The Indypendent News Hour on WBAI // 28 December 2021 by The Indypendent published on 2021-12-30T00:25:08Z This week on Indy News we speak with: —Sean Petty, a pediatric emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. He is also an activist in the New York State Nurses Association, the union that represents 42,000 nurses in New York. In a March 18, 2020 interview with the Indypendent at the onset of the Covid pandemic in New York, Sean warned “I’m running out of words to describe how dangerous and scary all of this is.” With the Omicron variant sweeping across New York City and the country, he is alarmed once again. — Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls and VP Derrick Palmer to update us on the struggle to unionize Amazon workers. On Dec. 22, for the second time in three months, Staten Island Amazon workers hand-delivered signed cards to a National Labor Relations Board office in Brooklyn, petitioning that the board authorize a union vote. The refiling comes after six weeks of furious organizing by the Amazon Labor Union after withdrawing their first petition. This time, the union is targeting only the largest facility on Staten Island, JFK8. —Julia Thomas, author of “Rikers Island Transferees Now Held in Maximum Security Prison Where Drinking Water Tastes Like Sewage” from the recent Dec. issue of The Indypendent. Bedford hills, a maximum-security prison in Westchester is experiencing an influx of women and transgender and non-binary people — all held pre-trial — who are being transferred from Rikers Island. The controversial and inhumane transfers, which began in October, come after renewed calls to close Rikers and address the increasingly inhumane conditions on the penal colony. Genre News & Politics