Starbucks organizing | Disabled workers | Farmworkers targeted?

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

STRIKES

► From Variety — Video Game Companies Release Final Offer to SAG-AFTRA Addressing AI Demands Amid 9-Month Strike — In a statement provided to Variety Monday, SAG-AFTRA “condemns” the video game companies’ move to release the proposal for publication and says its negotiating committee “responded to that offer within 72 hours – on May 2 – with our own response to the open issues relating to artificial intelligence” and that “we have to date received no response to our counter offer.”

► From ABC News — Thousands of machinists union members go on strike at jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney — Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers were picketing at manufacturing locations in East Hartford and Middletown, after about 77% of nearly 2,100 union members voted to approve their first strike since 2001, union officials said. Their contract expired late Sunday. “Pratt and Whitney is a powerhouse in military and commercial aerospace products because our membership makes it so,” David Sullivan, the union’s eastern territory vice president, said in a statement. ”This offer does not address the membership concerns, and the membership made their decision — we will continue to fight for a fair contract.”

► From Assembly Magazine — UAW Workers Go on Strike at Lockheed Martin — Members of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) have gone on strike at Lockheed Martin assembly plants in Denver and Orlando, FL, and after negotiations over a new labor agreement were rejected. The union alleges unfair labor practices by Lockheed Martin, as well as disagreements over starting salary, pay scale and raises, and recognizing Veterans Day as a company holiday.

LOCAL

► From Real Change News — “We’re stronger organized, no matter what happens”: Starbucks workers continue union drive under Trump — Mari Cosgrove, a barista at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Capitol Hill and a member of the union’s bargaining team, said workers couldn’t count on the government to protect them and must instead fight for their rights themselves. They noted an April 14 announcement by Starbucks that it will implement a stricter dress code, which the union has pushed back on. “It’s easy to just feel like things will be okay when the government is in a spot that seems friendlier to you, but as we’re seeing, things can change at any time,” Cosgrove said.

► From Cascade PBS — WA health plan contractor warns of Medicaid cuts — Community Health Plan of Washington, or CHPW, serves more than 300,000 majority-low-income clients across the state.  CHPW CEO Leanne Berge says cuts would be devastating to the most vulnerable citizens in Washington and would have a ripple effect across the board.  “Clearly the most vulnerable citizens in the state are dependent on Medicaid. We’re talking about people who have disabilities. Who, if they did not have Medicaid, their families would have to stay home and take care of them, if they have families,” Berge said. “What people also don’t realize is that almost everybody is one step away from having that vulnerability.”

► From the Tri-City Herald — Here’s what the Trump admin proposes spending on WA’s toxic Hanford nuclear site — The Trump administration showed support for environmental cleanup at Hanford in its initial proposal for fiscal 2026 funding, calling for a much higher annual budget than it did during Trump’s previous term as president. The support for Hanford came as elsewhere in the proposed budget the Trump administration wants a $163 billion cut for non-defense domestic spending, a reduction of almost 23% from current spending.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From Deadline — SAG-AFTRA Chief Lays Out What AI Protections It Will Be Looking For In Next Studio Contract — SAG-AFTRA chief Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has laid out some of the guilds plans ahead of its contract with the studios expiring in June 2026. He said that he believes that AI will be an important factor in these talks. “I’d never prejudge it, because our members — we’re a member-driven organization — decide what our priorities are going to be. We didn’t get everything that I would have wanted [in 2023], or that they would have wanted in that negotiation. This is evolving over time.”

NATIONAL

► From the AP — A model employer no more? Disabled workers question the federal government’s commitment to inclusion — “A lot of people who are disabled, they came to the federal government because it was a model employer for disabled individuals, and now they have nowhere else to go,” he told The Associated Press. The irony, he says, is that his job was to help resolve workers’ harassment claims before they escalated into full-blown lawsuits against the government. So much for reducing waste, he says.

► From the Intercept — “They Actually Had a List”: ICE Arrests Workers Involved in Landmark Labor Rights Case — The company is one of five agricultural businesses that, together with a state growers’ association, have tried for years to overturn or chip away at New York’s 2019 farm labor law. The law enshrined protections for the right of farmworkers — whether seasonal or year-round — to seek union representation. Several of the workers taken into custody on Friday have been active in efforts to unionize year-round employees, including at least one who has spoken publicly in favor of joining the United Farm Workers of America, according to Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for UFW, the storied labor union. “We are concerned at the appearance of targeting publicly pro-union worker leaders,” said Strater.

► From the AP — AFGE president says downsizing after Trump’s order threatens the union’s survival — Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March removed over 200,000 of its dues-paying members, or about two-thirds of the total…AFGE and other unions are fighting the order in court as illegal and retaliatory. But Kelley said the order has already taken a “very direct hit” on the group’s finances because agencies stopped collecting union dues from paychecks.

► From the AP — Appeals court to hear cases of 2 university students, one detained, the other recently released — A three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York, is expected to hear motions filed by the U.S. Justice Department regarding Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. The department is appealing decisions made by two federal judges in Vermont. It also wants to consolidate the students’ cases, saying they present similar legal questions…Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process…Mahdawi, 34, has been a legal permanent resident for 10 years.  In his release order, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford said Mahdawi has raised a “substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.”

POLITICS & POLICY

Federal updates here, local news and deeper dives below:

• Democratic AGs sue Trump administration over health program cuts (Washington State Standard)

► From ProPublica — Internal VA Emails Reveal How Trump Cuts Jeopardize Veterans’ Care, Including To “Life-Saving Cancer Trials” — Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans. In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed.

► From Wired — A DOGE Recruiter Is Staffing a Project to Deploy AI Agents Across the US Government — Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AccelerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers. Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he’s hiring for a “DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,” according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously.

► From MSNBC — DOGE wants access to Social Security data. That’s a terrible idea. — The people who normally look at your Social Security data are trained on the federal Privacy Act and have to pass background checks. Other members of the DOGE team, by contrast, include a 19-year-old nicknamed “Big Balls” who was reportedly fired from an internship with a cybersecurity company after he was accused of leaking proprietary information. (He said at the time that he had done “nothing contractually wrong,” according to Bloomberg.)

► From the Guardian — As Musk steps back, experts say Doge cuts have harmed government services — “Doge is not offering any solid claims that it has improved services in any way,” said Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “Rather, it has made the quality of some government services worse.” Moynihan and other public policy experts said it was unfortunate that Musk and Doge took the hard-charging focus of profit-maximizing business executives – of aggressively seeking to cut jobs and payroll – instead of adopting a broader focus aimed at making government more efficient while improving services.

► From Reuters — Watchdogs reviewing DOGE actions at CFPB, Democratic lawmaker says — The Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, and the CFPB’s Office of Inspector General, have agreed to review aspects of DOGE’s activities at the CFPB, the letters released by Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said.

► From the Seattle Times — Cantwell, Murray ask Trump to secure release of WA man detained in Venezuela — A Washington man has been wrongfully detained in Venezuela for over three months, according to U.S. officials, and Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have asked the White House to help secure his release. U.S. Air Force veteran Joseph St. Clair, 33, was last heard from by family members, who live in Kitsap County, before Thanksgiving. Joseph completed four tours in Afghanistan and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came home with post-traumatic stress disorder, and was seeking further treatment for it in Colombia. Joseph’s sibling filed a report with the U.S. Embassy in Colombia in January. The next month, [Joseph’s father] received a call from the consulate saying Joseph had been taken as a political hostage by Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

► From the NW Labor Press — Washington labor scores wins in Olympia despite budget cuts — Policy legislation mostly took a back seat over the 105-day session as the Democratic-led legislature spent most of its time grappling with a forecasted $16 billion budget shortfall. The solution they crafted combined budget cuts and revenue increases. “From our view, there’s a structural revenue problem,” said Sarah Tucker, spokesperson for the Washington State Labor Council, the state federation of unions…”And the result is that we have incredibly wealthy individuals and some of the biggest companies, with some of the biggest profits anywhere in the world, but our tax system doesn’t capture those dollars.”

► From the Colorado Newsline — Colorado House gives initial OK to bill that would ease union formation despite veto threat — The Colorado House of Representatives on Monday gave preliminary approval to a bill that would eliminate a second election requirement, unique to the state, for union formation, four months after the legislation was introduced and two days before the end of the lawmaking term. After months of negotiation between labor and business groups, there was no deal reached among groups on opposing sides of debate around the measure, and the bill is the same as it was in January. That will set up a likely clash with Gov. Jared Polis, who has signaled opposition to the measure.

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