By Joe Maniscalco

In this Work-Bites video, New York City Council Member Chris Marte [D-1st District] urges Mayor Eric Adams to push passage of Intro. 1096 into law. At 65, Hizzoner looks good, Marte says, but we never know what can happen to any of us tomorrow.

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 Joe Maniscalco

Last fall, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proudly announced the “next phase of work” at the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan saying his administration and private developers were “rewriting the future of public housing across New York City.”

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 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.

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 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 Joe Maniscalco

Branded as Enemy Number One by an entire political establishment who’d like to cancel him as an existential threat to the high-holy church of American capitalism, while also fending off wild claims of being anti-cop, anti-Semetic, anti-Hindu, you name it—mayoral frontrunner Member Zohran Mamdani does have a lot on his plate.

By Joe Maniscalco

Instead of allowing the gutting of Medicare and Medicaid, as the latest GOP budget bill does, angry New Yorkers took to the streets of lower Manhattan on Wednesday July 30, in an effort to rally support for passage of the NY Health Act.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite putting out an “Equity Research” paper earlier this year highlighting “The Required First Steps” to privatizing the U.S. Postal Service—multinational financial services giant Wells Fargo told Work-Bites this week it isn’t actually advocating selling off the U.S. Mail. Postal worker unions and their allies, however, dismiss that as nothing but corporate “double-speak” and insist the threat is very real and immediate.

Work-Bites

In this on-the-spot Work-Bites video, APWU President Mark Dimondstein helps make the case at a Thursday rally outside the Wells Fargo branch on 7th Avenue and 39th St. in Manhattan that Wall Street stands to make huge profits if all, or parts of the USPS are sold off—but that those of us who live on Main Street would have less service and higher costs; rural areas would be especially hard hit; both small businesses and the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry would be devastated—and the ability to vote by mail would be undermined.

By Joe Maniscalco

New Yorkers who don’t like the idea of the U.S. Postal Service being sold off and privatized—not unlike similar efforts underway to privatize Traditional Medicare and every other public good—are being urged to come out and support unionized postal workers tomorrow morning in Manhattan near Times Square.

By Joe Maniscalco

This past April, labor advocates for single payer health care published a white paper called, “Medicare Advantage: What Labor Leaders Need to Know.”

In it, the authors remind labor leaders—including those in New York City who spent the last four years trying to push 250,000 municipal retirees into Medicare Advantage—that Medicare Advantage is “neither Medicare (the public, universal program without intermediaries between patients and the healthcare they need), nor is it an Advantage, except to profit-driven insurance companies.”

Editor’s Note: This is an open letter to NYS Assembly Member Tony Simone, NYC Council Member Erik Bottcher, and Congress Member Jerrold Nadler Chief of State Robert Gottheim, following the recent Town Hall held at P.S. 33 in Manhattan regarding NYCHA’s plan to to privatize and demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. You can read more about that plan here. For the record, upon review of the available transcript, kindly note that only one of the 7/9/25 CB4 Town Hall Panelists, Robert Gottheim, Congressman Nadler’s Chief of Staff, mentioned the expression, “In an ideal world.”

By Lizette Colón

I woke up this morning with the following  phrase roaming in my mind and soul: “..In an ideal world…”. It was a phrase used several times by you, as the invited elected officials to the CB4 Town Hall held last night at PS 33.

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City Mayor Eric Adams may have announced his decision in June to abandon efforts to push 250,000 municipal retirees and their dependents into a profit-driven health insurance plan nobody wants—but ever since then, Hizzoner and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams have been batting around the ultimate fate of retiree health care around like a ping-pong ball.

By Joe Maniscalco

Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Party mayoral primary with 56 percent of the vote in large part because younger New York City voters are sick and tired of the Democratic Party Machine and it’s fossilized goon squad of neoliberal freaks who’s sole purpose in life is to neuter working class power.

By Joe Maniscalco

War has never been good for working class people anywhere in the world and it isn’t good for working class people anywhere in the world now.

Roughly two hundred people assembled in Times Square this past Sunday afternoon for an emergency street action challenging the Trump administration’s unconstitutional bombing of Iran over the weekend. Similar emergency demonstrations were also held in dozens of places around the United States.

By Steve Wishnia

“Medicaid!” “Saves lives!” health-care workers chanted in call-and- response outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights June 23. The overhead passageway between two buildings provided a bit of shade but no protection from the 93-degree heat. “Keep the hospitals open,” called out a woman with “Healthcare Hero” on the back of her shirt.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite Mayor Adams announcement on Friday that he is abandoning the Medicare Advantage push, New York City municipal retirees will continue to “hound” uncommitted City Council members until they finally sign onto legislation protecting the Traditional Medicare and MediGap benefits they earned on the job.