NEWS ROUNDUP
Fund for ironworkers’ families ● H-2A oversight ● Millennial pessimism
Thursday, May 23, 2019
LOCAL
► In today’s Columbian — Clark College to cut 3 programs — Clark College will eliminate three programs in the midst of ongoing budget cuts, issuing notice to eight employees Wednesday that their jobs will be eliminated… Expected budget cuts come in the midst of bargaining with the Clark College Association for Higher Education, the first time the community college has bargained over salaries with the union. At a heated board of trustees meeting, union employees say the college is using scare tactics in order to tamp down on bargaining. Gerard Smith, a faculty member in the English department, said staff are “as upset as I have ever seen them in the last 28 years.”
► From KNKX — Workforce development to focus on underserved communities, local officials say — The high-paying jobs in the Puget Sound region can seem out of reach for a lot of people. Officials from King County and the City of Seattle say they want job training to benefit people who have been left behind as the local economy has grown.
► From Politico Magazine — Has Seattle found the solution to driving alone to work? — Three years ago, this fast-growing, hilly city of 725,000 people took a huge leap toward a longtime civic dream: becoming a place where it’s easy to live without driving every day or without owning a car at all. The results of its Link light-rail project, the latest in a long string of mass-transit investments, have been remarkable, and Seattle loves to tout them: As the city has grown in population, adding jobs and buildings, its car traffic has actually gone down. As other cities experiment with congestion pricing in their business districts and even banning cars from major thoroughfares, Seattle is trying another strategy: investing in more commuting options to take the pressure off its roadways.
EDITOR’S NOTE — But if Tim Eyman’s I-976 passes this fall, the Puget Sound region will take a giant step backward.
THIS WASHINGTON
► In today’s (Everett) Herald — Pow! Bam! Inslee delivers a one-two punch of executive power (by Jerry Cornfield) — First, he vetoed a sentence repeated in six successive sections of the transportation budget, each time poisoning a different bucket of money for transit. Then, he ordered $175 million be shifted from five highway projects to removing and replacing culverts impeding the passage of salmon to spawning grounds, and fish to the ocean.
► From Crosscut — WA cities will get ‘free money’ from the state for affordable housing — A new fund will let cities and counties keep $51M in sales tax revenue for low-income housing construction and maintenance.
► From the AP — Washington joins West Coast bloc of sanctuary states — Washington has become the latest West Coast state to enact broad sanctuary protections that restrict all local authorities from asking about people’s immigration status.
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
► In the NW Labor Press — New Seasons Market paid a union-buster a third of a million dollars — We finally know how much New Seasons Market spent to talk its employees out of unionizing: $325,855. A group of New Seasons employees in Oregon — working with UFCW Local 555 — had announced a union campaign at the company on Nov. 1, 2017. Within weeks, union-busting consultants were in stores talking to workers… New Seasons presents a public image as a progressive grocer, but hiring the California-based union-avoidance consultancy Cruz & Associates puts it in the company of some of the most anti-union corporations in America.
BOEING
► In today’s Seattle Times — FAA head says Boeing 737 MAX will return to flight, but timetable is uncertain — “It takes as long as it takes,” said Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell. “The 737 MAX will fly again when we have gone through all of the necessary analysis to determine that it is safe to do so… If it takes a year to find everything we need to give us confidence to lift the order, then so be it,” he added. “I’m not tied to a timeline.”
► In today’s Seattle Times — Top executive at Boeing’s troubled South Carolina plant is out — David Carbon, the executive in charge of Boeing’s troubled 787 factory in North Charleston, S.C., is leaving the company, according to an internal company memo. His departure comes about a month after The New York Times published an article detailing shoddy production practices and weak oversight at the factory.
THAT WASHINGTON
► From Politico — Infrastructure Week dies — again — Hopes for a grand $2 trillion infrastructure deal were rapidly vanishing even before Wednesday’s White House meeting between Trump and congressional Democrats blew up in a cloud of recriminations. One big reason: Neither party has offered a serious way to pay for one.
► In today’s Spokesman-Review — Murray says Trump’s action on infrastructure shows he’s in midst of tantrum; Newhouse blames Democrats for ‘partisan attacks’
► A related story in the Star-Tribune — Union files for new vote at Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant — The United Auto Workers union filed a new petition Wednesday seeking to hold a vote on its representation of workers at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant, the same day the NLRB dismissed a previous petition on a technicality.
NATIONAL
► In the Baltimore Sun — Johns Hopkins should stop suing poor people (editorial) — Johns Hopkins Hospital is under a harsh spotlight again for taking some of its poorest and most vulnerable patients to court over $4.8 million in unpaid medical bills since 2009. A new analysis by the AFL-CIO, National Nurses United and the Coalition for a Humane Hopkins has found the medical system is targeting people with limited means even more aggressively than in the past… The hospital should cease this practice until they come up with a better way to measure whether a patient can truly afford to pay.
TODAY’S MUST-READ
“Social Security is the most successful anti-poverty policy in the history of the United States,” said Peter Arno, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “And this is not true just for seniors, but across the entire life cycle and the entire population. It reduces more poverty for children than any other policy, more poverty for working adults and more poverty for seniors. So it’s an intergenerational antipoverty program.”
ALSO at The Stand — Beware this sneak attack on Social Security (by Nancy Altman) — “Chained CPI” might sound technical and boring, but anyone who has closely followed the Social Security debate knows better. It has long been proposed as a deceptive, hard-to-understand way to cut our earned Social Security benefits.
The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.