Republic strike | Prime week | Wildfire season

Thursday, July 10, 2025

STRIKES

► From the Everett Herald — Growing Teamsters strike disrupts garbage pickup in Snohomish County — Trash haulers in Snohomish County are not on strike against trash contractor Republic Services, said Matt McQuaid, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Instead, he said they are honoring picket lines against the company that began eight days ago when 450 workers went on strike in Massachusetts. A growing number of collectors represented by different Teamsters unions across the nation, including in Washington state and Seattle, are honoring the picket lines, McQuaid said.

► From the Seattle Times — Republic Services strike pauses trash pickup across Western Washington — Republic Teamsters, represented by Local 252, initiated the picketing and the strike in Lacey, the union announced. Those workers operate a transfer facility that is used by waste companies across Thurston County, including cities like Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater and Yelm. Victor Mineros, director of the Teamsters’ solid waste and recycling division acknowledged the service disruption, saying in a statement the company can “easily afford a fair and competitive contract that meets the needs of everyday hardworking Americans.” More than 2,000 Teamsters are on strike against the garbage collector service across the country with more strikes expected soon, the union said.

► From Teamsters:

Republic Services has been threatening a war with American workers for years — and now, they’ve got one.

Thousands of Teamsters at the $77 billion waste corporation are uniting and striking nationwide with picket lines continuing to expand in major cities.

We will get the wages… pic.twitter.com/yOS3EyMMrp

— Teamsters (@Teamsters) July 10, 2025

► From the Philadelphia Inquirer — Philly strike ends: Trash collection to resume; some DC 33 members not thrilled with new deal — Sam Spear, the lead attorney for AFSCME District Council 33, said union president Greg Boulware ended the strike because the laws for public sector employees make it difficult to carry out extended work stoppages before being ordered back to work by the courts. “He’s very disappointed, but it’s a strike dynamic. You strike to try to get your maximum effectiveness,” Spear said in an interview. “The point of the strike is to create enough discomfort to get them to meet as many of the demands as we can get them to meet, but at some point, then the threat of the injunction kicks in.” Philadelphia’s last major municipal strike in 1986 ended shortly after a judge ruled that sanitation employees had to return to work to prevent a public health crisis due to the build-up of trash. The maximum point of leverage, he said, is likely well before that point.

LOCAL

► From KOMO — Transit Safety Task Force sees new protective barriers for King County Metro buses –Members of the Regional Transit Safety Task Force got a preview of the new protective barriers that will soon be installed on all 1,400 King County Metro buses. The barriers were one of the demands made by the union that represents transit operators after bus driver Shawn Yim was murdered in Seattle last year. Metro plans to spend $15 million to retrofit the entire fleet with the new protective barriers. The agency hopes to begin installation in December at a rate of 30 installations a week, until they are installed in all buses.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From Newsweek — OPINON: This Prime Week, Amazon Workers Like Me Need a Union Contract — Amazon would not be the two trillion-dollar company it is today without us. We make sure your packages are delivered rapidly, but this speed comes at a high human cost. Working at Amazon makes you feel like a cog in a machine. My day as a warehouse associate is spent lifting heavy boxes and sorting hundreds of packages while navigating narrow aisles at an impossible pace. I often feel unheard and unseen, and my body is pushed to the limit. Our basic needs for fair pay, benefits, and safe working conditions have consistently gone ignored.

NATIONAL

► From the New York Times — Trump Fuels Fear Among Immigrant Farm Workers in California’s Central Valley — When agents from the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned up last month at farms and packing houses in Ventura County, well south of the Central Valley, there was panic in the valley’s fields, where an estimated 80 percent of farmworkers are undocumented. Farmers here, most of whom voted for Mr. Trump and had expected him to protect them, were in a rage…There have been no raids so far this month in the Central Valley, but Manuel Cunha Jr., the president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents 500 farmers and more than 75,000 farmworkers, mostly in the region, is on edge…the whipsawing continued this week when Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers and that mass deportations would continue, but in a “strategic and intentional way.”

► From the Washington Post — Social Security pulls field office staff to answer overwhelmed phone line — The agency said it is temporarily reassigning about 1,000 customer service representatives from field offices to work on the swamped toll-free phone line, increasing the number of agents by 25 percent. Social Security’s new commissioner, Frank Bisignano, is attempting to reduce phone wait times after customers complained of dropped calls, the website has repeatedly crashed and thousands of workers left the agency under the cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Spokesman Review — With Texas floods and Northwest fire season in mind, Cantwell questions Trump’s NOAA nominee on weather research cuts — Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, pressed nominee Neil Jacobs over the president’s proposed 27% cut to NOAA’s budget, including the elimination of an office charged with improving forecasts and conducting other research on climate and ocean conditions…Cantwell raised concerns about roughly 2,000 job cuts at NOAA, part of the Commerce Department, since the beginning of the year and pointed out that the National Weather Service has lost some of its most experienced forecasters. “For example, Pendleton, Oregon, the forecast office serving central Washington, no longer has 24/7 local coverage because of their 44% vacancy rate,” she said. “And in my opinion, that is unacceptable in the height of fire season.”

► From the AP — New Hampshire judge decides to pause Trump’s birthright citizenship order — Judge Joseph LaPlante issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s order and certified a class action lawsuit including all children who will be affected. The order, which followed an hour-long hearing, included a seven-day stay to allow for appeal. The judge’s decision puts the birthright citizenship issue on a fast track to return to the Supreme Court. The justices could be asked to rule whether the order complies with their decision last month that limited judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions.

► From the Washington State Standard — More cities, counties join immigrant sanctuary lawsuit seeking to block Trump funding cuts — The expansion of the case could be a sign that more cities are seeing the benefit of suing to protect their rights in court from a Trump administration that is often acting without regard for legal precedent. A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that significantly limits nationwide injunctions means that cities and states must be part of a lawsuit to get the benefits of any injunction that would stop such policies while the legal merits are debated in court.

► From the Washington State Standard — WA governor commits to backfilling Planned Parenthood funding cut by Congress — This week, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily directed the Trump administration to continue the flow of funding to Planned Parenthood, which on top of abortions provides access to birth control and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted infections at health centers across the country. If the legal fight isn’t successful, Ferguson committed to backfilling the $11 million Planned Parenthood in Washington stands to lose. He said he would divert the money from the state Health Care Authority. This comes not long after Ferguson signed a new budget from lawmakers that cut state funding for an abortion care program by more than half. Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates called that reduction “devastating.”

► From Reuters — US Senate votes to confirm long-time Republic CEO to head FAA — The U.S. Senate Wednesday voted 53 to 43 to approve long-time Republic Airways CEO Bryan Bedford to head the Federal Aviation Administration. Bedford, the former head of the regional air carrier that operates nearly 1,000 daily flights for major airlines, stepped down last week after more than 25 years leading the airline and was nominated by President Donald Trump.

► From the New York Times — How Crypto Lobbying Won Over Trump — Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades. All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history.

► From the Wired — This Is DOGE 2.0 — without flashy leadership, DOGE technologists are now quietly cycling into federal agencies, spending days or weeks building products and cutting contracts before cycling out once again. This is all done with little oversight from the White House or the United States DOGE Service (USDS), which these technologists purportedly represent…“We used to say things like ‘DOGE wants to review X, Y, Z.’ But now our boss says not to call them DOGE anymore,” one US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee says. At the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), another federal employee told WIRED that DOGE is now being referred to as “The USDA Digital Service.”

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