Child care | Automation & AI | Lessons from nurse strikes

Monday, March 2, 2026

LOCAL

► From the Tri-City Herald — Booming demand for career, tech skills sparks $46M Tri-Cities renovation — A Tri-Cities school offering part-time advanced technical education to high school students is getting a major facelift for the fall. Tri-Tech Skills Center’s $46 million project will replace infrastructure, modernize classrooms and reconfigure the school’s main 66,000-square-foot shell, originally built in 1981…Demand for career and technical education courses, known as CTE, have boomed across the nation, Washington and the Tri-Cities in wake of the COVID pandemic and as software industries wither from the impacts of artificial intelligence. Nearly 200,000 high school students across the Evergreen State are enrolled in some form of CTE education, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

► From the Washington State Standard — Volunteers face long road to flood recovery in Whatcom County — Nearly three months after devastating flooding tore through Western Washington, volunteers in Whatcom County are stepping up to help people rebuild their damaged homes. But the money from donations is about to run dry, and lingering uncertainty over federal funding means many people are still displaced…In January, Gov. Bob Ferguson asked President Donald Trump for $21.3 million in federal aid to help repair homes across the state. He’s still waiting for a reply.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From Truthout — Striking Nurses From Coast to Coast Stood Up to Corporate Forces and Won — Historic nurses’ strikes on both coasts of the United States took place simultaneously within the first two months of 2026, demonstrating the power of collective bargaining and solidarity in a common struggle against monied interests…Like New York City nurses, West Coast Kaiser health professionals were striking over poor staffing and wages that have not kept up with inflation. Longoria explained that, in response to worker demands for a 25 percent pay raise over four years, unionized nurses have been offered a 21.5 percent increase from Kaiser, assurance that they will preserve their benefits, and a commitment to address union demands for better staff-to-patient ratios. On its surface, New York City’s private, for-profit hospitals appear starkly different from Kaiser Permanente, a nominally nonprofit health care provider and HMO. But Kaiser’s business model is similar to for-profit health care providers.

► From ESPN — Sources: WNBPA offers revenue sharing, housing concessions in latest proposal — The revenue share split is down from 27.5% of gross revenue as proposed in the WNBPA’s Feb. 17 proposal, a change that a source said amounts to nearly $100 million in reductions on revenue share. The new proposal also contains tweaks to the union’s housing offerings: Previously, the players asked that teams continue to provide housing to players in the first several years of the new deal, but that in later years, teams will no longer be obligated to provide it for players making at least 80% of the maximum salary, on multiyear deals and receiving full salary protection. In the new proposal, the union struck the multiyear component and lowered the salary threshold to 75% at which players would no longer be obligated to receive team-provided housing.

ORGANIZING

► From the Hollywood Reporter — As Video Podcasts Boom, SAG-AFTRA Looks to Organize the Industry — Recently, The Pete Davidson Show, the first original podcast launched by Netflix, made headlines after signing a SAG-AFTRA podcast agreement. The move may chart a course as more podcasts pop up on streamers, and as SAG-AFTRA ramps up its efforts in the space, while trying to define what constitutes a podcast versus a streaming show. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much coverage the union already has in the podcast space, given the large number of shows, according to Sue-Anne Morrow, the national director of contract strategic initiatives and podcasts at SAG-AFTRA, but she said the union already has “a lot of density” in scripted dramatic podcasts and expects to cover more interview podcasts as well as narrative podcasts going forward.

NATIONAL

► From Jacobin — Is AI Coming for Our Jobs? — In fact, the jobs themselves being automated don’t have to mean those jobs disappear. So, to give a good example that you sometimes see, automatic teller machines (ATMs) replaced what were called bank tellers. It was predicted that as ATMs increased in number, bank tellers as a profession would be wiped out — the job itself would disappear. What happened instead was that, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the number of ATMs increased exponentially across the economy, but the number of job listings for bank tellers actually rose by about 10 to 15 percent, I think. So, how could this happen?

► From the Guardian — California fast food workers, still reeling from ICE raids, demand employers step up — The California Fast Food Workers Union, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, drafted a Constitutional Pledge to California Workers’ Rights for workplaces to sign that affirms a commitment to protecting workers and “keep ICE from going where they are not allowed”. The pledge includes a list of actions that would protect vulnerable workers, such as making sure workers have access to private, protected areas in the workplace and ensuring that enforcement officers aren’t entering these spaces without a judicial warrant. In San Jose, workers at a McDonald’s franchise walked out earlier this month after management declined to affirm they would help employees if ICE showed up, telling workers to instead hide in their cars should enforcement arrive.

► From Wired — Everything Larry and David Ellison Will Control If Paramount Buys Warner Bros. — Less than a year ago, Skydance Media closed its $8 billion merger with Paramount, making the Trump-friendly Ellison family—billionaire Oracle founder Larry and his son David, CEO of Paramount Skydance—among the most powerful media moguls in the country. A looming Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery would expand their empire even further. Now that Netflix has backed out of its bid to acquire WBD, the Ellisons stand to gain an entirely new trove of significant intellectual property, from DC Comics to Harry Potter. According to Reuters, Warner Bros. agreed to be acquired by Paramount Skydance in a $110 billion deal signed Friday, with Paramount Skydance agreeing to pay a $7 billion termination fee if federal regulators don’t approve the merger.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Seattle Times — Don’t balance WA budget at child care providers’ expense — We are grateful that the Legislature rejected Gov. Bob Ferguson’s proposal to cap Working Connections Child Care. WCCC is a program that helps low-income families pay for child care. Despite its value and tiny share of the state budget, the governor targeted it for nearly half of his proposed cuts, which would have left 16,000 families without a realistic path to affording care…Child care is economic infrastructure. It is the work that makes all the other work possible and is as important as our roads and bridges. Protecting Working Connections reinforces a foundation that supports our economy. After $1 billion in cuts to early learning in 2025, this protection happened because parents, child care workers and providers unified with advocates and legislators to push back and say “no more cuts to our care.” This movement was led by those with the most to lose. Nearly 500 parents descended on the Capitol for the Washington State Association of Head Start and Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program lobby day, and every Tuesday, child care workers from SEIU 925 traveled from across the state to meet with legislators.

► From the AP — Trump’s ‘America First’ campaign battle cry gives way to military strikes abroad — President Donald Trump, whose fierce denunciation of military adventurism abroad fueled his unlikely rise to the top of the Republican Party, risks becoming ensnared by that very type of conflict. The U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran Saturday cemented Trump’s decade-long transformation from a candidate who in 2016 called the Iraq War a “big, fat mistake” to a president warning Americans to prepare for potential casualties overseas and encouraging Iranians to “seize control of your destiny.” The strikes were also at odds with Trump’s warnings during the 2024 campaign that his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, was surrounded by “war hawks” eager to send troops overseas.

► From the New York Times — Could the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act Decision Affect the Midterms? — A looming Supreme Court decision on a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act could shift the long-term balance of power in the House toward Republicans. But how significantly it could affect this year’s midterm elections depends heavily on one variable: when the court rules. The provision, Section 2, prohibits election or voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. That guidance has led to the creation of majority-minority districts that are meant to help voters of color elect candidates of their choice. If the court fully struck down the provision, Republican-led states across the South could try to eliminate those districts, many of which are occupied by Democrats.

► From the New York Times — Labor Secretary Is a Rare Presence at Department in Turmoil — The agency’s inspector general has opened an inquiry into allegations of professional misconduct by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her closest aides. Investigators have spoken with several dozen witnesses and reviewed evidence and allegations that the secretary used department resources for personal trips, that she was having an affair with a member of her security team and that her aides tried to steer grants to favored political operatives…In interviews, more than two dozen current and former department employees from across the political spectrum described a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary, hostile aides and a deeply demoralized staff.

► From the Seattle Times — How WA tribes are bracing for Trump’s ICE crackdown — The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians — which represents 57 tribes in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, northern California, southeastern Alaska and western Montana — this month passed a resolution demanding the Department of Homeland Security respect tribal sovereignty, notify tribes before entering reservations and acknowledge tribal ID cards as valid forms of identification. That resolution could be a model for Native leaders to pass their own tribe-specific policies, said Gabe Galanda, a Seattle-based Indigenous rights lawyer.

INTERNATIONAL

► From Transform! Europe — Portugal’s General Strike and the Struggle Over Labour Law  — On 11 December 2025, a general strike took place, called by all trade union confederations, which brought transport, much of the public services, and the largest companies in Portugal to a standstill – especially in industry, but not only. It was a strong response to a draft bill from the right-wing government, elected in March 2025, which aims to change some of the pillars of labour relations in Portugal…The far right, which initially condemned the strike call as being only in the “interest of the far left” and supported the government’s proposal, considering it an attempt to change labour law that in Portugal would be “Soviet” (this was the expression used by the far-right spokesperson about our labour code…), ended up making a complete U-turn the day after the strike, praising it as “absolutely legitimate” and condemning the government’s proposal as “an open bar for dismissals and precariousness”.

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