Evergreen classified staff | Mead educators | Women’s pay

Thursday, August 21, 2025

STRIKES

► From the Machinists:

STANDING STRONG AT BOEING 🪧

IAM International President Brian Bryant and members of our Executive Council are here on the strike line at Boeing Defense in St. Louis.

One day longer, one day stronger. ✊ pic.twitter.com/jePVITjFSG

— IAM Union (@IAM_Union) August 21, 2025

LOCAL

► From the Washington State Standard — Overturned court ruling clears way for WA to inspect immigrant detention center — Washington state should be allowed to enforce health and safety standards at the embattled immigrant detention center in Tacoma, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The decision overturns a lower court order blocking a 2023 state law that sought to provide greater oversight of conditions at the facility, including through unannounced state inspections. The detention center is run by the Florida-based GEO Group under a contract with the federal government.

► From KUOW — Slashed federal funds, tighter restrictions could hurt hundreds of thousands WA residents relying on Medicaid — Many people associate Medicaid with health care for low-income families. But it’s more than that. In the early 1990s, the federal government gave states flexibility to use Medicaid funds for non-medical services. The goal was to allow recipients who are elderly or who have disabilities to stay home and within their communities, instead of relying on institutional care. Nemhauser applied for a waiver when Nate was a toddler. She remembers struggling to provide care. His needs were intensive, and required specialized services like speech and behavior therapies. “I was starting to wonder, ‘Do I have to find him another place to live? I don’t know if I can care for him,'” Nemhauser recalled. “And that’s a really low place to be.”

► From the Washington State Standard — Feds direct states to check immigration status of their Medicaid enrollees — The feds will begin sending states monthly enrollment reports that identify people with Medicaid or CHIP whose immigration or citizenship status can’t be confirmed through federal databases. States are then responsible for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals in those reports. States are expected to take “appropriate actions when necessary, including adjusting coverage or enforcing non-citizen eligibility rules,” according to a CMS press release.

AEROSPACE

► From People’s World — Airline pilots outraged over one-pilot proposal — Current U.S. regulations require two pilots in the cockpit, and ALPA wants to keep it that way. But European airline bosses are pushing their regulators for only one. Through the International Civil Aviation Organization, they’re pushing the corporate-friendly GOP Trump regime to agree. “To prevent this risk to safety from reaching our country, we must work together with aviation regulators and stakeholders to discourage it across the globe,” said Ambrosi when ALPA posted a link to the senators’ letter on its website.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the union-busting Columbian — ‘The union is about solidarity’: Evergreen schools’ classified staff, supporters rally ahead of strike vote — Evergreen Public Schools’ classified workers rallied outside the district’s office Wednesday in advance of their union’s first strike vote in 57 years…The union plans to hold a vote Thursday. Members will decide whether to strike Tuesday, which would delay the first day of school, or ratify a new contract, said Mindy Troffer-Cooper, the union’s chapter president and a paraeducator at Harmony Elementary School. “The union is about solidarity. When one of us stands, we all should stand,” said Derek Sytsma, a special education paraeducator at Wy’east Middle School. “Some of us are working two, three jobs, donating plasma, giving whatever we can to make a livable wage.”

► From the Spokesman Review — Mead teachers union continues to rally as no contract has been reached in negotiations with school district — Inside the office building on Farwell Road, representatives from the school district and the Mead Education Association sat around a bargaining table to iron out the details of a renewed contract for certificated employees, their current contract set to expire at the end of the month. “We are a group of educators who grind every day,” union President Toby Doolittle told the horde of rallygoers wearing the union’s signature red. “We come and we meet the challenges every day in our classrooms, and quite frankly, it is time for the district to uphold their obligation.” …There are two more bargaining sessions on the calendar for August 25 and 27. If no tentative agreement for a contract is reached by August 28, union membership will discuss next steps at their general assembly meeting that day, Doolittle said.

► From the Nation — Trump’s War on Higher Ed Comes to the Bargaining Table — Workers in Columbia and Harvard graduate student unions were on tenterhooks. After a month of student detainments and discipline—including the expulsion of Columbia’s graduate union president, Grant Miner, the day before contract negotiations were set to begin—representatives headed to the bargaining table on March 28 hoping to forge ahead in negotiations. But they emerged from heated sessions without having discussed a single contract article or finalized ground rules. Since then, both unions’ contracts have expired, with no resolution in sight.

ORGANIZING

► From Barron’s — JPMorgan Chase Union Push Reveals Tensions Inside America’s Largest Bank –The five-day in-office mandate, issued in January, led some staff to begin the first formal union drive at the bank. In addition to preserving strong resource groups, the union is calling for better pay, more flexibility in work arrangements, and what they say is a fairer process for handling medical accommodation requests. The union, called JPMC Workers Alliance, is likely to face a long, uphill battle in winning explicit concessions from the bank’s management. Still, a small but growing union drive represents a sea change for labor relations at America’s largest bank and the industry at large. The U.S. finance industry has the lowest unionization rate of all private-sector industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at 0.8%.

NATIONAL

► From the AP — US flight attendants are fed up like their Air Canada peers. Here’s why they aren’t likely to strike — In the United States, however, the nearly century-old Railway Labor Act makes it far more difficult for union flight attendants like Miller, a member of the Association of Flight Attendants, to strike than most other American workers. Unlike the Boeing factory workers and Hollywood writers and actors who collectively stopped work in recent years, U.S. airline workers can only strike if federal mediators declare an impasse — and even then, the president or Congress can intervene. For that reason, airline strikes are exceedingly rare. The last major one in the U.S. was over a decade ago by Spirit Airlines pilots, and most attempts since then have failed. American Airlines flight attendants tried in 2023 but were blocked by mediators.

► From Axios — HHS workers accuse RFK Jr. of stoking violence against them — More than 750 current and former federal health workers on Wednesday accused HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of contributing to harassment and violence against government employees they said manifested itself in the Aug. 8 attack on CDC’s Atlanta headquarters…The letter charges Kennedy as being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.”

► From the Economic Policy Institute — Unions aren’t just good for workers—they also benefit communities and democracy — Rebuilding worker power by strengthening unions is not just good policy—it is a democratic imperative in the face of authoritarian backsliding…The productivity–pay gap has grown more slowly in states with smaller declines in unionization since 1979. In these states, it wasn’t just corporations and the wealthy who benefited from economic growth, but also working people, both unionized and nonunionized. In high-union-density states, 2023 median household income was on average more than $12,000 higher than in low-union-density states. 

► From Wired — Phone Searches at the US Border Hit a Record High — From April through June this year, CBP searched 14,899 devices carried by international travelers, according to stats published on the agency’s website…“The real issue is the chilling effect it has on all travelers,” says Esha Bhandari, a deputy director of American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Bhandari adds that anyone could be subject to a potential device search, including those who are critical of the administration or lawyers and journalists who may have sensitive information on their devices. “This is essentially a limitless authority that they claim for themselves to search travelers without a warrant to search the full scope of information people carry on them,” Bhandari says.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From Ms. Magazine — Over a Million Women Are at Risk of a Pay Cut Under a New Trump Rule — Imagine Angela, a home health aide worker in Georgia who spends her days helping elderly and disabled clients eat, bathe and manage their medications for a national home healthcare agency employing over 30,000 workers in 25 states. She works 10-hour days, often six days a week, and—thanks to a 2015 rule introduced by Obama’s Department of Labor—earns overtime. But under a Trump administration newly proposed rule, she could legally lose overtime protections and even be paid less than the federal minimum wage. The law that once protected her paycheck would be eliminated as “obsolete.”

► From the New York Times — Senate Adds Guardrails in an Effort to Force Trump to Obey Spending Bills — The little-noticed moves are part of a quiet escalation in the battle between the legislative and executive branches over federal spending powers. Ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for funding the government, the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee have said they must take extra steps to assert their authority over the allocation of government dollars, after the Trump administration has repeatedly questioned and defied congressional instructions on spending…“I believe members of Congress who know their districts and states should decide how taxpayer dollars get spent — not faceless political appointees, and not any president who wrongly believes they hold the power of the purse instead of Congress,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington.

► From Reuters — Texas Republicans approve Trump-backed congressional map to protect party’s majority — Texas lawmakers on Wednesday passed a new congressional district map intended to flip five Democratic-held U.S. House seats to Republican control in next year’s midterm elections, a key step in an increasingly acrimonious partisan battle as California Democrats lined up their own redistricting effort. Texas Republicans undertook the rare mid-decade redistricting at the behest of President Donald Trump, who says he wants to bolster the odds of preserving his party’s slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives amid political headwinds.

► From People’s World — Crime exposed not in city streets but in corporate suites — Delta, the nation’s largest airline, got caught by an unidentified whistleblower. So it paid an $8.1 million fine to the federal government for falsifying records of its pay to its executives and for lying about laying off its workers during the coronavirus pandemic…two unions who are trying to organize Delta’s unorganized workers—the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and the Machinists–are in no doubt about the carrier’s wrongs. Especially AFA-CWA President Sara Nelson, who played a key role in crafting the provisions Bastian’s airline broke.

► From the New Republic — Elon Musk Just Won His War on Labor Unions — The case itself reads like a Gilded Age parable. South African–born billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, had asked the court to block the board’s enforcement actions against one of his companies for its alleged anti-union activities. A panel of three Republican-appointed federal judges in Texas, two of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump, agreed with him…Tuesday’s ruling in SpaceX v. NLRB is a significant blow to American workers who hope to organize their workplaces without fear of retaliation. It represents a partial negation of the New Deal, along with 90 years of legal precedent—and a victory for the conservative legal establishment’s war against federal regulatory power.

The Stand posts links to local, national and international labor news every weekday morning. Subscribe to get daily news in your inbox.