Protecting immigrant workers | Chavez-DeRemer out | UC strike looms

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

STRIKES

► From the Harvard Crimson — Live: Harvard’s Graduate Workers Strike as Negotiations Stall  — HGSU-UAW dropped several provisions on non-citizen worker protections that Harvard had objected to as falling outside the scope of labor bargaining — a central union priority as the Trump administration has escalated pressure on international students. But the union reasserted its demand that workers forced to leave the country mid-appointment over immigration issues be guaranteed rehiring upon return, along with language restricting Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to campus without a judicial warrant. Adams said Harvard did not commit to additional bargaining times before the strike deadline.

LOCAL

► From the Seattle Times — OPINION: Dear Starbucks: Here’s some perspective from a native Nashvillian — A Tennessee law allows for the state to enter into negotiations with corporations and to agree to tax incentives, all in secret. The state used the law when it put in its bid for Amazon’s second headquarters in 2017. Under state statute, the Department of Economic and Community Development commissioner and the state attorney general can determine that a document or information should not be disclosed because it could harm the dealmaking. The documents can be sealed from the public for up to five years…Starbucks workers may find Nashville a good place to make a living, but Seattle is a place to make a life.

► From Oregon Live — Oregon teachers, Nike factory workers demand higher taxes and wages — Oregon teachers and Asian garment workers have launched a campaign demanding Nike pay higher state taxes and better factory wages. The campaign’s organizers include the Portland Association of Teachers, Global Labor Justice, Asia Floor Wage Alliance and Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation. On Friday, the Oregon Education Association’s Representative Assembly, which has roughly 1,000 members, most of them teachers, voted to back the campaign. The OEA is the state’s largest union for public education employees. It has 42,000 members.

► From NPR — She raised concerns about her company’s contracts with ICE. Then she lost her job — Little, who worked in legal publishing, was part of a committee of employees that sent a letter to company management in February flagging that ICE could be using Thomson Reuters products unlawfully and asking for greater transparency about the company’s oversight of its contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Soon after their effort was made public in the media, however, Little was fired from her role…Little is now suing the company, arguing that her dismissal violated a law in her home state of Oregon that bars employers from firing whistleblowers.

► From OPB — Portland Mayor Keith Wilson proposes cutting jobs and city programs to balance budget deficit — Unions representing city staff have spent the past few months lobbying the mayor’s office to avoid cutting union jobs to balance the budget. Last year, the city trimmed more than 100 positions to cut costs. Unions, like the City of Portland Professional Workers and AFSCME Local 189, have specifically urged Wilson to address what they call “administrative bloat” in certain departments, where the number of high-paying non-union middle management positions has grown as lower-level union positions have been chopped.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the Daily UW — We watched a UW student get detained and removed from the country. Now it’s time to take a look at our university — For the deported grad student, community looks like United Auto Workers (UAW) 4121, the union representing academic student employees at UW, taking steps to support him and other immigrant workers. Gourav Khullar, a post-doctoral scholar in the astronomy department, is one of the many members of the union currently advocating to enact safety measures for immigrant workers at UW.

► From the Daily Cal — AFSCME 3299 set to strike next month over health care hike and housing — The open-ended strike comes after five separate strikes and as negotiations move into their third year. In a statement, AFSCME 3299 said it has filed two Unfair Labor Practices against the university, citing an alleged raise in health care costs for members and an alleged refusal to bargain over housing benefits…According to Perlman, the university raised health care costs for members without bargaining, which she alleges is illegal. She says these hikes can cost AFSCME members about $100-200 per month. The average union member makes $62,000 per year.

► From the Sacramento Bee — Two years into bargaining, UC service, health care workers plan open-ended strike — The union said the open-ended strike, scheduled to begin May 14, would be the first of its kind at UC health systems and would impact all 10 university campuses and other facilities across the state…In November 2024, AFSCME Local 3299 went on a multi-day strike over low wages and health care costs. The union represents roughly 40,000 UC service and patient care technical workers who work at university facilities across the state.

NATIONAL

► From Axios — Exclusive: Microsoft partners with construction unions on AI boom — Microsoft and North America’s Building Trades Unions are supercharging efforts to train workers for the AI economy, according to an announcement shared first with Axios…NABTU and Microsoft will now offer free AI literacy courses and industry-recognized credentials to millions of skilled craft professionals across North America…The company also has partnerships with the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers.

► From People’s World — Labor leaders at People’s World town hall: May Day’s our day — Faye Guenther urged workers to remember all the different aspects of their economic power. Guenther is president UFCW Local 3000, which represents more than 50,000 grocery, retail, health care, and other workers in the Pacific Northwest. Her union has been going from workplace to workplace to talk with workers about the need for “a general strike pledge to protect workplaces and communities.” Many of their conversations have centered on abuses committed by federal immigration agents.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Washington Post — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will resign amid misconduct allegations — By many accounts, Chavez-DeRemer had shown fierce loyalty to the president and his agenda, installing a massive banner of Trump’s face on the side of the agency’s Washington headquarters in the fall. She invited him to see his “beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”…“We need a labor secretary who understands working people and will work to make our lives better— not just be a rubber stamp for corporations’ wish lists and gut the protections we count on,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, in a statement, responding to Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation.

► From Bloomberg Law — Trump’s AI Plan Leaves Labor Groups Wanting More Tech Guardrails — AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said at a press conference last week that labor groups like the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, an affiliate of UniteHere, had won guardrails that required casinos to give workers advanced notice before implementing new technologies. The union is “pushing companies to develop tech that centers workers, so that technology makes our jobs better and safer and not degrading and dehumanizing,” she said. Additionally, the News Guild-Communications Workers of America and The Writers Guild of America also won contract provisions in recent years, like requiring oversight over AI implementation in the workplace or advanced notice if a company wants to license work to train AI models.

► From Maine Public — Trump admin. ends collective bargaining agreements with 2 Portsmouth Naval Shipyard unions — The Trump administration has terminated collective bargaining agreements with two unions representing several hundred workers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, according to labor leaders…Alana Schaeffer, president of the Portsmouth Metal Trades Council, said undermining worker stability ultimately hurts national security. Schaeffer said her union’s bargaining agreement is shielded for now by a court injunction, but that it’s still unnerving workers. “It puts that level of anxiety where, you know, our workers don’t know if they’re going to wake up tomorrow and they’re going to have also lost their rights,” Schaeffer said.

► From the NW Labor Press — DOL looks at cutting paperwork for hundreds of small unions — The smallest unions file simple one-page forms known as LM-3s or LM-4s, while those with more than $250,000 a year in revenue (most unions) file the LM-2, which discloses the names of officers and employees and how much they are paid, the value of union assets, and much more. Last July the DOL proposed to raise the LM-2 threshold to $450,000 to keep up with inflation and reduce the burden on small unions of filing the more detailed forms. The government estimates that on average it takes 530 hours for union staff or officers to collect the necessary records and 88 hours to prepare the form.

► From the NW Labor Press — Union to City Hall: Wage theft is tax fraud — Paying workers under the table is tax fraud. That’s the message United Brotherhood of Carpenters delivered April 7 at a noon-hour rally outside Portland City Hall. Misclassifying workers as independent contractors is also tax fraud, Carpenters union leaders said. And both are categories of wage theft. For years the Carpenters union has tried to raise public awareness that wage theft is also tax fraud. This year the union held more than 100 similar actions around the country from April 6-18.

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