NEWS ROUNDUP

Nuclear workers fired (or not) | Praise for cabin crew | Fed. workers rally

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

 

STRIKES

► From the OPB — Under growing political pressure, Providence agrees to resume negotiations with striking nurses — Officials at Providence Health and Services have agreed to return to negotiations with a union representing nearly 5,000 nurses across multiple hospitals, according to a press releases from the Oregon Nurses Association. On Monday, nearly all Portland City Councilors signed on to a letter urging Providence to return to the bargaining table with the Oregon Nurses Association to resolve the strike. The letter, signed by 11 councilors, encourages management to meet the union’s requests to increase wages and improve workplace safety.

► From OPB — More than 4,000 striking Providence nurses in Oregon will lose health coverage on March 1 — Nurses union officials issued a statement Thursday saying that “threatening to strip health insurance from nurses and their families, including children, while delaying and prolonging contract negotiations, is shameful and inexcusable.”

 

LOCAL

► From KOMO — Seattle-area federal employees rally as Trump cuts national workforce — Hundreds of federal employees in Seattle rallied Monday against President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce. Rally organizers were joined by employees from the Environmental Protection Agency, who are responsible for ensuring safe drinking water, the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Aviation Administration, to name a few.

► From KUOW — ‘It’s a terror campaign.’ Federal workers in Seattle area describe snitching, secrecy under Trump — A Veterans Affairs employee said the directive to snitch on colleagues has created a lack of trust internally. “It’s an overnight, major culture shift,” she said. “We’re being told, ‘healthcare as usual, provide the care to veterans.’ But it’s really hard to provide care when you’re afraid all the time, and you’re exhausted all the time because of all of it.” Said another employee, at NOAA: “Even though we’re still scared and we’re experiencing these almost daily traumas at this point, we’re still coming to work with our mission in the foremost of our mind.”

► From Cascade PBS — Can Washington’s agriculture industry survive on H-2A workers? — “Many of these workers who originally filled essential agricultural roles are aging out of the physically intensive work, while others who settled in the U.S. seek year-round, higher-paying jobs in other industries,” Gallardo said. This decline in available labor has created a stark imbalance as agricultural demands grow, especially with modern high-density planting techniques requiring more intensive care. “The organizations that own the orchards, the warehouses, the sale agencies — they can withstand these extra costs easier than the local family farmer,” Harnden said. “When regulations come down, costs come on, and they’re going up every year. There is no relief.”

► From Cascade PBS — For many in Washington, Long COVID care remains out of reach — A paper published by the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease and co-authored by the Department of Health’s Arran Hamlet reported that in October 2023, 6.4% of adults in Washington state had post-COVID symptoms, defined as lingering symptoms such as cough and fatigue that hang on for months after the initial illness. A study from the National Institutes of Health found that Black and Hispanic Americans were disproportionately impacted by Long COVID.

 

AEROSPACE

► From U.S. News and World Report — Major Boeing Customer Avolon Sees ‘Impressive’ Progress in Production Following Strike — Avolon is the world’s second-largest aircraft leasing company. The sector is responsible for around half of Boeing and Airbus aircraft orders. “I think the first step in the journey is getting production stability, and I think Boeing are making enormous steps forward on that journey relatively quickly,” Cronin said.

 

ORGANIZING

► From the New York Times — Amazon Union Push Falls Short at North Carolina Warehouse — Workers at the RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, outside of Raleigh, voted 2,447 to 829 against unionizing with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, an upstart union founded by warehouse workers in 2022. In a statement, leaders of CAUSE said the election outcome was the result of Amazon’s “relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us.” They did not say whether they would challenge the outcome, but vowed to keep trying to organize.

► From People’s World — Whole Foods moves against Philly workers described as union busting — [worker Daniel Bard] referenced a reason behind Whole Foods’ strategy of objections: decertification. A decertification vote can only take place one year after a successful union election, and removes the legal recognition for the union at that location. Decertification also requires low union support, which gives companies incentive to stall by contesting elections, firing organizers, and even refusing to show up for bargaining sessions.

 

NATIONAL

► From the Washington Post — How did everyone survive the Delta plane crash at Toronto airport? — “The fact that 80 people survived an event like this is a testament to the engineering and the technology, the regulatory background that would go into creating a system where somebody can actually survive something that not too long ago would have been fatal.” Braithwaite applauded the cabin crew members for their quick work in getting everyone off the plane. “These people put their lives on the line — they’re the last people off the airplane, and I think sometimes we forget that,” Braithwaite said. “They serve us drink and food, and that’s wonderful, but their real function is to keep you safe.”

 

POLITICS & POLICY

Federal updates here, deeper dives below:

► From the Washington Post — Trump’s federal firings imperil government services from cities to farm towns — The dismissals swept in veterans, disabled employees, mothers, fathers, grandparents and young interns. It swept in people who’d spent years in other federal agencies before transferring and those who’d just landed their dream jobs in civil service. One disabled veteran who worked at Veterans Affairs overseeing patient care said he learned of his firing by email Thursday. He was one month shy of graduating from his probationary period, he said. The email cited “performance” as the reason. “This is ironic,” he said, “because my most recent — and granted, only — performance evaluation was the highest you could possibly achieve at my agency.”

► From the AP — Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in DOGE reversal — The Trump administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that DOGE’s blind cost cutting will put communities at risk…Many [workers] dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs. This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn’t further contaminate nearby communities…[like] the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where workers secure 177 high-level waste tanks from the site’s previous work producing plutonium for the atomic bomb.

► From Politico — Handful of dismissed Energy Department staffers offered their jobs back — Mike Braden, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 928, a union that represents federal workers, said about 30 of his members who help build and maintain high-voltage power lines and perform other work to run the power grid for the Bonneville Power Administration in the Department of Energy were terminated last week and then asked to return to the job. “When they come into these departments and agencies, they’re firing people and then they’re moving on, and then they come back and say, ‘Oh shit,’” said Braden. “They had no idea what we did. They said, ‘Oh, they’re the elite.’ They got to be doing labs and stuff. No, we actually control power in the Pacific Northwest.”

► From CNN — Hundreds of FAA probationary workers fired by Trump administration, union says — An exact number of firings is not yet known, but the head of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, AFL-CIO, said that “several hundred” workers started getting firing notices on Friday — and that they could even be barred from FAA facilities Tuesday after the federal holiday. The move comes less than three weeks since the midair collision over Washington, DC, that killed 67 people and that highlighted shortages of air traffic controllers and FAA infrastructure issues. The FAA’s system that distributes critical flight safety alerts to pilots failed just days after the crash and forced the agency to rely on a backup system.

Editor’s note: in a tweet, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced he’s bringing in SpaceX to help “envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.” You’d be forgiven for thinking Musk is essentially attempting to gut a federal agency and replace it with his own business. 

► From the New York Times — Education Dept. Gives Schools Two Weeks to Eliminate Race-Based Programs — The Education Department warned schools in a letter on Friday that they risked losing federal funding if they continued to take race into account when making scholarship or hiring decisions, or so much as nodded to race in “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” On Monday, the department said it had also canceled $600 million in grants focused on training teachers in “inappropriate and unnecessary topics” such as critical race theory, social justice activism, antiracism and “instruction on white privilege.”

 

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