By Bob Hennelly
In a bipartisan rebuke of President Trump's stripping of collective bargaining rights from one million federal workers, 20 House Republicans joined 211 Democrats to pass the “Protect America's Workforce Act." The lopsided 231 to 195 vote came after a successful House discharge petition effort led by Rep. Jared Golden (ME-D) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-R) over the objection of Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-R).

Editor’s Note: The following is an op-ed from consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein.

Dear Mayor-elect Mandani,

It should not come as a surprise to alert citizens that your decisive victory in the Mayoral race has prompted your opponents – the privileged super-rich and their indentured servants in City Hall – to label you as an “extremist,” “radical,” or, in Trump’s view, a “communist.” How ludicrous! Your affordability agenda is hardly immoderate. Many Democratic politicians have taken these positions over time.

Editor’s Note: Ray Rogers is a pioneering labor strategist & organizer, and founder of CorporateCampaign.org.

By Ray Rogers

Since 2004, as part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, I have attended Coca-Cola’s annual meetings of shareholders to confront The Coca-Cola Company’s chief executives and board members over the company's involvement in horrific human rights abuses and other criminal behavior.

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of Phil’s first-person account of a truly unusual decertification fight that took place at a Brooks Brothers shirt factory located in Garland, North Carolina during the mid-1990s.

WAR STORIES BY Phil Cohen

As we resumed our seats at the bargaining table, Hodges asked if we’d had a chance to review the company’s package.

“As much as possible within a short period of time,” I replied. “Where do you come off trying to eliminate seniority from the job bidding language? That’s at the heart of every union contract, including the other two Brooks Brothers plants.”

By Joe Maniscalco

Eighty-nine-year-old academic and author Patricia Hills spent her entire professional career opening up American museums and cultural institutions to the exact kinds of “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” the Trump administration has now pledged to purge.

WAR STORIES By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part I of Phil’s first-person account of a truly unusual decertification fight that took place at a Brooks Brothers shirt factory located in Garland, North Carolina during the mid-1990s.

Brooks Brothers, the iconic manufacturer of fashionable men’s wear, was purchased in 1988 by British retailer Marks and Spencer. The UK conglomerate already owned a chain of grocery stores in New Jersey.

By Bob Hennelly

The lopsided success of the House discharge petition calling for the release of the Epstein files may be grabbing all the headlines—but there’s a second more obscure discharge petition calling for the restoration of federal workers’ union rights that is also a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump and his efforts to strip one million federal workers of their rights.

By Steve Wishnia

The Trump administration violated furloughed federal workers’ free-speech rights during the shutdown when it changed their automated out-of-office email replies to blame “Democrat Senators,” a federal judge in Washington ruled Nov. 7.

By Bob Hennelly

This will be the first Monday that Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani gets to set the media agenda for the city he has yet to officially lead. Indeed the whole world will be watching with the kind of fascination and hope it had when a very young President-Elect John Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the office, prepared to assume it.

By Carol Lang and Steve Zeltzer

Editor’s Note: Carol Lang is a CUNY Professor and PSC Delagate and Steve Zeltzer is the producer and host of the WorkWeek Radio program.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten attempts to provide an understanding of the ever increasing problem of Why Fascists Fear Teachers, but, in my opinion, fails miserably. Her book provides no solution that will meet the immediate crisis because she is unable to understand the crisis from a class perspective.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

During 1998, John Cummings was promoted to operations manager in the Receiving Department of Kmart’s Greensboro Distribution Center. The managers and supervisors on all three Receiving shifts reported to him. Cummings was a tall, muscular man in his mid-thirties who had previously held management positions at Walmart and Family Dollar warehouses.

By Joe Maniscalco

Unlike previous “No Kings” rallies held across the county earlier this year where demonstrators were a lot more circumspect about calling for a nationwide general strike to response to  the Trump administration’s growing authoritarian attacks on American democracy—Oct. 18’s demonstrations were much more definitive about the need to take such action now.

By Joe Maniscalco

Some seven million people, according to organizers, took part in this past weekend’s “No Kings” rallies across the United States—reportedly making the anti-Trump action one of the largest single day protests in American history.

By Bob Hennelly

President Trump is headed to the Mid-East to take a global victory lap for brokering a ceasefire in what devolved into a genocide against the Palestinian people after Hamas's Oct 7, terrorist attack on the Nova music festival in which some 1,200 people were killed.

Work-Bites

National Nurses United [NNU]—the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in the U.S. and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America [UA] earlier this week called for the U.S. to “immediately halt military aid to Israel” and “secure a permanent and immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of Phil’s touching two-part saga recalling a very special relationship with a remarkable woman named Valerie. Here’s Part I in case you missed it.

PART II – The Hand of Fate Points South

Three years later I moved to North Carolina, found work as a city bus driver and became chief steward of the union local. I stayed in touch with Valerie and periodically visited at her new apartment on 92nd Street and West End Avenue.  Riverside Park was one block further west, where the vigilante played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish hunted for muggers. One had to remain vigilant at night, but it was a long way from the crime-infested labyrinth of the Lower East Side.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

During the winter of 1970 at the age of nineteen, circumstances had left me homeless and broke on the streets of New York. A stack of arrest warrants associated with driving illegal gypsy cabs the previous year made finding steady work nearly impossible.

By Joe Maniscalco

Imagine you’re a farmworker in 2025. You make the food on tables across the United States possible. Five years ago because of the pandemic, people even began acknowledging the essential work you do. It felt good for a second, even hopeful, after decades of being left out of the conversation around worker rights. 

By Steve Wishnia 

A Senate bill to regulate employers’ use of software to monitor workers and algorithms to evaluate them and set their pay has won support from unions representing app-based workers, despite its apparently slim chances of passage.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of Phil’s two-part story about a community of Montagnard tribesmen who fought alongside US Special Forces in the Vietnam War, were abandoned for 20 years, and ultimately allowed to immigrate to Greensboro, North Carolina many years later. That’s where Phil met them working at a Kmart warehouse and started organizing. Part I is here in case you missed it. 

When the date for the long-awaited hearing on the forklift issue eventually arrived, Hin Nie and several Montagnard workers joined me in a Marriot Hotel conference room. The arbitrator requested to meet with both parties in the lobby to acquire a better understanding of this most unusual issue before we went on the record.