By Joe Maniscalco

Starbucks worker Joel Foote already had seven write-ups hanging over his head when Work-Bites talked to him outside the company’s Reserve Roastery in Chelsea this past Thursday. One more and he would be fired. “Fear is a tool of the boss,” the 24-year-old said. “The power lies within our labor — and once we understand that we don’t need to be afraid.”

By Joe Maniscalco

There are better cost-saving alternatives to rewriting New York City’s Administrative Code and pushing a quarter of a million municipal retirees into a for-profit health insurance plan that’ll only make corporate fat cats fatter while delaying and denying vital medical care to people who worked for the city all their lives.

By Steve Wishnia

Voters in Illinois solidly approved amending the state’s constitution to protect the right to collective bargaining and the union shop, while Tennessee voted to embed its ban on the union shop in its constitution.

By Bob Hennelly

On this special Election Day edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we take a look at the latest COVID data and give a shout out to the NewsGuild CWA for their one-day-strike against Gannett. The corporation owns over 200 newspapers and has refused to bargain in good faith while it lays off hundreds of reporters and pays its CEO several million dollars.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Friday, over 200 journalists with the NewsGuild CWA put their careers at risk by walking off their jobs as local reporters at Gannett owned newspapers at the Asbury Park Press and The Record as well as a dozen other news rooms around the country because the company refuses to bargain with their union in good faith.

By Bob Hennelly

The Adams administration Nov. 4 deadline for the New York City Council to approve a controversial revision of the administrative code to permit the shifting of city civil service retirees to a privatized for-profit Medicare Advantage plan came and went Nov. 4 without any action from the City Council. 

By Steve Wishnia

This Nov. 8, voters in Illinois will consider amending the state’s constitution to protect the union shop, while Tennessee will consider adding the state’s law banning the union shop to its constitution.

Bob Hennelly and Joe Maniscalco

Despite increasing opposition — a lot of it coming from his sisters and brothers in organized labor, UFT President Michael Mulgrew continues to push hard for a shift to a Medicare Advantage Plan for New York City municipal retirees. And on this week’s edition of the Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour, the UFT leader suggests changing the administrative code and ushering in MAP will give New York City the ability to tame the for-profit private health insurance industry.

By Joe Maniscalco

Commentary

So, some of the most powerful people in town are warning the rest of us that the most pressing — the most urgent — the most vital issue — facing the City of New York right now is the need to immediately privatize healthcare for municipal retirees — or else. I dunno about you, but this kind of thing reminds me of that time working people were told we had to bail out the big banks.

By Bob Hennelly

Faced with the failure of the City Council to change the administrative code to permit the shifting of city civil service retirees to a privatized for-profit Medicare Advantage plan, the city is moving for the “immediate implementation of a Medicare Advantage plan with the elimination of all other plans that otherwise would have been offered to retirees.”

By Steve Wishnia

A panel of five state appeals-court judges appeared skeptical of the city administration’s contention that it can legally change retired employees’ health coverage from traditional Medicare to a private Medicare Advantage plan.

By Helen Klein

The skeletons were fake, but the scare was real as municipal workers, past and present, gathered near City Hall on Thursday, Oct. 27, to protest the city’s efforts to substitute a Medicare Advantage plan for the health insurance retirees have counted on for years.

By Joe Maniscalco

One of the unions New York City municipal retirees charge wields too much power inside the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] and is helping to bulldoze workers into an inferior Medicare Advantage health insurance plan is being called “autocratic” and “anti-democratic” by some of its own members.

By BOB HENNELLY/Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour

“I’m Running not to reform the existing bureaucracy of the UAW, but to abolish it and put power in the hands of all the workers in the UAW that pay dues,” 34-year-old Will Lehmann says.

By Bob Hennelly

On October 20, 2022, my youngest sister, Rachel Hennelly, 62, died in hospice care at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey. My other sister, Jennifer, was with her. She had been triumphantly battling cancer for two years, but the COVID she contracted at a rehabilitation facility after being transferred from a hospital ended her brave battle.

By BOB HENNELLY

Aiming to reset the debate over the future of the healthcare provided retired New York City civil servants, the president of the largest municipal union insists he wants the City Council to change the city’s administrative code — not to force retirees into a controversial Medicare Advantage Plan as critics claim — but to preserve all city unions’ collective bargaining rights.

By Steve Wishnia

With New York State beginning to license its first legal adult-use marijuana farms and stores, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union [RWDSU] is preparing to organize workers in the industry — even though most of the businesses that will employ them haven’t opened yet.

By BOB HENNELLY

Stuck Nation: The Radio Labor Hour Oct. 17, 2022

Part I. National update on how the nation's dozen rail unions are voting on the tentative contract deal brokered by President Biden with the rail carriers and the unions' leadership.

By Joe Maniscalco

That’s for daddy’s work!

IBEW Local 3 apprentice Natalie Rivera returned home after her first day on the job as a union electrician still in her hardhat and hi-viz vest but the image just did not compute for her tiny two-year-old daughter.

By Joe Maniscalco

The City of New York’s ongoing drive to force present and future municipal retirees into a for-profit Medicare Advantage healthcare system is exposing some of the most influential union leaders in town to charges of being “scabs” and betraying workers — but the head of the organization formed to help block the looming switch says there is a way out of the mess.