By Bob Hennelly

The BBC is reporting that the next few days in Gaza are "make or break," according to the UN, as Israel's military pauses its ongoing attacks following a global outcry about the toll on Gaza's civilian population. The pause comes after the World Health Organization said on Sunday that malnutrition has reached "alarming levels" in Gaza with one in three people going without food for "multiple days in a row." 

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite putting out an “Equity Research” paper earlier this year highlighting “The Required First Steps” to privatizing the U.S. Postal Service—multinational financial services giant Wells Fargo told Work-Bites this week it isn’t actually advocating selling off the U.S. Mail. Postal worker unions and their allies, however, dismiss that as nothing but corporate “double-speak” and insist the threat is very real and immediate.

Work-Bites

In this on-the-spot Work-Bites video, APWU President Mark Dimondstein helps make the case at a Thursday rally outside the Wells Fargo branch on 7th Avenue and 39th St. in Manhattan that Wall Street stands to make huge profits if all, or parts of the USPS are sold off—but that those of us who live on Main Street would have less service and higher costs; rural areas would be especially hard hit; both small businesses and the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry would be devastated—and the ability to vote by mail would be undermined.

By Joe Maniscalco

New Yorkers who don’t like the idea of the U.S. Postal Service being sold off and privatized—not unlike similar efforts underway to privatize Traditional Medicare and every other public good—are being urged to come out and support unionized postal workers tomorrow morning in Manhattan near Times Square.

By Bob Hennelly

Last week, the Congress voted to end the funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, long a goal of America's radical right wing. Created  in 1967, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting was  founded as a publicly funded non-profit to guarantee high quality, universal access to arts, educational and public affair programming to 1,400 locally-owned and operated public radio and TV stations. For years, for fear of being blamed for killing off “Big Bird” and the beloved Sesame Street, forced enough Republicans to vote with Democrats to keep CPB. President Trump’s re-election radically altered that political calculus, however, and so last week the axe finally came down on CPB.

By Bob Hennelly

On this edition of WBAI’s "What’s going On?” we open with BBC reports that in central Gaza the Israeli military has launched "yet another devastating blow" to humanitarian relief efforts in an area that the IDF had previously refrained from directly attacking.

By Joe Maniscalco

This week, California farmworkers protesting the recent death of 57-year-old Jaime Alanís García after he broke his neck fleeing militarized ICE agents in Ventura County on July 10, chose to observe the “Huelga para la dignidad,” or “Strike for Dignity.” Most, however, did not.

And the reason they did not has everything to do with Trump administration policies designed to perpetuate an unrepresented class of workers in this country consigned to a state of virtual slavery.

By Bob Hennelly

The tragic death of Jaime Alanis, a farmworker, who was frightened into hiding when federal ICE agents laid siege to a state-licensed cannabis farm in the agricultural area of Ventura County, needs to prompt more of a response from organized labor that registers nationally.

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part III of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir. Read Part I here and Part II here. 

Two weeks later I made my annual pilgrimage to the Great Labor Arts Exchange in Washington, this time accompanied by Melvin Chambers who was treated like a celebrity. One of the guests handed her song lyrics written by an anonymous composer during the recent Detroit Newspaper strike, explaining that the words were set to the legendary pop song, “Dancing in the Street.”

By Joe Maniscalco

This past April, labor advocates for single payer health care published a white paper called, “Medicare Advantage: What Labor Leaders Need to Know.”

In it, the authors remind labor leaders—including those in New York City who spent the last four years trying to push 250,000 municipal retirees into Medicare Advantage—that Medicare Advantage is “neither Medicare (the public, universal program without intermediaries between patients and the healthcare they need), nor is it an Advantage, except to profit-driven insurance companies.”

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir. Part I is here.

A few weeks later I drove to AMI Recording in Burlington with the master and graphics in hand, making sure the owners understood I was going to be a significant, ongoing customer if they met my demands. I placed a rush order for five-hundred copies to be picked up in time for the choir’s new album to make its debut at the union’s Southern Regional convention in Atlanta on June 7. The cost came to $675 and including studio time and various miscellaneous charges, the project was only $300 over budget.

By Bob Hennelly

Almost six months into Trump 2.0 and President Trump is pressing ahead with his controversial plan to deport millions of immigrants, many of whom are essential workers in the healthcare, agricultural and construction sectors. While the federal courts slow the pace of the implementation of Trump’s agenda, The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been largely deferential to the White House letting President Trump move ahead while the litigation in the lower courts proceeds.

By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part I of Phil’s bittersweet story of the Local 1077 Whiteville Choir.

During April 1995, the North Carolina District of ACTWU held its yearly conference in Greensboro’s spacious union hall. The delegates and staff were blown away by the choir providing entertainment. The twenty-three singers and one electric keyboard player named Kenneth Stanley all worked at the Whiteville Apparel suit factory in Eastern North Carolina and were members of Local 1077.

Editor’s Note: This is an open letter to NYS Assembly Member Tony Simone, NYC Council Member Erik Bottcher, and Congress Member Jerrold Nadler Chief of State Robert Gottheim, following the recent Town Hall held at P.S. 33 in Manhattan regarding NYCHA’s plan to to privatize and demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. You can read more about that plan here. For the record, upon review of the available transcript, kindly note that only one of the 7/9/25 CB4 Town Hall Panelists, Robert Gottheim, Congressman Nadler’s Chief of Staff, mentioned the expression, “In an ideal world.”

By Lizette Colón

I woke up this morning with the following  phrase roaming in my mind and soul: “..In an ideal world…”. It was a phrase used several times by you, as the invited elected officials to the CB4 Town Hall held last night at PS 33.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may have announced his decision in June to abandon efforts to push 250,000 municipal retirees and their dependents into a profit-driven health insurance plan nobody wants—but ever since then, Hizzoner and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams have been batting around the ultimate fate of retiree health care around like a ping-pong ball.

By Bob Hennelly

Across the country and here in our region local and state governments are scrambling to assess the damage from the passage of President Trump's so-called "Big Beautiful" bill. The new budget bill strips 17 million Americans of their healthcare and shrinks the vital food stamp program—all to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers and corporations while exponentially increasing spending to execute Trump's mass deportation program by making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the nation's largest law enforcement agency. 

By Joe Maniscalco

Two minutes into any basic economics course and you learn labor exists as a cost at the bottom of the business ledger eating into the boss’s profits. A few pages into Peter Kellman’s slim but essential “Building Unions, Past, Present, and Future” history you understand that the laws of this land were written to favor the bosses in their endless quest to maximize those profits. The game is, in fact, rigged. And it has been from the very beginning.