Surprise, the NY Nursing strike is bringing disappointing results for workers
Last week, we brought you word that the New York State Nursing Association (NYSNA) was planning to make "major concessions” during the strike involving 15,000+ nurses, and yep, this is definitely happening.
After a month on the picket lines, nurses from Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospital systems have gone back to work. They ratified a contract with 12% raises over three years. Clearly, that’s a far cry from the NYSNA demand of $220,000 base salaries, which would have been a significant boost from their current average base salary of around $160,000. It’s also noticeably lower than the 18% raises that the nurses received with their 2023 renewal.
Why did these nurses approve a contract with such strikingly different wage results than they were promised by the union? Well, they probably felt that they didn’t have a choice. Approximately 4,000 remain on strike against New York-Presbyterian, where the bargaining committee is holding out for a commitment to hire 120 more full-time workers. There, one vocal nurse already feels “betrayed,” which suggests that they’re not pleased by the wage developments there, either. However, she’s ready to get back to work because “I miss my patients” and “we are all out of money.”
Once again, a healthcare strike isn’t producing meaningful results.
Why are Nevada brothel workers seeking to unionize?
This certainly isn’t a story that you hear every day.
A unit of 74 courtesans filed a union petition this week while citing intellectual property worries as their reason for organizing. They seek to join the Communication Workers of America. A few points on this subject:
CWA is further proving that they haven’t met an industry that they don’t want to infiltrate. After expanding a telecommunication workers base to include gaming, journalism, ski resort, and healthcare support workers, CWA organizers just couldn’t resist branching out again.
The workers believe that their contracts have “overly broad” terms that “could reasonably be used to claim ownership of anything we do,” and they want to protect their content creation on the web.
The company is arguing that these courtesans are classified as independent contractors rather than employees and therefore not eligible to unionize. CWA claims that the opposite can be proved, although they haven’t explained how they will attempt to prove this.
If successful, these workers would be the first legalized brothel workers to unionize in the U.S. Never a dull moment, as they say, in labor relations!
The Teamsters Won’t Stop Lying About Their UPS Contract Regarding Another Buyout Plan
In 2023, Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters substantially raised labor costs for UPS around the time when the company’s volume began to slow. To stay in business, the company has been implementing a multiyear turnaround plan that has included facility shutdowns and corporate staff layoffs. This is an unfortunate but predictable result of a high-profile contract battle that pushed driver salaries upwards of $170,000 annually.
The logistics company has now launched its second voluntary buyout program for drivers, and the Teamsters sued while requesting an injunction to halt the program, which O’Brien characterizes as illegally eliminating jobs in violation of the union’s master contract.
This has happened before. Last July, O’Brien reacted to the first buyout plan by claiming that UPS “is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs.” At that time, we scrutinized the master contract and found that the company agreed to “fill,” not “create,” 22,500 job openings but did agree to fill “at least seventy-five hundred (7500) new full-time jobs from existing part-time jobs” before 2028. So, the company only agreed to create 7,500 jobs, and O’Brien’s spin didn’t match the contract’s plain language.
Guess what? O’Brien’s claims for the second buyout don’t add up, either. The Teamsters-UPS contract has rules around job reduction notifications, but it doesn’t prohibit them because it can’t do that. Unions cannot protect workers from job reductions, although they often make that false promise.
AI Turbulence Straight Ahead, Including in the Legal Industry
As always, the AI-related news overfloweth, but Claude developer Anthropic’s safety researcher prompted sensational headlines by posting his resignation letter on social media.
In doing so, Mrinank Sharma cryptically warned, “The world is in peril,” and he recently published a study on how AI chatbots can cause “users to form distorted perceptions of reality” and “act in ways misaligned with their values.” He now plans to become “invisible” and pursue a poetry degree.
In other AI news, the legal field continues to see an alarming frequency of attorneys citing hallucinated case law in court documents. This month in Kansas, a judge fined patent lawyers $12,000 for relying upon “non-existent quotations and case citations” made up by an AI chatbot.
This industry is also grappling with how AI tools induce “a discovery nightmare,” as noted by employment law attorneys Matt Margolis and Noah Bunzl. They point toward a current New York federal criminal case, in which the government is arguing that a lawyer’s AI bot chats, which he used to refine his thoughts based upon his notes on client conversations, are like “talking to a friend” and therefore not confidential or privileged.
That would obviously be bad news for the client and could lead to even more lawsuits and fines levied against law firms and the companies that hire them. Be careful out there in the wild, wild AI west.
The NLRB’s Regional Offices Are Digging Out, Too
Over the past month, the three-member NLRB has issued at least 20 Board decisions and over 60 unpublished counterparts. They are still chipping away at their petition, and ULP backlog after an essentially nonfunctional 2025, but that pain is also heavily affecting regional offices, where staffers not only process representation elections but do the investigative legwork for ULPs, handle trials before ALJs, and much more.
Only 2 of 26 regional offices are adequately staffed to dig through their heavy workloads with around 510 total workers as opposed to the 670 reportedly needed to keep operations running at their smoothest.
Although the Board wasn’t subject to last year’s mass federal layoffs, many staffers retired or otherwise voluntarily exited while a hiring freeze was in place. Additionally, the agency received 5% less funding this year, so it doesn’t seem as though a hiring spree will happen soon, although the NLRB’s new docketing procedure should lighten the workload a bit.
