By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part report

With six justices on the Supreme Court, the extreme right wing now has a majority to rewrite American labor law substantially — and there is an extensive and well-financed network developing legal arguments and filing lawsuits for it to do just that.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ.com

It’s a tough fact of life but ignoring it won’t change it, whereas, confronting it head on just might. Unions continue to be at a distinct disadvantage in a system where corporations use the legal system and their vast wealth to violate labor law with impunity.

By Joe Maniscalco

The Twitter office cleaners billionaire owner Elon Musk marked for termination in both New York and California last month, are part of a group of essential workers who, just a minute ago, were rightly being lauded as pandemic heroes responsible for helping to keep the economy going while many were too afraid to go outside the house.

By Bob Hennelly

The miraculous rescue of 18 children from an aggressive fire at an illegal daycare center in Queens this week is helping to highlight a national crisis that’s only gotten worse with the closure of 16,000 licensed childcare centers across the country.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite the roughly $340 million employers spend each year to crush their unionization efforts, American workers are filing more union petitions than they have at any time since 2016, and they’re winning more than 70 percent of workplace elections. So, how come most still don’t have a signed union contract after more than a year of trying?

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour we explore the continuum of COVID and the occupational health implications for America’s essential workforce with Dr. Gounder, senior fellow and editor-at-large for Public Health at Kaiser Health News. Topics include the lack of an accounting for the work exposure related deaths of essential workers during the pandemic and the longterm challenges of long COVID as potentially disabling.

By Joe Maniscalco

Their chief antagonists may happen to be some of the most influential union leaders in New York City — but municipal retirees refusing to be stripped of their traditional Medicare health insurance and pushed into a scandalous for-profit Medicare Advantage program are exercising as much labor power as any Amazon warehouse worker or Starbucks barista — and that’s how they ought to be celebrated this week.

By Bob Hennelly

The City Council will not advance a controversial bill being pushed hard by Mayor Adams and the Municipal Labor Committee to change the city’s Administrative Code 12-126 that covers how the city covers its 300,000 active-duty employees and 250,000 retirees.

BY RILEY JAMES

When my daughter was in second grade, she appeared in a school play as a member of the White House Press Corps. She could have tried out for the role of president, or vice president, or Secret Service agent, but she knew the role she wanted, because she wanted to be a journalist just like me, and she got it.

By Timothy Sheard

Editor’s Note: Tim Sheard is the founder of Work-Bites’ publishing partner Hard Ball and Little Heroes Press. We’re happy to share this little vignette of old-time New York City with you. Have a great work week!

My dad was a New York City newspaper reporter in the 1940's and 50's. On most mornings, he and his fellow reporters would clock in at work, and then go to the pub to start drinking.

By Steve Wishnia

Along with multiple vows to investigate the “weaponization” of federal agencies against the peaceful tourists who visited the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, another ritual of the Republicans taking control of the House this month was once again changing the name of the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

By Joe Maniscalco

Last week’s New York City Council hearing on changing Administrative Code 12-126 made two already obvious things a helluva lot clearer. They are as follows:

By Bob Hennelly

Several New York City Council members at the Jan. 9 Civil Service and Labor Committee hearing on the future of healthcare for the city’s active and retired civil servants appeared to stump the expert panel sent by the Adams administration who repeatedly had to commit to following up later with their answers.  

By Bob Hennelly

The tentative agreements reached between the New York State Nurses Association, Mt. Sinai and Montefiore Hospitals include a 19.2 percent pay raise over three years as well as groundbreaking and enforceable patient nursing staffing ratio requirements. The 7,000 union nurses, on strike since Monday, headed back to work today as details on the deals, that still need to be ratified, continued to emerge.

By Steve Wishnia

The Supreme Court heard a three-headed argument Jan. 10 in a case on whether employers have the right to sue unions in state court for property lost or damaged during a strike.

By Joe Maniscalco

FDNY retiree Ken Dolan’s wife suffers from Parkinson’s and the 80-year-old knew he really should be at home looking after her, but here he was standing outside City Hall on Jan. 9 with hundreds of other senior citizens trying to convince members of the New York City Council not to touch their traditional Medicare health insurance plan.

By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

There’s an African proverb that goes like this: “Support those who may have lost their teeth…because they supported you when you were teething.”

By Bob Hennelly with Joe Maniscalco

Were you one of those New Yorkers who were banging on pots and pans or hanging out your window applauding overworked nurses and doctors at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? Well, striking nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan need you on the picket line today.

By Joe Maniscalco

You know your for-profit, privatized Medicare Advantage health insurance plan really sucks when right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats actually unite to defeat its imposition on municipal retirees.

By Steve Wishnia

More than 7,000 nurses went on strike at 6 a.m. Jan. 9 after failing to reach a contract agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital in East Harlem and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, two of the largest privately owned hospitals in New York City.