NEWS ROUNDUP

Workers’ Memorial Day | Starbucks | 100 days of DOGE

Friday, April 25, 2025

LOCAL

► From the (Everett) Herald — Snohomish County officials honor Worker’s Memorial Day — The Snohomish and Island County Labor Council, a confederation of 64 local labor unions, organized the memorial. It took place in Everett, a city with a long history of union organizing…“We owe [fallen workers] more than just our sympathy,” said Heather Kurtenbach, a member of the Washington Building and Construction Trades Council. “We owe them action. We owe them change. We owe it to every worker today to not let these names fade into statistics. We must turn memory into momentum.”

► From the Tri-City Herald — WA honors 15 Tri-Cities nuclear workers, along with slain educator and others — Every spring, the Washington Department of Labor and Industries honors workers who have died of work-related illnesses or injuries. The 2025 honorees include 97 Washington workers, 21 of them from the Tri-Cities. Many were connected to the nuclear industry and their deaths are linked to their employment by the state.

► From The (UW) Daily — Labor union asks College of Arts & Sciences to ‘cease and desist’ reorganization plans threatening scores of staff — SEIU 925, a union for educators in Washington state, wrote in the letter that they are prepared to file an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint for interference with job status while the union petition is still being considered. The Advising Professional Staff at UW filed for representation June 28, 2024, and have not been certified or come to a bargaining agreement yet. The letter adds to mounting pressure on college leadership to slow and rework approaches to addressing the CAS $12.5 million budget shortfall.

► From the Seattle Times — WA international students are seeing their legal statuses get restored — Jay Gairson, an attorney representing 10 students who are suing the federal government for terminating their SEVIS records, said Thursday afternoon that three of his clients notified him their status had been returned to active, even though those three students do not have a restraining order or preliminary injunction that has been granted by the courts. Gairson said there is “still plenty of damage” done by the administration that has impacted these students, like reputational harm and disruption to their studies. It’s unclear, right now, whether the courts will allow any of the lawsuits to go forward, or if the government could reterminate the same records.

► From the Cascadia Daily News — Mt. Baker Roofing under federal investigation for weeks tied to workers’ false documents — “They arrived wielding their guns like they were going to shoot us, like we were criminals,” Fuerte told CDN in Spanish. “They corralled us into a room in the back of the building. They had a list and pictures of everyone who was undocumented and took them away.” The day of the raid, Kuske said his company was fully cooperating with law enforcement while ensuring that employees were being treated fairly. He noted that many of those detained were “tax-paying employees” and had supported the community by building homes.

► From SEIU 925:

SEIU 925 members rallied in Richland today alongside @seiu775, calling on @RepNewhouse: Hands off Medicaid! We’re standing up to protect care, protect dignity, and protect what our communities need to thrive. #HandsOffMedicaid #SaveMedicaid pic.twitter.com/DTZDptxzxO

— SEIU Local 925 (@SEIU925) April 24, 2025

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From Fast Company — After 3 years without a contract, Starbucks workers are turning to civil disobedience — Negotiations between the union and the company have broken down, members say. Since September, the union has presented the company with a number of suggestions around wages, benefits, and guaranteed hours, all of which are meant to be negotiations, but it says the company wouldn’t even counter those offers. The union (and the National Labor Relations Board) argue that Starbucks hasn’t been bargaining in good faith.

NATIONAL

► From Common Dreams — Workers in 600+ US Cities to Protest ‘Billionaire Takeover’ on May Day — “There will be no business as usual while they are disappearing people off the street, slashing critical services, and taking away our freedoms,” said Saqib Bhatti, executive director of Bargaining for the Common Good. “They’re causing a crisis in our communities. We’re going to bring that crisis directly to their doorsteps.”

POLITICS & POLICY

Federal updates here, local news and deeper dives below:

Judge blocks part of Trump’s order calling for proof of citizenship to vote (Washington Post)

► From the New York Times — Trump Executive Order Makes It Easier to Fire Probationary Federal Workers — Normally, probationary federal employees attain full status in one or two years, depending on the job — unless the agency they work for takes steps to dismiss them, which usually involves citing poor performance. Under the executive order, whose implications were outlined in a White House fact sheet, probationary employees will only attain full status if their managers review and sign off on their performance.

► From Reuters — 100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency — Nearly 100 days into what Trump and tech billionaire Elon Muskhave called a mission to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient, Reuters found 20 instances where the staff and funding cuts led to purchasing bottlenecks and increased costs; paralysis in decision-making; longer public wait times; higher-paid civil servants filling in menial jobs, and a brain drain of scientific and technological talent.

► From Common Dreams — ‘How Authoritarians Reshape Society’: Critics Denounce Trump Order Targeting College Accreditation — “Threats to remove accreditors from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump administration in order to stifle teaching and research. These attacks are aimed at removing educational decision-making from educators and reshaping higher education to fit an authoritarian political agenda,” AAUP continued. Max Flugrath, the communications director for the free and fair elections group Fair Fight Action, echoed this sentiment on Wednesday, writing on X: “This is how authoritarians reshape society: control what we’re allowed to learn.”

► From the Washington Post — Democrats urge Social Security Administration to keep field offices open — The request came after the General Services Administration, which leases and manages commercial real estate for the federal government, identified offices that could be closed or sold in a list that was later deleted. The agency previously denied reports that field offices were closing. “Given SSA’s recent attempts to close field offices — only to reverse course after public outcry and claim it never had plans to close offices — will you commit to keeping each one of these offices open?” the lawmakers said in the letter to Dudek, which included a list of the agency’s field offices.

► From NPR — More than 50 House Democrats demand answers after whistleblower report on DOGE — The lawmakers, who are part of the Congressional Labor Caucus, wrote the letter in light of news first reported by NPR, that a whistleblower inside the IT Department of the NLRB says DOGE may have removed sensitive labor data and exposed NLRB systems to being compromised. “These revelations from the whistleblower report are highly concerning for a number of reasons,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to Cowen. “If true, these revelations describe a reckless approach to the handling of sensitive personal information of workers, which could leave these workers exposed to retaliation for engaging in legally protected union activity.”

► From the AP — Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, but many say he’s gone too far, a new AP-NORC poll finds — About half of Americans say Trump has “gone too far” when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally…There is not a strong desire for more aggressive action on immigration, though, even among the people who approve of what’s Trump doing…The poll found that 38% of Americans favor deporting all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, down slightly from an AP-NORC poll conducted just before Trump took office in January.

► From the Washington State Standard — Compromise reached on Washington bill to cap rent increases — Under the version House and Senate Democrats announced late Thursday, annual rent hikes statewide would be capped at 7% plus inflation, or 10%, whichever is lower in a given year. The latest bill would also nix a proposed carveout for some single-family homes and shorten the time that new construction would be exempt from the cap.

INTERNATIONAL

► From the Guardian — ‘Morally repugnant’: Brazilian workers sue coffee supplier to Starbucks over ‘slavery-like conditions’ — “John” was just days from turning 16 when he was allegedly recruited to work on a Brazilian coffee farm that supplies the global coffeehouse chain Starbucks. Unpaid and without protective equipment such as boots and gloves, he worked under a scorching sun from 5.30am to 6pm with only a 20-minute lunch break, until he was rescued in a raid by Brazilian authorities in June 2024. The official report from that operation concluded that John had been subjected to “child labour in hazardous conditions”, and that he and other workers had been “trafficked and subjected to slavery-like conditions”.

TODAY’S MUST-LISTEN

► From Uncanny Valley | Wired — Protecting Your Phone—and Your Privacy—at the US Border — Under the new Trump administration, more and more visa holders and foreign visitors are being detained or denied entry at the border. It’s also becoming more common for people to be questioned or detained because of content on their phones, laptops and cameras. In today’s episode, we’ll tell you what you need to know about your carrying devices across the US border, and how to stay safe.

JOLT OF JOY

On this sunny Friday, sharing an evergreen track for singing with your girls while cruising around with the windows down (but absolutely not trying to holler while hanging out the passenger side of your best friends ride).