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.

By Joe Maniscalco

Is there a more consequential issue facing the folks in city government today than the plan backed by the mayor and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee to push New York City’s retirees into a for-profit private health insurance plan calling itself “Medicare Advantage?”

By Joe Maniscalco

Colleges and universities have for years employed an economic system that’s allowed them to get the most talented and dedicated academics this country has to offer on the cheap — but students at The New School School and Parsons School of Design in New York City are calling bullshit on the whole operation.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

In response to an unprecedented spike in healthcare insurance premium hikes for essential workers, some of the Garden State’s largest unions, healthcare advocates and social justice nonprofits are forming the New Jersey Coalition for Affordable Hospitals (NJCAH) to press for more transparency on the runaway healthcare pricing. 

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 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. 

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

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 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.

BY BOB HENNELLY

Last month’s brutal on-duty murder of FDNY EMS Lieutenant Alison Russo-Elling, who was posthumously promoted to Captain, is no longer front page news in a city that’s struggling to recover its pre-pandemic equilibrium.