Work-Bites

National Nurses United [NNU]—the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in the U.S. and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America [UA] earlier this week called for the U.S. to “immediately halt military aid to Israel” and “secure a permanent and immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of Phil’s touching two-part saga recalling a very special relationship with a remarkable woman named Valerie. Here’s Part I in case you missed it.

PART II – The Hand of Fate Points South

Three years later I moved to North Carolina, found work as a city bus driver and became chief steward of the union local. I stayed in touch with Valerie and periodically visited at her new apartment on 92nd Street and West End Avenue.  Riverside Park was one block further west, where the vigilante played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish hunted for muggers. One had to remain vigilant at night, but it was a long way from the crime-infested labyrinth of the Lower East Side.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

During the winter of 1970 at the age of nineteen, circumstances had left me homeless and broke on the streets of New York. A stack of arrest warrants associated with driving illegal gypsy cabs the previous year made finding steady work nearly impossible.

By Joe Maniscalco

Imagine you’re a farmworker in 2025. You make the food on tables across the United States possible. Five years ago because of the pandemic, people even began acknowledging the essential work you do. It felt good for a second, even hopeful, after decades of being left out of the conversation around worker rights. 

By Steve Wishnia 

A Senate bill to regulate employers’ use of software to monitor workers and algorithms to evaluate them and set their pay has won support from unions representing app-based workers, despite its apparently slim chances of passage.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of Phil’s two-part story about a community of Montagnard tribesmen who fought alongside US Special Forces in the Vietnam War, were abandoned for 20 years, and ultimately allowed to immigrate to Greensboro, North Carolina many years later. That’s where Phil met them working at a Kmart warehouse and started organizing. Part I is here in case you missed it. 

When the date for the long-awaited hearing on the forklift issue eventually arrived, Hin Nie and several Montagnard workers joined me in a Marriot Hotel conference room. The arbitrator requested to meet with both parties in the lobby to acquire a better understanding of this most unusual issue before we went on the record.

Editor’s Note: This is Part I of Phil’s two-part story about a community of Montagnard tribesmen who fought alongside US Special Forces in the Vietnam War, were abandoned for 20 years, and ultimately allowed to immigrate to Greensboro, North Carolina many years later. That’s where Phil met them working at a Kmart warehouse and started organizing.

Montagnards were an ethnic minority of ancient warrior-tribes living in the central highlands of Vietnam, who considered themselves a separate nation with their own languages and religion. Having suffered a long history of persecution by the Vietnamese, they were recruited during the 1960s by American Special Forces to engage a common enemy. The Montagnards’ warlike upbringing and intimate knowledge of local terrain made them invaluable assets and the military guaranteed their protection regardless of the war’s outcome. They were dramatized in a somewhat exaggerated fashion by the movie Apocalypse Now.

By Joe Maniscalco

Amazon Labor Union co-founder Chris Smalls on Saturday called for a national day of action against both the AFL-CIO and the International Longshoremen’s Association [ILA] to protest what Smalls said is their complicity in Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Editor’s Note: This piece from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee is republished here courtesy of the author.

By Bill Barry

To err is human, to be a union organizer is to make mistakes. We all do it, so don’t sweat it. Here are some tips to try to avoid the next one.

By Time Sheard & Len Shinel

We often hear that working class folks in conservative communities are hopelessly drawn to the dominant storylines of the wealthy and powerful. That they don’t want to know about labor or “people’s” history.

By Steve Wishnia

In a ruling the American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE] denounced as “a setback for fundamental rights in America,” a federal appeals court in California on August 1 lifted an injunction preventing the Trump regime from terminating collective-bargaining rights for an estimated two-thirds of the federal workforce.

By Joe Maniscalco

A few weeks ago, Work-Bites took a look at the white paper warning labor leaders about profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans and how they are just “another Wall Street privatization scheme of raiding public funds for private profit.”

By Steve Wishnia

Eight state labor federations, including the Texas and New York branches of the AFL-CIO, have joined together to protest President Donald Trump’s push to have Texas gerrymander its congressional districts to enable Republicans to gain five seats in the 2026 elections.

By Joe Maniscalco

Amazon Labor Union co-founder Chris Smalls is expected to be coming home to Newark International Airport tomorrow morning after reportedly being seized and beaten by Israeli military forces while taking part in a humanitarian effort to bring baby formula and other aide to the starving people of Gaza.

By Joe Maniscalco

The secretary-treasurer of IBT Local 808 in New York is calling on his union leadership to press for the release of Amazon Labor Union co-founder Christian Smalls after Smalls was reportedly seized and beaten by Israeli military forces this week while helping to bring food and other aide to the starving people of Gaza.

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.