NEWS ROUNDUP
Sims on Labor bills | MN construction workers | Shuler @ Davos
Thursday, January 22, 2026
STRIKES
► From Spectrum News — Negotiations set to resume Thursday in ongoing NYC nurses strike — The New York State Nurses Association said nurses at Montefiore, Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Morningside, Mount Sinai West and NewYork-Presbyterian will resume negotiations after being urged by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani to restart talks…“Nurses stand ready to bargain to reach fair contracts and end the strike,” NYSNA said in a statement. Thursday will mark the eleventh day of the walkout.
LOCAL
► From the Seattle Times — In WA, thousands are forgoing health insurance this year. Here’s why — At the start of open enrollment in November, Bittner logged on to the state insurance portal to look at future costs. He was already enrolled in the cheapest option available, a bronze plan with a monthly premium of $218. But without action from Congress, that plan was slated to jump to $800 per month for him in 2026…Compared to last year, new enrollment for 2026 dropped 17%. Meanwhile, 28,000 people actively canceled their coverage — a 38% increase, according to preliminary numbers shared with the Seattle Times by the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, which operates the state’s health insurance marketplace.
► From KUOW — Tech layoffs drive Seattle-area unemployment above 5% — The layoffs come as the region’s tech industry is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Tech giants are spending billions of dollars to build data centers and fiercely competing for AI talent. Even as they slash jobs in some parts of their businesses, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are in the WDC’s top 10 companies hiring the most workers.
CONTRACT FIGHTS
► From IATSE Local 15:
► From Nurse.org — 31,000 Kaiser Nurses Plan to Strike Across California and Hawaii, From SF to San Diego — More than 31,000 frontline nurses and health care professionals at Kaiser Permanente have issued a 10-day notice of intent to strike, according to a Press Release obtained by Nurse.org. The notice is setting the stage for a possible Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike beginning Monday, January 26. The notice was delivered by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), which represents Kaiser employees across California and Hawaii. If the strike proceeds, picket lines are expected at nearly 20 Kaiser hospitals and more than 200 clinics, stretching from Los Angeles to San Diego, Oakland to Honolulu.
► From KARE 11 — American Hockey League and Professional Hockey Players’ Association ratify CBA — The American Hockey League’s Board of Governors and Professional Hockey Players’ Association’s full membership have ratified a collective bargaining agreement that ensures labor peace in the top layers of the sport in North America for the foreseeable future. The AHL and PHPA announced the final step in the process Wednesday. The CBA, like that of the NHL and ECHL, is good through the summer of 2030.
ORGANIZING
► From NBC Montana — Logan Health clinicians vote to unionize, await certification — More than 90 primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants at Logan Health clinics in northwestern Montana have voted to form a union with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD). “It’s a reaffirmation of what our mission and that is to empower physicians all over the country to empower their voices so that they can work with their employer to create a better, more efficient, healthcare delivery system. That is exactly what motivated the providers at Logan to seek us out, they weren’t being heard,” explaine Union President Dr. Stuart Bussey.
NATIONAL
► From Workday Magazine — Construction Workers Occupy Lobby of a Developer, Demand Action Against ICE Raids on Job Sites — Workday Magazine spoke with Alexander, a construction worker who specializes in siding and is a member of CTUL. He said in Spanish, “I have friends who have been detained while working on construction sites. That’s why we’re here today—so that ICE respects places of work.” Alexander, who asked we only publish his first name to protect him from retaliation, explained that he’s been out of work for over a month ever since ICE ramped up activity in Minnesota. Construction projects have been paused because many workers are afraid to leave their homes to work, he said, with ICE targeting workers in roofing and siding in particular. “What they do is they park their cars outside of construction sites and wait for the workers as they leave to detain them,” he said.
► From the New York Times — Job Applicants Sue A.I. Recruitment Tool Company — And now, a lawsuit filed by a group of job applicants claims that some A.I. employment screening tools should be subject to the same Fair Credit Reporting Act requirements as credit agencies. The lawsuit’s goal is to compel A.I. companies to disclose more information about what data they are gathering on applicants and how they are being ranked. The target of the suit is a screening company, Eightfold AI, that sells its technology as a tool for employers to save time and money.
► From Wired — Surveillance and ICE Are Driving Patients Away From Medical Care, Report Warns — The report, published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), attributes the problem to outdated privacy laws and rapidly expanding digital systems that allow health-related information to be tracked, analyzed, breached, and accessed by both private companies and government agencies. “Unregulated digital technologies, mass surveillance, and weak privacy laws have created a health privacy crisis,” the report says. “Our health data is increasingly being harvested, sold, and used beyond our control.” The organization found that health data routinely escapes medical settings and gets repurposed for surveillance and enforcement and is increasingly deterring patients from seeking care.
► From Popular Imagination — ICE has stopped paying for detainee medical treatment — While ICE employs some of its own medical staff, it often uses third-party providers. ICE’s Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, for example, houses over 500 detainees and has no doctor or dentist on staff. ICE, however, has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed “to hold all claims submissions.”
POLITICS & POLICY
► From TVW’s The Impact — WATCH: Bills Would Extend Collective Bargaining to Farm and Domestic Workers — From expanded collective bargaining to the costs of business regulation, we examine the labor and business flashpoints driving the 2026 session. Hear from April Sims, President of the Washington State Labor Council.
► From the Washington State Standard — WA Gov. Ferguson asks Trump for $21M to help flood victims — State officials will next await word from President Donald Trump, who has declined to approve such declarations in some cases, especially in Democrat-led states. Ferguson and Trump clashed on the state’s request related to the 2024 bomb cyclone. Trump previously approved a federal emergency declaration, allowing federal resources to help during the flooding in December.
► From the Seattle Times — WA lawmakers consider bill to end retail surveillance, surge pricing — The bill would prevent “economic prejudice” by prohibiting surveillance pricing in grocery stores, banning surge pricing on essential goods and pausing the rollout of electronic shelf labels until they can be further investigated….“The quantity of data that these massive retailers are collecting on individual consumers, I think, would shock most consumers,” said John Marshall, capital strategies director for UFCW 3000, a union representing retail, grocery and health care industries. Marshall testified in favor of the proposal Wednesday.
► From the Washington State Standard — Veteran Democratic state Sen. Steve Conway to retire from WA Legislature — In the Legislature, he’s been a stalwart voice for workers, helping develop the state’s collective bargaining laws, unemployment insurance program, workers’ compensation system, apprenticeship program, and Paid Family and Medical Leave program…In his tenure, he’s abetted efforts to expand the University of Washington Tacoma, build the LeMay Car Museum, the UW Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, and most recently, the Asia Pacific Cultural Center.
► From the AP — Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, memo says — The memo itself has not been widely shared within the agency, according to a whistleblower complaint, but its contents have been used to train new ICE officers who are being deployed into cities and towns to implement the president’s immigration crackdown. New ICE hires and those still in training are being told to follow the memo’s guidance instead of written training materials that actually contradict the memo, according to the whistleblower disclosure.
► From the New York Times — Trump Administration Backs Down in D.E.I. Schools Lawsuit — The case was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Sociological Association and a school district in Eugene, Ore. Randi Weingarten, president of the A.F.T., said the case was the most important of the 22 lawsuits that her union had filed, along with partner groups, against Mr. Trump in his second term, because of the precedent it would establish for limiting executive power. “You cannot, by executive fiat, rewrite 60 years of educational opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview, referring to the civil rights laws that protect students from racial discrimination in schools.
► From the Oregon Capital Chronicle — New labor coalition hopes to spur job growth to meet Oregon’s clean energy targets — Climate Jobs Oregon has been more than a year in the making, union leaders announced at a news conference Wednesday along state Route 19 amid a patchwork of clean energy projects south of Arlington and the Columbia River Gorge. Ten construction industry unions are represented in the coalition, including Oregon AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of unions covering more than 300,000 members in the construction, education, health care and manufacturing industries. The coalition’s pitch is that in order to lower Oregonians’ utility bills and meet Oregon’s clean energy targets, including 100% clean electricity by 2040, the state needs hundreds of thousands of workers on clean energy projects, and the stability, wages and training that unions offer.
INTERNATIONAL
► From Common Dreams — US Union Leader Tells Davos Elites ‘You’re Gonna Have a Revolution’ If AI Wipes Out Jobs — The leader of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the United States, told elites and others gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday that rapid advances in artificial intelligence risk turbocharging the worst inequities of the existing economic order, displacing workers en masse while enriching those at the very top. Liz Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s president, said during a panel discussion that if the billionaires and corporate titans currently directing AI developments are “looking to just deskill, dehumanize, replace workers” and “put people out on the street with no path forward—then absolutely you’re gonna have a revolution.”
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