Ferry workforce | Videogame workers TA | Unions fight back

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

STRIKES

► From Variety — SAG-AFTRA and Video Game Companies Reach Tentative New Deal, Strike End In Sight — “Everyone at SAG-AFTRA is immensely grateful for the sacrifices made by video game performers and the dedication of the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee throughout these many months of the video game strike,” said SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. “Patience and persistence has resulted in a deal that puts in place the necessary A.I. guardrails that defend performers’ livelihoods in the A.I. age, alongside other important gains.”

LOCAL

► From the Seattle Times — New apprenticeship program boosts Washington State Ferries workforce — Launched in 2024, the apprenticeship was created to both diversify and replenish the ferry workforce, and to remove two major barriers: time and cost. This pathway changes that. The program pays for training, with no prior maritime experience required. Among roughly two dozen apprentices, 40% identify as women or people of color. But spots are scarce: Out of hundreds of applicants, only 12 for each cohort are accepted…Once working as a mate, though, he’ll make a decent wage. The starting salary for mates is between $97,000 to $110,000 a year.

► From Cascade PBS — Laid-off federal workers in WA face uncertainty, tough job search — At least 1,000 employees in Washington have lost their jobs. As Musk leaves DOGE, they are still picking up the pieces and wondering what comes next. “It’s a giant mess,” said Rebecca Howard, a former research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was fired in February, rehired under a court order in March, then fired again in April. Like many former federal workers, Howard is still looking for a new job. She said funding cuts have made it difficult to find research work. “It’s definitely been a struggle because my career kind of evaporated with this,” Howard said.

► From the Seattle Times — Simmering Trump trade war still hurting WA shipping, tourism — The numbers tell a depressing story. In May, the volume of cargo containers imported through Seattle and Tacoma dropped steadily as the effect of shipments canceled in April, due to higher tariffs, finally reached U.S. shores. By the last week in May, imported container volume at the two ports was 33% below the average for May 2024, according to new data from the Northwest Seaport Alliance, which oversees marine cargo operations at both ports.

► From the Seattle Times — Quilcene School Board under fire after banning transgender athletes from sports — Cortney Beck, a Quilcene School teacher and co-president of the Quilcene Education Association (QEA), said the vast majority of teachers in the school district are opposed to the passage of the resolution…The QEA released a statement Friday, saying the resolution is unlawful and contradicts Title IX. The statement ended with this: “More importantly, this resolution sends a harmful message to our LGBTQ+ students, particularly transgender youth, who already face disproportionate rates of bullying, mental health challenges, and suicide. As educators, we have an obligation to foster a learning environment where every student feels safe, seen, and valued-not targeted or erased.”

► From the KUOW — Seattle protesters block ICE vans from leaving immigration court — On Tuesday morning, about 40 people gathered at the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle, which houses a federal immigration court…Just a few weeks ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting people attending hearings in this building, after their hearings were dismissed by judges. Tuesday’s protest followed another on Monday, when roughly 300 people marched to Seattle’s City Hall in opposition to the arrest of a union leader last Friday in L.A.

► From the union-busting Columbian — $44M Port of Longview rail project halted after recent Rotschy work accident in Woodland — At a special meeting Monday afternoon, the commissioner flagged numerous pages in the 109-page safety document required as part of Rotschy’s $44 million construction bid. Wilson’s concerns ran the gamut, pressing Director of Facilities and Engineering William Burton about a wide range of flaws in the plan. Those flaws included telling workers the AED on the job site is in a nonexistent “maintenance room,” and details lacking in the confined spaces rescue plan that included no named primary or secondary rescue agencies. The special meeting Monday followed a new wave of scrutiny on Vancouver-based Rotschy after a laborer was airlifted from a job site in Woodland after the boom of an excavator fell on him in a trench. The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries confirmed last week that they are investigating incident.

NATIONAL

► From Wired — Airlines Don’t Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS — A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected US travelers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details. “The big airlines—through a shady data broker that they own called ARC—are selling the government bulk access to Americans’ sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used,” senator Ron Wyden said in a statement.

► From the Nation — How the White House’s War on the Job Corps Is Hurting Trump Country — Astoria, where the Tongue Point facility helped prepare people to work for area shipping and fishery companies as well as in service jobs, sits at the mouth of the Columbia River near the Pacific Ocean. Astoria is also an old coastal working-class town that once harbored Finnish socialist labor organizers—along with the KKK, which ran the city for a short time in the 1920s. Tongue Point, a former naval base on the city’s outskirts, became Astoria’s Job Corps facility not long after Lyndon Johnson signed the bill creating the program in 1964; it supplied housing as well as job training for young people enrolled there. Sixty years later, Tongue Point Job Corps continues to thrive, with 150 staff serving 313 students learning 12 skilled trades. The program’s goal of training workers for American jobs seems tailor-made for Trump’s many campaign pledges to protect American jobs in US-backed industries.

► From the AP — With reporters shot and roughed up, advocates question whether those covering protests are targets — Journalists have been pelted with rubber bullets or pepper spray, including an Australian TV reporter struck while doing a live shot and a New York Post reporter left with a giant welt on his forehead after taking a direct hit. A CNN crew was briefly detained then released on Monday night. The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said Wednesday there have been at least 35 attacks on journalists — 30 from law enforcement — since the demonstrations started…Photojournalist Nick Stern was standing near some people waving a Mexican flags when he was shot in the thigh. He later had emergency surgery. “I thought it was a live round because of the sheer intensity of the pain,” he told the AP. “Then I passed out from the pain.”

POLITICS & POLICY

Federal updates here, local news and deeper dives below:

• Five questions and answers about reconciliation in the U.S. Senate (Washington State Standard)
• Labor Board Member Nominations on the Horizon, Chair Says (Bloomberg Law)
• Trump tariffs may remain in effect while appeals proceed, US appeals court rules  (Reuters)

► From Jacobin — Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is a Crackdown on Unions — The administration is recognizing that one of the largest impediments to executing its racist, anti-worker, and antidemocratic agenda is and will continue to be the labor movement and its allies. This federal show of force reflects a broader trend of hypermilitarization by a Trump administration testing how far it can go in using tactics against its own people once reserved for war abroad. Federal border authorities have equipped National Guard soldiers with 20-ton Stryker combat vehicles, reports the Washington Post. The Department of Homeland Security has requested 20,000 National Guard troops to carry out immigration roundups nationwide.

► From the Wall Street Journal — Trump’s Immigration Plans Meet a Powerful Adversary: Unions — Some of unions’ biggest organizing wins recently have been in service workplaces where undocumented immigrants often make up an outsize share. “Whether you’re documented or not, you can be a member of a union, and those we represent, we vow to protect,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO. Alfred Muñoz, an Amazon delivery driver, said he joined the protest Monday because Huerta and the SEIU have supported the Teamsters’ effort to organize his workplace. Huerta sent SEIU members to join a picket line during a multiday strike at Amazon in December, said Muñoz, 43.
“If they can support us, then why can’t we support them?” Muñoz said.

► From Wired — The ‘Long-Term Danger’ of Trump Sending Troops to the LA Protests — In contrast, Rutgers University professor Bruce Afran says deploying military forces against Americans is “completely unconstitutional” in the absence of a true state of domestic insurrection. “There was an attack on ICE’s offices, the doorways, there was some graffiti, there were images of protesters breaking into a guardhouse, which was empty,” he says. “But even if it went to the point of setting a car on fire, that’s not a domestic insurrection.” Afran argues that…“The long-term danger is that we come to accept the role of the army in regulating civilian protest instead of allowing local law enforcement to do the job,” he says. “And once we accept that new paradigm—to use a kind of BS word—the relationship between the citizen and the government is altered forever.”

► From Politico — Republicans back off Medicare changes in GOP megabill — Senate Republicans appear to be popping their own trial balloon on including changes to Medicare as part of their “big beautiful bill.” The public shift comes after GOP senators caught their own colleagues off guard — and gave Democrats a new political target — when they opened the door last week to going after “waste, fraud and abuse” within the program to capture savings to satisfy their deficit hawks.

► From CBS News — Conservative Sen. Josh Hawley wants to raise federal minimum wage — Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley plans to introduce legislation Tuesday to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour — a position that aligns one of the most conservative Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill with some of the most liberal members of Congress. The legislation, called the “Higher Wages for American Workers Act,” would raise the federal standard starting in 2026 and would also call for an increase in subsequent years to match inflation, CBS News has exclusively learned. Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch has signed on as a co-sponsor.

► From Politico — Trump team plans to send thousands of migrants to Guantanamo starting as soon as this week — The official reason for the transfers is to free up bed space at detention facilities on domestic American soil, but the use of the notorious facility, which has long housed terrorism suspects, would also send another signal aimed at deterring illegal immigration to the United States…Some 800 Europeans — including one Austrian, 100 Romanians and 170 Russians — are being considered for the transfers, according to one of the documents. That element of the plan has alarmed some U.S. diplomats, who note that most European countries are American allies that are cooperative in taking back deportees and that there’s no need to send the people to Guantanamo. State Department officials who deal with Europe are trying to persuade DHS to abandon the plan.

► From the Hill — Judge determined OPM broke law with DOGE access to data — “Following President Trump’s inauguration, OPM granted broad access to many of those systems to a group of individuals associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’), even though no credible need for this access had been demonstrated. In doing so, OPM violated the law and bypassed its established cybersecurity practices,” Cote wrote. DOGE was given access to OPM data in the earliest days of the administration as the Trump team looked for ways to contact every federal employee — a task that was otherwise handled through each individual department or agency.

► From the Washington State Standard — Washington governor wants agencies to look for deeper cuts — On Tuesday, Washington chief economist David Reich offered a sense of what to expect when he delivered his quarterly review of the economy to the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers and agency executives…It didn’t sound good. Tax collections are coming in lower than predicted in March. Uncertainty surrounding tariffs, trade and federal policies are having a chilling effect on exports, consumer spending, and general activity across many sectors.

► From OPB — Bill to grant striking workers unemployment pay fails final vote in Oregon Senate — State Sen. Mark Meek, D-Gladstone, had voted in favor of Senate Bill 916 when it first came before his chamber in March. But after small changes in the House, the bill needed another approval from the Senate in order to advance to Gov. Tina Kotek’s desk. It failed on a vote of 15-14. Along with Meek, three other Democrats voted alongside Republicans against the bill: Sens. Jeff Golden of Ashland, Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro and Courtney Neron Misslin of Wilsonville. Only Meek, a sponsor of the bill, changed his position, however…Lawmakers from the House and Senate are scheduled to meet in a conference committee Tuesday afternoon — a six-member group made up of four Democrats and two Republicans — in an attempt to find a compromise.

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