By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

Last week, an arbitrator named Martin Sheinman delivered a 60-page opinion in favor of the Adams’ administration’s campaign to push municipal retirees into a privatized, for-profit Medicare Advantage healthcare plan.

By Joe Maniscalco

Collusion.

That’s what the campaign by New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] to push municipal retirees into a privatized for-profit Medicare Advantage healthcare program looks like to the many thousands who’ve spent more than a year trying to stop the plan.

Special to Work-Bites.com

Somehow, you just know when your temp job involves toxic waste things are not gonna go well. In this episode of “This Is Working” artist Jenner Bateman Grace interviews a worker who’s on-the-job experiences are both horrifying and hilarious…happy holidays! [WATCH IT NOW]

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

While the issue of Congress imposing an unpopular rail contract on the nation’s 115,000 workers that lacked paid sick time to precent a strike may have faded from the headlines, a series of high energy union rallies across the country on Dec. 13 are adding pressure on President Biden to issue an executive order mandating paid sick days for rail workers.

By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

Take a hard look around at some of the most incendiary labor struggles taking place in the nation right now — rail workers fighting the bosses over sick days; the demise of the Expanded Child Tax Credit; public sector workers watching their hard-fought contract gains vanish before their eyes — look closer and you’ll find the prohibitively high cost of healthcare is never far from the mix.

By Bob Hennelly

On Nov. 29, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared at a press conference that his “compassion” driven response to the city’s homeless crisis would be to enhance the state’s existing authority to involuntary commit the mentally ill in their ranks to ensure people “in desperate need” were no longer allowed “to slip through the cracks.”

By Joe Maniscalco

Jennifer Bateman Grace has thought a lot about working — the nature of work, what it means to work, and what our work means to us. Those deep meditations have now resulted in an ongoing series of whimsical YouTube video shorts about working in America today — and they’re every bit as insightful as they are fun to watch.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

It’s been a week since President Biden and a Democratic Congress took the draconian step of imposing a labor pact that most of the nation’s 125,000 rail workers voted down because it lacked more than one sick day per year. The last time this happened was in 1992 when President George W. Bush did it.

By Joe Maniscalco

The New York City Council — celebrated for being the most progressive in NYC history — is reportedly still searching for “clarity” on the campaign to push municipal retirees into a privatized for-profit Medicare Advantage health plan. Retired Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson has some.

“Your medical care can really go off the rails,” Peterson recently told Work-Bites.

By Bob Hennelly

Even as the nation finds itself in a tridemic, with COVID, the flu and pediatric respiratory viruses all surging, the nation is facing a critical shortfall of hundreds of thousands of nurses. In Part 1, I talk with New York State Nurses AssociationPresident Nancy Hagans, RN.

By Bob Hennelly

In the first direct vote ever by the rank-and-file of the United Auto Workers, members voted by a nearly two-to-one margin for someone other than Ray Curry, the incumbent president. But thanks to the crowded field no one candidate emerged with the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a run-off early next year.

By Joe Maniscalco

Sometimes, jobs can get so bad they kill. Ivan Frias, went to work last Monday November 28, and never came home again after plunging off the 15th Floor of a 23-story building located at West 72nd Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Tuesday of next week will be the last public hearing being held by New Jersey’s Coronavirus Disease Pandemic Task Force on Racial and Health Disparities where people can offer their first-hand account of their COVID tribulation that at last count killed over 35,110 New Jersey residents and 1.1 million Americans nationally.

By Joe Maniscalco with Dana Jacks

From New York City adjunct professors striking for a living wage to US railroad workers fighting for the right to call in sick — working class people across the country are increasingly feeling the power of collective action.

By Bob Hennelly

The House of Representatives voted Nov. 30 to impose a tentative pact reached between the nation’s freight railroads and labor leaders back in September. The deal was subsequently rejected by the rank and file of four of the industry’s larger unions but approved by several others. The 290 to 137 bipartisan House vote came after President Biden requested Congressional intervention to head off “a potentially crippling national rail shutdown” on Dec. 9.

By Steve Wishnia

A group of retired city workers is asking state courts to stop the $15 copayment for medical treatment the city and its health-insurance companies began charging in January.

By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

Despite two consecutive losses in court and ample evidence that Medicare Advantage is a bad deal for seniors — the City of New York continues to push it’s municipal retirees into a privatized for-profit health insurance plan.

The Adams administration and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee insist healthcare costs are bleeding the city dry.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee have been unable to take away traditional Medicare from the municipal workers who’ve earned it because retirees keep beating them in court — and on the streets.

By Bob Hennelly

A state appeals court has upheld a lower-court ruling the Adams administration can’t switch retired workers from Medicare to a private Medicare Advantage plan and force those who want to keep their traditional Medicare to pay more has added more pressure on the City Council to weigh in on the controversy while increasing the leverage of the the retired civil servants who successfully sued the city to stop the move.

By Steve Wishnia

A state appeals court on Nov. 22 unanimously upheld a lower-court ruling that the city administration can’t legally switch retired workers from traditional Medicare to a private Medicare Advantage plan, and can’t force those who want to keep Medicare to pay more.