Carpentry program | VEA fights layoffs | Amazon

Thursday, April 16, 2026

LOCAL

► From the Seattle Times — Students urge Seattle Colleges to keep carpentry program building — Visible through the room’s large windows, members of the Seattle Colleges classified employees union — Washington Federation of State Employees Local 304 — picketed on the sidewalk outside. They chanted: “Don’t be crooks! Open the books!” Occasionally, their chanting overtook the volume of the meeting’s speakers…Lizbeth Chaidez, a carpentry student and president of Wood Technology’s student council, said during public comment that Seattle Colleges needs to present clear reasoning for its proposal to potentially shutter a highly in-demand program.

► From the union-busting Columbian — Staff, students, parents pack Vancouver Public Schools board meeting to oppose layoffs –Charlotte Lartey, a teacher at Gaiser Middle School and Vancouver Education Association vice president, received her seventh nonrenewal notice in eight years in March. This year is different, however, because she’s pregnant with twins and due in August — around the same time her health insurance will end. “I really cannot afford to be stressed right now,” Lartey said. “This is not acceptable after giving eight years as a school teacher in this state. It is unacceptable for my 280-plus colleagues who had no business receiving a nonrenewal notice.”

► From The Mirror — Amazon workers forced to work around dead coworker and told to ‘turn around and not look’ — A new report says that an Amazon worker lay dead in the facility in Oregon for over an hour, while his colleagues were told to get back to work and to “not look”. While the workers were instructed to continue working, the man lay lifeless on the ground, and people were allegedly discouraged from helping him. One worker said that a manager told them to “Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work,” according to The Western Edge, which broke the story.

► From the Seattle Times — Amazon accused of underpaying women by misclassifying their jobs — Gayatri Srinivas and Amy Cisneroz say they faced a discriminatory system at Amazon that saw roles held by women underpaid based on job classifications, according to a proposed class-action complaint filed April 8 at federal court in Seattle. One of the ways the plaintiffs say Amazon underpaid women was by coding their roles as lower-paying “non-tech” jobs. The two former employees say they were “substantially” underpaid relative to male co-workers who had the same job titles, had similar experience and performed similar work.

► From KING 5 — ‘Hiding in plain sight’: Video shows UW student, child escorted onto passenger flight for removal — The surveillance video, obtained by KING 5 from the Port of Seattle, shows University of Washington graduate student Kennedy Orwa and his 13-year-old son being escorted through the terminal by uniformed agents just before 1 p.m. on April 8…Benson said that among the dozens of traditional deportation flights he has observed, detainees are typically shackled, and he hasn’t seen children on those charter flights. That contrast raises questions about whether commercial flights are being used in part to avoid the optics of transporting minors in restraints.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From Labor Notes — Starbucks Is Bargaining Backwards, Baristas Say — “They’re trying to move backwards on issues we’ve already settled instead of settling the few that we have left,” said Mina Leon, a barista in downtown Manhattan who struck for two months to get the company back to the table…The union has filed unfair labor practice charges against the company for regressive bargaining. Those join 600 other labor law violations which are still unresolved. During the four years of the organizing campaign, the company has racked up a record number of violations, and still owes millions in back pay to workers.

► From CBS NY — NYC residential building workers vote to authorize strike, which might start Monday — More than 34,000 building employees are members of the Service Employees International Union – Local 32BJ, which held a rally on the Upper East Side Wednesday afternoon…Union leaders are looking for increased pay, stronger health care protection, and better retirement benefits for the residential building workers that they represent citywide. They say their wages, health care costs, and retirement benefits need to reflect the rising rates of inflation.

NATIONAL

► From Rolling Stone — Can America’s Working Class Organize Before AI Crushes It?  — Concerns over automation present a challenge for organized labor as it seeks to rebuild its former standing. As policymakers on the left and right look to bring back manufacturing — a traditional bastion for unions — some posit that many if not all returning jobs would be automated, highlighting growing automation in China and the rise of “lights out” factories that have automated to the point that lighting is no longer needed. Facing this, as well as fears over job losses across all sectors, many labor leaders have highlighted the need for greater power in establishing policy. This is where organizations like Union Now hope to provide additional support.

► From the New York Times — A Progressive Group Rolls Out a Campus Competitor to Turning Point — But if Turning Point was the right’s answer to the left’s dominance of academia, More Perfect University will frame itself as a progressive champion for the working class, said Elise Joshi, a former executive director of Gen-Z for Change who will lead the push. “The same corporations that are rigging the economy against young people are bankrolling the right’s campus operation,” Ms. Joshi said. The evidence, she added, lies in Turning Point’s “refusal to champion working-class issues.”

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Federal News Network — DoD moves to end most collective bargaining agreements — These cancellations at DoD impact union contracts with the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union representing DoD workers…“Secretary Hegseth’s decision to terminate the union rights of hardworking individuals who support our military is a cowardly continuation of this administration’s unlawful attack on federal employees’ first amendment right to belong to a union,” Kelley said in a statement.

► From Notus — Josh Hawley Is Trying to Sell Unions to Republicans. It’s Not Working — The framework includes increasing civil penalties for employers who violate labor laws and banning required “captive audience” meetings, where employers discourage workers from organizing. Hawley has also introduced the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which requires employers to start negotiations for a first contract within 10 days of a union’s certification. These policies are lifted from Democrats’ Protect the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, a comprehensive labor-reform bill that never came to a floor vote when Democrats controlled the Senate. Unions, from the Teamsters to the AFL-CIO to the United Food and Commercial Workers, say they are on board with the PRO Act and Hawley’s Faster Labor Contracts Act.

► From the Cascadia Daily — Federal attacks on vote-by-mail, voter eligibility worry WA election officials — Washington has no time constraint — as long as it was postmarked on or before Election Day. Nonetheless, the Washington Secretary of State’s Office is recommending voters take “full advantage of the 18-day voting period and vote early.” “If returning a ballot within seven days of Election Day, we highly recommend using a drop box or voting center,” Stefanie Randolph, the director of communications for the Secretary of State, told Cascadia Daily News on April 10. If the court rules against Mississippi, only ballots received before or on Election Day will be counted.

► From NPR — ‘Dear America’: HUD workers say they’re being blocked from doing their jobs — A small number of current and former employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a website Thursday to accuse the Trump administration of blocking enforcement of federal fair housing laws. They chose to remain anonymous out of concern they’d be fired for speaking out…”I pray for justice for every person unfairly denied a safe place to live,” states another. A third, signed by “a tired HUD employee,” states, “Months later, I still think about the people impacted by the work I was forced to abandon.”

► From the American Prospect — Trump’s NLRB Doesn’t Want to Investigate Worker Complaints — So, rather than taking steps to handle its current caseload, NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey is taking a different tack: choking off the number of cases that reach the agency by increasing the burden of filing complaints in the first place. As a result, employers who violate labor law are getting off scot-free…Last year, with full knowledge of the backlog they faced, the NLRB requested funding for just 1,152 full-time employees for fiscal year 2026 (FY26). This is nearly a hundred fewer employees than the prior year and 500 fewer than requested a decade ago for FY16, despite a higher combined intake of ULP and representation cases.

► From the New York Times — Labor Department Investigates Texts Sent Among Staff, Secretary and Her Family — In an April 2025 exchange provided to investigators, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s father, Richard Chavez, wrote to a young female staff member: “Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.”…[Chavez-DeRemer’s husband] Dr. DeRemer, an anesthesiologist, was barred from the department headquarters this year after several women told the inspector general’s investigators that he was making unwanted advances at them. One of the women filed a report with Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, which opened a sexual assault investigation. The department and the federal prosecutor’s office later said they would not bring charges in the matter.

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