Surveillance economy | Pregnant workers | UC strike averted

Thursday, May 14, 2026

LOCAL

► From KUOW — Washington AG accuses Providence of mistreating pregnant and nursing staff — “Taking commonsense steps to keep pregnant and nursing employees and their babies safe and healthy isn’t optional — it’s the law,” Brown said in the release. “A health care provider like Providence should know better.” Some specific accommodations that Providence allegedly denied over the years include: allowing an employee to sit more frequently, enabling scheduling flexibility for prenatal visits, limiting heavy lifting, and providing a private space to express breast milk…Before filing the lawsuit in King County Superior Court on Wednesday, the Attorney General’s Office says it brought these concerns to Providence and attempted to resolve them, but the discussions were “unsuccessful.”

► From KUOW — Washington state tech layoffs are second highest in the country — But Simon said those layoffs still comprise a tiny fraction of the overall labor market. The bigger change she sees in the tech workforce is the slowdown in hiring. “ I think the bigger margin of adjustment is the lack of hiring … that rate keeps just ticking down, down, down, down consecutively every month,” she said…“ There’s a lot more people still employed in tech than getting laid off by many, many multiples,” Simon said. “But it’s also just an example of such a concentrated city where it must feel like everybody’s working in tech in Seattle.”

► From the union-busting Columbian — State auditor’s letter recommends improvements to Evergreen Public Schools’ supplemental contracts process — One of those speakers, Kendall Thiemann, a teacher at Evergreen High School, highlighted a $13,980 supplemental contract paid to Chief Operations Officer Jenae Gomes as lead negotiator during the 2023 teachers strike. When Gomes led negotiations again during last year’s strike that included paraeducators and other classified staff in the district, Thiemann submitted documents to the Vancouver Police Department in early September alleging Gomes falsified records to receive the extra payment

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the Los Angeles Times — UC strike averted as AFSCME union patient care and service workers reach tentative agreement — A strike that would have disrupted operations affecting thousands of University of California hospital patients and students was averted at the 11th hour Thursday morning after UC and leaders of 40,000 union members reached a tentative agreement, winning raises and capped healthcare costs for workers. “WE WON! Strike is off!” read an announcement from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299. Workers were told to report to work Thursday at the system’s sprawling network of medical centers and campuses.

► From the New York Times — A Long Island Rail Road Strike May Be Near. Here’s What to Know. — Kevin Sexton, a vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, one of the unions, said he was encouraged by the governor’s willingness to negotiate, but that the possibility of a strike remained…The five unions, representing about half of the Long Island Rail Road work force, are the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen; the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen; the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; and the Transportation Communications Union. They are seeking a retroactive 9.5 percent wage increase covering the last three years — the same deal the M.T.A. offered several other transit and civil service unions in recent months.

► From the Seattle Times — REI union workers call for boycott of co-op’s biggest annual sale — Sue Cottrell, a sales associate at the REI store in Bellingham, said she plans to hand out leaflets to passersby outside her workplace during the boycott. “Calling for a boycott is kind of a big deal,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday. “We do not want REI to fail. We’re just trying to bring the attention to the general public.”

ORGANIZING

► From the Stranger — Seattle Art Museum Workers Are Unionizing — First to take the stage was Jenny Woods, an installation and design registration specialist and member of the SAMWU organizing committee. A 25-year veteran of the museum industry who’s spent the last decade of her career at SAM, Woods said staff regularly could not afford basic necessities and had to leave their positions for jobs with better pay and benefits. “Without a staff, a museum is nothing but a warehouse,” Woods said. “Too often, museums consider staff to be dispensable, easily replaceable, whiny and—apparently —independently wealthy. If museum professionals make the museum, then it is time for museum leadership to recognize staff’s contributions and work harder to keep us here.”

NATIONAL

► From Jacobin — The Surveillance Economy Is Here. This Is How We Fight Back. — The basic terms of democracy were being tested by private power that recognizes hardly any limits at all. As a consumer and worker rights attorney who has served in every level of government, I see this test playing out across our economy — most starkly with the advent of surveillance prices and wages, a system where paychecks are set to the lowest a worker is willing to accept, and prices to the highest a consumer is willing to pay. It’s not some distant future. Corporations are already tinkering with ways to map our vulnerabilities and convert them into profit. As the war in Iran drives up airline prices, one carrier was caught urging consumers to purchase tickets in “incognito” mode — a rare admission of how companies use our personal data to draw inferences about us and raise prices.

► From Construction Dive — Bechtel, NABTU launch nuclear apprenticeship push as power demand rises — Bechtel and North America’s Building Trades Unions have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at modernizing apprenticeship programs for nuclear construction projects, including both traditional reactors and small modular reactors…The agreement also reflects broader growth across the power construction market. Utility and gas construction starts increased 59.3% during the 12 months ending February 2026, while nonbuilding construction starts climbed 17% overall, according to recent data from the Dodge Construction Network.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From Common Dreams — No Kings Movement and ‘All Roads Lead to the South’ to Protest GOP Voting Rights Attacks — Republican state lawmakers are seizing on the US Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act to continue President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering spree, including in Alabama, where “All Roads Lead to the South,” the No Kings coalition, community members, faith leaders, and other organizations plan to come together on Saturday, May 16, in protest. They are set to start at 9:00 am CT at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon and the site of Bloody Sunday…“The politicians attacking voting rights today are clinging to a shrinking vision of America rooted in fear, exclusion, and minority rule. They are trying to preserve a past this country has already rejected,” said the No Kings panel.

► From Politico — Georgia to draw new congressional maps for 2028 — Kemp on Wednesday ordered the Legislature to convene next month to consider redistricting for 2028. His proclamation specifically asks the Legislature to draw new maps in response to the Supreme Court decision last month that has triggered new Republican-drawn maps in other Southern states…By taking up the 2028 map years in advance, Kemp assures Republicans can draw a favorable map for that cycle regardless of the results of this year’s elections, in which the GOP could potentially lose seats in the Legislature and a Democrat could succeed the term-limited Kemp.

► From the New Republic — Trump Says He Doesn’t Care “Even a Little Bit” About People’s Finances ​​– “When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. “Not even a little bit,” Trump said, shockingly out of touch even for him. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

► From the New York Times — Trump Administration Pushes I.R.S. to Identify Undocumented Immigrants — At the center of the deliberations between Trump administration officials and the I.R.S., described by three people familiar with them, are potential changes to a nine-digit code, called an individual taxpayer identification number or ITIN, that people without a Social Security number can use to file their taxes. Currently, a relatively large pool of people can receive an ITIN to put on their tax returns. It includes people living abroad who owe U.S. taxes, some immigrants with legal status and those without it. The codes can also be used to open a bank account, apply for a credit card and, in some states, get a driver’s license.

Editor’s note: the TL;DR here is that an ITIN allows people to access essentials for living in the US. If that data can be used to target people with violent immigration enforcement, immigrant workers hoping to avoid inhuman detention and deportation would be pushed further into the shadows, expanding an underclass of working people increasingly vulnerable to exploitation by employers. 

► From Reuters — US freezes Medicare enrollments for new home healthcare and hospice providers — The Trump administration will block new home healthcare and hospice providers from enrolling in Medicare for at least the next six months, according to a government statement posted on Wednesday, citing concerns about widespread fraud. The moratorium will temporarily bar new providers in those categories from signing up for reimbursement ‌from Medicare, a U.S. government health insurance program for Americans aged 65 and older and those with disabilities. It will not impact providers already registered with Medicare, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the program.

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