalco

Protesters demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza were still being handcuffed outside Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s Third Avenue offices in New York City on Friday night when Work-Bites talked to a 17-year nursing veteran about her feelings around the ongoing violence and the prohibitions against speaking out about it at work. 

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

Members of the Memphis union on strike since June at a protein processing plant owned by International Flavor & Fragrances are hoping to raise the visibility of their prolonged struggle at a protest held outside the multinational’s 521 West 57th Street headquarters in Manhattan on Oct. 18, at 1 p.m.

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 Bob Hennelly

Tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser Permanente in several states have won a 21 percent pay increase over four years following a three-day strike earlier this month, the largest such action in U.S. history. The tentative deal includes restrictions on outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

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 Steve Wishnia

If the minimum wage had gone up as much as event-ticket fees in the past 50 years, it would now be almost $70 an hour.

In 1973, when I was a teenager, the minimum wage was $2 an hour, and tickets were $6.50 to see Frank Zappa at the old Nassau Coliseum or Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls at the theater in Madison Square Garden. There was also a 50-cent fee if you bought them from Ticketron, the pioneering electronic ticket-selling company that was acquired by Ticketmaster in 1991.

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 Steve Wishnia

“A hideous little bundle was slowly lowered from a window of what had been the ninth floor of the scab shop the Triangle Waist Company,” Carrie W. Allen wrote for the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, on March 28, 1911. “It swirled and flapped grotesquely in the wind as it made its lonely journey to the street. Spinning round and round, it kept up a goblin dance as it went down, down, down, and finally lay in eternal quiet upon the ground.”

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour — the UAW strike continues. Some 4,000 UAW rank and file members who work for the Volvo-owned Mack Trucks company overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract. The proposed agreement included a 20 percent wage increase over five years with a ten percent increase in the first year and a guarantee of no increases in workers’ health care insurance premiums for the term of the contract.

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.