By Bob Hennelly

The lopsided success of the House discharge petition calling for the release of the Epstein files may be grabbing all the headlines—but there’s a second more obscure discharge petition calling for the restoration of federal workers’ union rights that is also a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump and his efforts to strip one million federal workers of their rights.

By Steve Wishnia

The Trump administration violated furloughed federal workers’ free-speech rights during the shutdown when it changed their automated out-of-office email replies to blame “Democrat Senators,” a federal judge in Washington ruled Nov. 7.

By Bob Hennelly

This will be the first Monday that Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani gets to set the media agenda for the city he has yet to officially lead. Indeed the whole world will be watching with the kind of fascination and hope it had when a very young President-Elect John Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the office, prepared to assume it.

By Carol Lang and Steve Zeltzer

Editor’s Note: Carol Lang is a CUNY Professor and PSC Delagate and Steve Zeltzer is the producer and host of the WorkWeek Radio program.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten attempts to provide an understanding of the ever increasing problem of Why Fascists Fear Teachers, but, in my opinion, fails miserably. Her book provides no solution that will meet the immediate crisis because she is unable to understand the crisis from a class perspective.

War Stories By Phil Cohen

During 1998, John Cummings was promoted to operations manager in the Receiving Department of Kmart’s Greensboro Distribution Center. The managers and supervisors on all three Receiving shifts reported to him. Cummings was a tall, muscular man in his mid-thirties who had previously held management positions at Walmart and Family Dollar warehouses.

By Joe Maniscalco

Unlike previous “No Kings” rallies held across the county earlier this year where demonstrators were a lot more circumspect about calling for a nationwide general strike to response to  the Trump administration’s growing authoritarian attacks on American democracy—Oct. 18’s demonstrations were much more definitive about the need to take such action now.

By Joe Maniscalco

Some seven million people, according to organizers, took part in this past weekend’s “No Kings” rallies across the United States—reportedly making the anti-Trump action one of the largest single day protests in American history.

By Bob Hennelly

President Trump is headed to the Mid-East to take a global victory lap for brokering a ceasefire in what devolved into a genocide against the Palestinian people after Hamas's Oct 7, terrorist attack on the Nova music festival in which some 1,200 people were killed.

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.