By Joe Maniscalco

Has the election Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as a recent UFT Delegate Assembly resolution declared, “definitively ended the immediate danger” of New York City municipal retirees being stripped of their Traditional Medicare and pushed into a predatory Medicare Advantage health insurance plan?

By Steve Wishnia

“I’ve witnessed many people having heatstroke, and many people having limbs and fingers amputated,” a worker at a Consolidated Catfish processing plant in Mississippi told reporters Apr. 22, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation. Despite the heat from the machines and the Deep South weather, she added, the plant has only one or two functioning water fountains, and they’re both “unsanitary.”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City home care workers fighting to ban the 24-hour workday capped off Week 1 of their hunger strike outside the gates of City Hall on Thursday confident City Council Speaker Julie Menin will finally green light a vote on legislation they want by mid-May.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City law enforcement agents on Tuesday reportedly tried unsuccessfully to strip elderly home care workers of the makeshift tent they’re using to help withstand unseasonably frigid temperatures and rain during their ongoing hunger strike outside the gates of City Hall.

By Joe Maniscalco

The March 19 photograph of home care workers cheering New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin on the sidewalk as she promises to bring the “No More 24 bill” to the floor for a vote this month features prominently outside the gates of City Hall where the workers are now on the fifth day of their hunger strike. 

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite some of the most powerful forces in New York State arraying against them, home care workers on hunger strike this week in support of the No More 24 bill thought they were finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

By Steve Wishnia

New York residential-building workers and landlords have reached a tentative agreement on a new four-year contract, 32BJ SEIU and the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations announced late in the afternoon Apr. 17—three days before the current contract expires.

By Bob Hennelly

President Trump's social media post of his likeness as a Christ-like figure bathed in a golden aura  attending to a sick man was strongly denounced  as idolatry by attendees at a Yale Divinity School conference this week that drew hundreds of public theologians from around the nation.

By Steve Wishnia

Arlind Lela led a chant of “Kursluftujmë fitojmë” at 32BJ SEIU’s rally April 15. That means “We fight and win” in Albanian, a language spoken by many of the building-service workers union’s members.

Five days before the contract covering 34,000 residential-building workers will expire, a crowd the union estimated at 10,000 people assembled in the downtown lanes of Park Avenue on the Upper East Side and authorized a strike by voice vote.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani doesn’t believe public housing is worth saving, according to tenants pushing back against ongoing plans to demolish 18 NYCHA buildings on the west side of Manhattan.

Editor’s Note:Several years ago, Phil Cohen authored an indispensable training manual in labor law for rank and file workers called “Enforcing Your Rights.” Work-Bites is happy to bring you the continuing serialization of that book with this latest chapter on the National Labor Relations Board.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a federal law enforcement agency - created in 1935 to protect the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.  Those rights are spelled out in the National Labor Relations Act.  

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is celebrating his first 100 days in office with some favorable poll numbers and national headlines touting his “unique star power.” Underneath it all, however, Hizzoner has demonstrated an established pattern of simply ignoring inconvenient groups that threaten to undermine the social media confection he and his administration have carefully curated for mass consumption.

By Joe Maniscalco 

New York City home care workers announced on Wednesday they will start a hunger strike on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s watch beginning next week if promised City Council legislation ending mandatory round-the-clock shifts in the industry isn’t brought to the floor for a vote.

By Joe Maniscalco

Organizers of the latest round of “No Kings” demonstrations held nationwide over the weekend concluded their post-game wrap-up on Tuesday evening promising, “tonight is the night when we move from talking about what’s next—to doing what’s next.”

By Steve Wishnia

Claiming that a potential rent freeze is an “existential threat” to the real-estate industry, the trade group negotiating with residential building-service workers is seeking a two-tier contract that would pay future workers 25% less—which 32BJ SEIU union President Manny Pastreich called “disappointing and insulting.”

By Steve Wishnia

If Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls himself a socialist, then “NYCHA should not be an afterthought. We are 511,000 residents,” the Rev. Kevin McCall of the Brownsville-based Crisis Action Center told a group of about 50 protesters on E. 109th St. in East Harlem March 27.

By Steve Wishnia

A five-judge panel of the state Appellate Division has extended a temporary restraining order stopping the New York City Housing Authority from proceeding with its plan to demolish and privatize two Chelsea public-housing developments for at least seven weeks.

By Joe Maniscalco

“We can make this happen.” 

That was the hopeful message State Senator Joseph Addabbo [D-15th District] delivered to New York City municipals retirees in Albany this week to continue fighting for statewide legislation protecting the Traditional Medicare coverage they earned after decades on the job. 

By Steve Wishnia

Less than 48 hours into their strike, New York University contract faculty reached a tentative deal for their first union contract.

The proposed five-year agreement, reached about 2 a.m. on March 25, will raise salaries for the about 950 professors and others who work on contracts at NYU by at least $14,000 by September, with $6,000 of that coming this academic year, the Contract Faculty Union-UAW said in its announcement. It also includes what the union called “a meaningful salary decompression adjustment,” one-time raises for longtime faculty who are paid less than more recent hires. 

By Steve Wishnia

A few seconds before 11 on the morning of March 23, about two dozen union members and supporters in front of New York University’s Paulson Center counted down—“Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”—and broke into a chant, “If we don’t get it, shut it down!”

“We’re officially on strike,” a woman said.