By Joe Maniscalco

Sixty-two years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I have dream speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On Thursday’s more modest March on Wall Street in NYC, the message on the streets was, “We better wake up.”

By Bob Hennelly

A steady rain in Times Square this past Wednesday couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of hundreds of union activists who gathered to welcome the national AFL-CIO’s “It’s Better in a Union” bus tour. The high profile rally to support the LIVE Broadway heavily unionized workforce came as union negotiators prepare to take on the powerful Broadway League in what is expected to be tough bargaining.

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 Joe Maniscalco

Restaurant worker turned working class organizer Hannah Lopez has been able to help mobilize some 36 different organizations in the campaign to strengthen New York City’s Earned Sick & Safe Time Act [ESSTA].

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.

By Bob Hennelly

As President Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky and European leaders grabbed headlines, Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza City in a final push to force out the population. Amnesty International maintains that Israel is “carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation” in Gaza and is “systematically destroying the health, well being and social fabric of Palestinian life.”

By Joe Maniscalco

Twenty-one-year-old Chloe Jacobs is a fourth generation Chelsea resident. Her grandparents moved into Penn South during the 1960s when the west side neighborhood was still developing as a cozy enclave where poor and working class New Yorkers could thrive and raise their kids in peace.

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.

By Bob Hennelly

In a wide ranging interview, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA warns every union in America is at risk if there's not a successful fight back against President Trump's evisceration of the collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

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.

By Joe Maniscalco

On the latest episode of WBAI’S Labor and Healthcare Confidential, Uniformed EMTs, Paramedics & Fire Inspectors FDNY Local 2507 President Oren Barzilay asserted—quite modestly—that the dangers his members face on the job are “just as high as the other [uniformed] professions” in New York City. Oren was being diplomatic, even understating the case.

By Joe Maniscalco

Last month, elderly residents at NYCHA’s Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan began receiving notices telling them they have 90-days to vacate their homes. But most aren’t going anywhere—instead, they’re staying put and fighting back against the massive privatization plan their neighbors say has “literally choked off the voices of the people who are most affected.”

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of We Decide: America at the Crossroads with Jenna Flanagan Pacifica’s Rev. Billy and Savitri D. sit down with Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement [AIM] leader who was prosecuted for the 1975 shootout on a South Dakota reservation that left two FBI agents dead. Peltier spent a half‑century in federal prison and has always maintained he was wrongfully convicted.

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 Bob Hennelly

Throughout our region, Canadian wildfire smoke continues to degrade our ambient air quality. Health officials warn the fine particulates could irritate the eyes, nose and throat, causing respiratory and coronary distress particularly for those with pre-existing conditions. 

By Joe Maniscalco

A strange case of “inertia” continues to grip the New York City Council this week where Intro. 1096—the bill aimed at shielding retiree healthcare from being diminished in the event of what Mayor Eric Adams calls “evolving conditions”—continues to languish.

Editor’s Note: In this open letter to Council Member Erik Bottcher, Save Chelsea—a grassroots organization opposing NYCHA’s plan to sell off and demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in the name of “redevelopment”—urge the council member to oppose the project. 

Dear City Council Member Bottcher:

Save Chelsea strongly opposes NYCHA’s plan for the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses (FEC). Its midtown-like density and grotesquely out-of-scale towers would be ruinous for Chelsea’s character, and environmentally disastrous.

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.