Cablevision CEO James Dolan.

Last week we reported on the 23 Brooklyn technicians who were fired by Cablevision for allegedly refusing to work Wednesday morning.

The fired technicians were a part of a group of about 70 workers who say that they were attempting to utilize an open-door policy at the company that allows workers to voice work-related concerns to management. They requested to meet with their vice president Wednesday morning to voice their frustrations over their nearly year-long quest to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with Cablevision--a contract which workers say is being negotiated in bad faith by the company.

The workers were told that the site's vice president wasn't available to talk when they initially requested. Many of the workers decided to stay and wait for him to become available. Cablevision says the workers were asked to head out on their routes but refused to comply.

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The City Council urged Mayor Bloomberg to postpone the negotiations of school bus driver contracts yesterday in a letter that called for "restoring much needed normalcy to the thousands of students and families affected by the strike." The stakes get higher for workers today as health insurance for the striking members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 expires.

44 members of the 50-person council signed off on the letter, which encouraged the mayor to accept a "cooling off" period proposed by retired Justice Milton Mollen, which would allow drivers to return to their routes while the union renegotiates its contract with the city. The council members pointed to the impact on school attendance as reason enough to stop the strike.

"Unnecessarily prolonging this strike puts the education of thousands of students, especially special needs students, at risk," the council wrote. It's not just a claim intended to tug the heartstrings -- the Department of Education reported that attendance has dropped since the strike began. Regular schools had a 89.4 percent attendance rate yesterday, while District 75, which serves special needs and disabled students, was at 70.6 percent.

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Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union hosted a town hall teleconference last night to clarify facts surrounding the school bus strike -- facts that they argue have been distorted by the Bloomberg administration and the media.

Last night's telephone town hall was held for the constituents of City Councilman Jumaane Williams who represents District 45 in Brooklyn. It marked the first of what the union plans to be a series of many telephone town halls hosted in conjunction with politicians representing various districts across the city.

"It's in the mayor's hands to end this," Michael Cordiello, president of ATU Local 1181, said during the teleconference. "Quite frankly we've been trying to reach out to the mayor for over a year. It was quite clear from both sides, the companies and the union, that the mayor holds the key to ending the strike."

Getting Mayor Michael Bloomberg to sit down at the negotiation table remains a faint hope for the union and the bus operators. Although the mayor helped broker Monday's meeting between Local 1181, the bus operators and a mediator, Bloomberg maintains his position that it's up to the union to negotiate with bus companies for the Employee Protection Provision that the strikers want to preserve.

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Mahoma Lopez, one of the leaders of the Hot and Crusty bakery workers, at the rally yesterday.

A crowd of out-of-work bakery employees and their supporters blocked sidewalk traffic on the corner of 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue yesterday to rally to pressure the bakery's new owners to recognize their union and reopen the bakery.

Tired of the workplace harassment, unpaid overtime, and sub-minimum wage jobs that they say was common at their bakery, workers have spent the past year organizing.

The owners of the shop at the time countered by hiring a union-busting firm, but in May, the workers won an election to form an officially recognized union.

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Hot and Crusty employees Marcelino Cano and Mahoma Lopez will have their jobs and their union back.

In one of the most remarkable underdog stories in recent labor history, 23 low-wage restaurant workers at a Hot and Crusty Bakery location on the Upper East Side have won a surprising victory.

The bakery's owners closed it August 31after the workers successfully formed a union, but the workers fought back, briefly taking over the bakery on its last day and maintaining a 24-hour picket and street cafe through the following week.

Saturday, it was announced that new owners had taken over the bakery, and had signed binding promises to reopen the bakery within 15 days, rehire its workers, recognize their union, and institute a hiring hall, giving the workers control over the hire of new employees.

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Lauren @JailhouseTapes, maepoe.blogspot.com

The scene outside Hot & Crusty Friday afternoon.

Friday was the last day that the Hot & Crusty bakery on 63rd and 2nd Avenue was scheduled to be open. Instead, employees and their supporters took the store over briefly Friday afternoon before police moved in, emptying the shop and arresting six people.

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Marchers at yesterday's protest of the Con Edison lockout.

The Con Edison lockout of 8,500 workers is now well into its third week, and there doesn't appear to be any end is in sight.

Negotiations between the utility giant and members of the Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2 resume today, but sources inside the negotiations say so recent talks haven't gone anywhere.

Con Ed locked out its union employees at the beginning of the month, when they wouldn't promise not to strike on short notice. Since then, it has been filling the gap by reassigning 5,000 managers to do the field maintenance necessary to keep the grid running through heat waves and brown-outs.

Locked-out workers tried to turn up the pressure yesterday with a noisy demonstration that began outside Con Ed's headquarters on Irving Place and proceeded to Union Square.

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Steven Thrasher

Front row L to R: Speaker Quinn, Stuart Appelbaum/RWDSU, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum/CBST, Sharon Stapel/AVP at podium; Ben Jealous/NAACP, Rev. Al Sharpton/NAN, Marty Rouse/HRC, George Gresham/SEIU

An historic coalition of traditional race-oriented civil rights organizations, labor unions, and LGBT groups met yesterday at the Stonewall Inn to endorse the upcoming SIlent March to End Stop and Frisk on Father's Day, June 17. The "press conference" featured an impressive roster of speakers -- including the Rev. Al Sharpton, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and NAACP President Benajmin Jealous -- and had anyone wanted to wipe out nearly every LGBT leader in the city, they could have done it with one strike.

But as historic as it was to see "Gay Inc" standing alongside black civil rights groups at the location where the Stonewall Riots kicked off the gay rights revolution four decades ago, there was one inconvenient truth which the event did not acknowledge. In fact, when the Voice even asked about this -- that the assembled were joined to fight a policy which belongs primarily to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is a very close ally of several of the speakers, particularly Speaker Quinn, and also the Human Rights Campaign, who honored Mayor Bloomberg last year -- it brought the "press conference" to a hasty end. (Like most events we cover, it was expected by organizers that the speakers would talk at us and we journalists would transcribe whatever they said and repeat it without question.)

Still, it was one of the most unusual events we've covered, and a hearteningly significant one at that.

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Perhaps there might be some positive outcomes from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn fisaco after all. In a direct response to the case, the newest version of the New York Hotel Trades Council union workers' contract calls for some employees to be equipped with "devices to be carried on their persons at work that they can quickly and easily activate to effectively summon prompt assistance to their location." In other words, panic buttons that function exactly like the ones that elderly folks sometimes wear in case they fall down and can't get up again.

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A disputed tip to a tabloid about MTA employee contact talks could deal a damaging blow to negotiations -- according the MTA Transit Authority's top honcho, Joseph J. Lhota.

In today's New York Post, an article claims that the MTA "has caved to several costly union demands," including "one concession agreeing to give subway operators three paid days off when they hit someone."

An exasperated-sounding Lhota fired back with a statement this morning, disputing the paper's reporting.

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