NEWS ROUNDUP

AI shakeup | Costco strike threat | Project 2025

Monday, January 27, 2025

 

STRIKES

► From KOBI — ONA launches survey for Providence patients cared by replacement staff — The ONA said it is concerned about quality of care provided by temporary replacement staff. This comes after the union says it learned about a report from the Oregonian/OregonLive where Providence may have attempted to waive a patient’s hospital bills after media members brought up that patient’s experience being cared by strike-breaking nurses and providers.

► From Oregon Live — Providence health care strike reaches third week with no resolution — As the largest health care strike in Oregon history stretches into its third week, Providence Health & Services and its unionized workers are still at an impasse. On Sunday, at a town hall hosted by U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, the strike came up repeatedly as workers represented by the Oregon Nurses Association and supporters raised questions about their support for frontline health workers. “Nurses going on strike is a big deal,” Merkley said. “Providence needs to get back to the table and give these nurses and doctors what they deserve.”

 

LOCAL

► From KOMO — Western Washington firefighters return home after aiding California wildfire battle –Firefighters from stations in western Washington have returned home after spending several weeks in Southern California assisting in the fight against wildfires. Their efforts were part of a larger initiative to support overwhelmed local crews battling the intense blazes in California.

► From the Yakima Herald — Two people detained by ICE in Sunnyside on Sunday; city plans news conference — WAISN is a nonprofit group that is working to monitor and confirm activity with the help of volunteers. The group said three pickup trucks cornered a car in the parking lot of Fiesta Foods, where immigration agents detained two people around 12:50 p.m. Sunday. Agents were wearing vests that said “Police ERO,” for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations. WAISN sends teams of trained volunteers to locations where ICE activity has been reported, and has a hotline where people can report information, Executive Director Brenda Rodríguez López said Friday. The group said it will release confirmed information on its social media accounts.

 

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the (Everett) Herald — Costco stores could be impacted by looming truck driver strike threat — Truck drivers who deliver groceries and produce to Costco warehouses in Snohomish County and the rest of Washington said they will strike if no agreement is reached by Jan. 31. The 150 truck drivers are part of 18,000 Costco workers in six states represented by the Teamsters Union. Members voted Jan. 18 by an 85% margin to authorize a strike. If the strike occurs, it would impact Costco warehouses in Washington, California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Virginia, where the Teamsters Union represents workers.

► From the Seattle Times — Alaska Airlines flight attendants to vote on an improved contract offer — The terms of the new offer were disseminated to union members late Friday. Base pay rates are unchanged from the proposal rejected in August except for small increases to those with more than 13 years of service. However, the proposal bumps up slightly the amount of “boarding pay” from the first tentative agreement, which is of more benefit to junior flight attendants who fly shorter routes and board and deboard often. Online voting on the proposal will open Feb. 11 and close Feb. 28.

► From Jacobin — Striking Ski Patrollers Won Big Against a Resort Giant — Jacobin contributors Oren Schweitzer and Elliot Benjamin sat down with Emmet Murray, an eight-year ski patroller at Park City and a vice president of the Park City Ski Patroller Association, to discuss life and work on the slopes, organizing in a right-to-work state, and the growing union movement of ski resort workers, of which the Park City patrollers are just the tip of the mountain.

 

ORGANIZING

► From the New York Times — Amazon’s Fight With Unions Heads to Whole Foods Market — The roughly 300 workers are set to vote on Monday on whether to form the first union in Amazon’s grocery business. Several store employees said they hoped a union could negotiate higher starting wages, above the current rate of $16 an hour. They’re also aiming to secure health insurance for part-time workers and protections against at-will firing. There is a broader goal, too: to inspire a wave of organizing across the grocery chain, adding to union drives among warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon is already combating.

► From Starbucks Workers United:

NATIONAL

► From the Seattle Times — Tech stocks shake as a Chinese competitor threatens to topple their AI domination; Nvidia down 13% — The shock to financial markets came from China, where a company called DeepSeek said it had developed a large language model that can compete with U.S. giants but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s app had already hit the top of Apple’s App Store chart by Monday morning, and analysts said such a feat would be particularly impressive given how the U.S. government has restricted Chinese access to top AI chips.

► From Yahoo News — What Is China’s DeepSeek and Why Is It Freaking Out the AI World? — Though not fully detailed by the company, the cost of training and developing DeepSeek’s models appears to be only a fraction of what’s required for OpenAI or Meta Platforms Inc.’s best products. The much better efficiency of the model puts into question the need for vast expenditures of capital to acquire the latest and most powerful AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia Corp. That also amplifies attention on US export curbs of such advanced semiconductors to China — which were intended to prevent a breakthrough of the sort that DeepSeek appears to represent.

► From the Seattle Times — How large is the new Starbucks CEO’s pay package? Trenta — Starbucks granted new CEO Brian Niccol about $96 million after four months of work last year, one of the biggest compensation packages in corporate America. Friday’s filing shows Starbucks paid more than $143,000 in housing expenses, about half of which were tax-related payments. Niccol also spent about $72,000 flying between his home in Southern California and Seattle and about $19,000 related to other personal use of company aircraft.

 

POLITICS & POLICY

► From Politico — ‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies —  Some were startled by the directive that they report individual cases of people’s job descriptions being changed to “disguise” the DEI element to a special Office of Personnel Management email address. Some saw it as an order to snitch on colleagues. Career staffers who have been in the job for less than a year are on probationary status, meaning they can be fired without triggering civil service protections that insulate much of the federal workforce. New hires who have yet to start are also seeing their jobs vanish. Employees whose start date was Feb. 8 or later had their job offers revoked with limited exceptions, under a different OPM memo tied to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze.

► From the New York Times — Trump Fires at Least 12 Inspectors General in Late-Night Purge — The firings defied a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice before removing any inspector general, along with reasons for the firing. Just two years ago, Congress strengthened that provision by requiring the notice to include a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal. Agencies and departments whose watchdogs were said to have been removed included the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration.

► From the Washington Post — 5 ways Project 2025 appeared in Trump’s presidential directives — Many of the directives mirrored the priorities of Project 2025, the plan for a second Trump term that was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and written largely by alumni of the first Trump administration. A Washington Post analysis identified more than two dozen presidential directives containing language that resembled text published in Project 2025 — that amounts to more than half his directives since taking office, excluding pardons and appointments.

► From the Spokesman Review — Trump administration scraps plan for stricter rules on PFAS — Known as “forever chemicals,” perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, abbreviated PFAS, are a set of man-made chemicals used in thousands of products over the decades. High levels of them have since been linked to cancers, heart disease, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, low birth weight and other diseases. The Environmental Protection Agency announced it scrapped plans to regulate PFAS being discharged by corporations in wastewater. PFAS regulation also was targeted by the writers of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation document outlining potential policies for a second Trump administration. 

 

INTERNATIONAL

► From the Canadian Press News — CN Rail signal union issues 72-hour strike notice — The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers says it has given Canadian National Railway a 72-hour strike notice. The union represents about 750 employees at CN who work in signals and communications. It says that barring a negotiated settlement, the union will be on strike as of the start of Tuesday, Jan. 28.

 

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