By Steve Wishnia

A quartet of people in wheelchairs, joined by a handful of supporters, protested outside City Councilmember Christopher Marte’s Chinatown district office May 12, saying that Intro 303, his bill to prohibit 24-hour shifts for home-care aides, would lead to patients getting their care cut off.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: 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 has been happy to bring you the serialization of that book with this concluding chapter on Just Cause.

If you ask most workers about the most important part of a union contract, they’ll usually say money or seniority. But both answers are wrong. The most important part of a union contract lies in two simple words: Just Cause.  Sometimes buried within the most unlikely contract article, you’ll find, “the company can discipline or fire employees for just cause.”

By Joe Maniscalco

The hard-fought struggle to finally end institutionalized wage theft and round-the-clock shifts in New York City’s home care industry entered a new phase this week with a possible vote a bill nobody seems to want. 

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City public Housing advocate Layla Law-Gisiko may have lost her bid to win last month’s special election to fill Erik Bottcher’s vacated District 3 Council seat, but the vote once again proved that Chelsea residents reject plans to demolition their community.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of Frontline Voices on WBAI, Samar Ali, a Research Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University, talks about how last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision on Louisiana vs. Callais could reshape the political landscape in America.

By Bob Hennelly

On the latest episode of “What’s Going On” I speak with Dr. Joe Wilson and Larry Hamm, founder of the People's Organization for Progress, who recap May Day's dynamic American rebirth even as SCOTUS demolishes the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Louisiana delays a primary that was already underway.

By Steve Wishnia

Washington Square Park was a sea of orange May 1, as the Laborers International Union of North America brought hundreds of members from as far as New England and Delaware for the May Day march.

By Joe Maniscalco

Repealing the New York State Stock Transfer Tax rebate could, according to supporters, generate as much as $40 billion to $75 billion annually for the most urgent needs facing working class New Yorkers today.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood inside Washington Square Park on May Day waxing poetically about socialist icon Eugene V. Debs and the battle for the eight hour workday.

But just 20-some-odd blocks away outside the gates of City Hall home care workers and their allies fighting to end the 24-hour workday and other working class struggles against privatization and displacement called out Hizzoner’s hypocrisy in turning a blind eye to all those ongoing battles.

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.