Rail safety | Boeing workers deliver | Spokane ❤️ immigrants

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► From Facing South — VOICES: The stone is in our hands, now we take the shot — Amazon is our Goliath. It is one of the largest corporations in human history, worth over two trillion dollars. It wields its power ruthlessly, crushing opposition with corporate lawyers, high-paid consultants, and million-dollar union-busting campaigns. It fires those who dare to speak up, as it did to me in December. It threatens, surveils, and retaliates. It tells us that we will never win. But like David, we refuse to cower in fear. This week, from February 10 to 15, my coworkers and I at Amazon’s RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, North Carolina, will cast our votes in a historic union election. The union election at RDU1 this week is just one step along our path. If we win, Amazon workers across the South will see what is possible. If we lose, we will fight again, because the only way to bring justice to a system built on exploitation is through collective action.

Editor’s note: read more about this courageous union effort from Reuters: Amazon faces union vote at North Carolina warehouse

LOCAL

► From the Spokesman Review — ‘They are not other. They are us’: Community members at Spokane rally urge city support for immigrants — Tia Moua, a political organizer for Asians for Collective Liberation in Spokane, also spoke during the rally in solidarity, urging the city to be a committed place for immigrants and refugees. “Spokane has become home to countless immigrant and refugee families who contribute to the vibrancy of our community, our neighbors, our teachers, our caretakers, our essential workers. They run businesses and they build the future of this city with their dreams,” Moua said. “They are not other. They are us.”

► From the Seattle Times — Here’s what advocates are telling WA immigrants about ICE raids — Those plans can include connecting with mutual aid groups that support “people who have been taken and families left behind,” helping make sure families’ rents are paid and children have food to eat, Mora Villalpando said. “We should be working with those that have been doing this work, those local leaders that have been fighting to protect their communities,” Mora Villalpando said. “We cannot expect right now anybody (in Congress) to come and save us — that is the reality.”

AEROSPACE

► From the Seattle Times — Boeing delivered 45 commercial jets last month, a decent start to 2025 — As Boeing tries to recover and increase airplane production, it delivered 45 jets last month, the highest monthly total since December 2023, according to company data released Tuesday. The January delivery total included 40 Renton-built 737 MAXs. For the first time since March 2023, Boeing surpassed European rival Airbus, which delivered only 25 jets in January.

► From the Seattle Times — Boeing hugs its suppliers instead of squeezing them for money — That squeeze on suppliers was only one of Boeing’s strategies to improve the share price that ultimately proved damaging and that Ortberg must reverse. Under McNerney and other CEOs, it also devalued its engineers as expendable, stomped on its unionized blue-collar employees, outsourced work central to the future and slashed costs everywhere. Presenting at the conference, Michaels said the entire aerospace industry “has gone through kind of a dark period called Shareholders First.”

NATIONAL

► From the Washington Post — Tech layoffs reveal the unintended consequences of mass job cuts — But since the tech industry slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs in mass layoffs spanning 2022 and 2023, the sector has shifted to routine cutbacks. On Monday, Meta slashed roughly 5 percent of its 74,067-member workforce, an effort to push out “low-performers.” Inside Silicon Valley, many employees say the job cuts have severed trust between rank-and-file tech workers and their company leaders.

► From Military.com — Unemployment Rate for Veterans Spiked More than a Percentage Point to 4.2% in January — The first jobs report of President Donald Trump’s second term Friday showed a troubling rise in the unemployment rate for all veterans from 2.8% in December to 4.2% in January, even as the jobless rate for all Americans ticked down from 4.1% to 4.0%. “It’s a very big concern as we start to see furloughs and layoffs” at federal agencies, where veterans make up about 30% of the federal workforce, said [Will Attig, Union Veterans Council at the AFL-CIO], a former Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq.

POLITICS & POLICY

Updates here, deeper dives below:

• Judge Keeps Pause on Trump’s Deferred Resignation Program for Federal Workers (New York Times)
• Judge Rules That Trump Administration Defied Order to Unfreeze Billions in Federal Grants (New York Times)
• Federal employees union files lawsuits over CFPB shutdown and DOGE access (CBS News)
• Restraining order granted to stop Trump’s cuts to health research amid Washington AG lawsuit (MyNorthwest.com)

► From the People’s World — Union leaders to try again on rail safety; Corporate greed sidetracked it — But whether J.D. Vance, then an Ohio Republican senator and a co-sponsor of the safety bill that died, will really help is an open question. He’s part of the Republican Trump administration that is hell-bent on smashing federal rules and turning business free—free to prey on the rest of us. For the nation’s six big Class I freight railroads, that means leaving them free to keep cutting costs by cutting people, via so-called Precision Scheduled Railroading, cutting corners on inspections, pressuring workers to cover up safety problems and shoveling cash in dividends, stock and pay–$146 billion total in the last decade–to their Wall Street capitalist backers.

► From NPR — LISTEN: What DOGE could mean for Medicare and Medicaid? — On Twitter X, Musk said he believes quote “big money fraud is happening.” Medicare insures older people. Medicaid offers insurance to low income people and those with disabilities. These two health insurance programs serve tens of millions of people, and they consume a huge part of federal and state budgets. So how could DOGE impact these services?

► From Reuters — Protest erupts after US consumer watchdog boss tells staff to stop work — The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents CFPB staff, filed a federal lawsuit on Sunday, arguing that Vought’s actions violated the Constitution by undercutting the U.S. Congress’ power to set and fund the agency’s mission. The White House said in a statement the CFPB has long functioned as another “woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy that leverages its power against certain industries and individuals disfavored by so-called elites.”

Editor’s note: ah yes, the banking industry, notoriously so disfavored by the powerful that almost no one faced consequences for tanking the economy in ’08. 

► From the Huffington Post — Donald Trump Is Running A Bulldozer Over Independent Agencies — Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Trump and Musk aren’t trying to make the government more “efficient”— they’re simply going after regulatory agencies they dislike. “We are in dangerous territory because we see this sort of serial lawbreaking by Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Van Hollen told HuffPost Monday. “It has nothing to do with efficiency… This is all about installing their cronies in key positions in government and shutting down agencies that help protect the American people.”

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