St. Joes picket | Hunger strike ends | Alaska airlines understaffed

Thursday, August 20, 2026

LOCAL

► From the Stranger — Hunger Strike Over Poor Food Quality at NWDC Concludes  — After nearly a week, more than 140 immigrants detained in the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) have concluded their hunger strike in protest of inedible food, often served at irregular hours…Days into the strike, participants entered into negotiations with employees of GEO Group, the private prison corporation which owns and operates the NWDC on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to a press statement by La Resistencia, the detainees stopped the hunger strike over the weekend after company representatives promised them new menus, improved food quality, and bigger portions.

► From KHQ — Cash Assistance available from WA state and Red Cross after Spokane Fires — To receive cash assistance, you can apply in-person at several locations across Spokane and Stevens county, or online. To qualify, you will be asked to provide Photo ID and proof of residency in a home that was destroyed or damaged in the Spokane Area Fires…The American Red Cross is also offering cash assistance to individuals with damaged primary residences without income or insurance conditions. To apply, go in person to one of their sites, and present a Photo ID.

► From OPB — Vancouver Public Schools accepts state financial oversight amid budget woes — The board agreed to be placed under “binding conditions,” which involve monitoring and guidance from the state as the district works to improve its financial picture…VPS has an approximately $2.25 million deficit from the 2025-26 school year. That’s after making staff cuts earlier this year to close a $24 million hole in its budget. Administrators ultimately cut 35 staff and left another 72 positions unfilled.

AEROSPACE

► From Simple Flying — “Impossible To Deliver”: Alaska Airlines 787 Long-Haul Flights Are Understaffed, Crews Say — Flight attendants on Alaska Airlines’ new long-haul Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner routes from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) say the carrier is not maintaining sufficient staffing levels to support its Main Cabin service. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) has filed a formal grievance against the airline, accusing management of adding new food, drink and premium products to the economy cabin, but refusing to add the crew needed to deliver it.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the Tacoma News Tribune — Informational pickets organized for Tacoma, Silverdale hospitals. Here’s what’s up — Healthcare workers represented by UFCW 3000 scheduled pickets Wednesday afternoon at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma and Thursday at St. Michael Medical Center in Silverdale in Kitsap County. At issue is the union-represented workers’ contract fight “to prevent CommonSpirit Health from lowering the standard for health care jobs across Puget Sound,” UFCW 3000 stated in a release ahead of the pickets.

► From UFCW 3000:

► From FOX 13 — Seattle teachers prepared to strike if no contract agreement is made — Barker is a teacher at Captain Stephen E. Sanislo Elementary and has been an educator with Seattle Public Schools for about 20 years. She tells FOX 13 Seattle that teachers say they are overloaded by more work than there is time. “There is a lot of what we’ve been calling pressurization and trying to reclaim some of our time so that we as educators can accomplish the things that we know that we need to do to best serve our kids and build relationships with our families,” said Barker. Barker said other areas of concern are maintaining a special education program that benefits all students and providing educators and staff with a livable wage.

► From People’s World — Two years after unionizing, Portland homeless support workers have no contract — Getting organized was a big achievement, but winning a collective bargaining agreement has turned out to be another matter for Do Good Multnomah Workers United (DGWU / AFSCME 1790). The latest financial proposal from the company was that 90% of workers take a $1,500 per year pay cut—after two years of no cost-of-living increases or raises. One DGWU worker called the proposal to cut their pay a “slap in the face.” Workers have had no COLAs or raises since negotiations started, but the prices of rent, gas, groceries, and more have continued to rise.

ORGANIZING

► From Capital & Main — After Years-Long Battle, California Rideshare Drivers Win Certification. Can They Win a Contract? — At a celebratory news conference Tuesday, organizers of the California Gig Workers Union announced they’ve crossed the threshold of worker support needed in order to be certified by the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to represent Uber and Lyft drivers. That certification, expected to be finalized in early September, affects roughly 800,000 California rideshare drivers who could then be covered by collective bargaining.

NATIONAL

► From the Verge — Meta glasses are a workplace menace — Ordinarily, if you are recorded against your will, you can try to leave the area or otherwise resist being recorded. But many people are encountering smart glasses for the first time while at their job, especially those who interact with the public, like retail and service workers. In the workplace, smart glasses exacerbate the power imbalance between the customer and the employee, or the boss and subordinate…Emily, who works at a popular Seattle tourist destination, deals with vlogger questions and videographers trying to get close-up shots of the food her attraction sells…The worst is when a much taller man stands over her and films her with his Meta glasses. She thinks — hopes — he is not filming down her shirt. But that’s what it feels like. “If someone was [holding] a phone up from that angle, I could obviously be like, ‘Hey man, please stop that,’” Emily says. The glasses make it much harder to tell what, exactly, a customer is filming.

► From Teen Vogue — Teens Have Always Been on the Front Lines of the Labor Movement — The first factory strike in U.S. history began on May 26th, 1824…The mill workers of Pawtucket had planted the seeds for the next two hundred years of working class rebellion. It just so happened that all of them were women—and many of them were teenage girls, some as young as 15 years old. Teenagers and young adult workers have played an outsized role in American labor since such a thing even existed.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Spokesman Review — Wildland firefighting bill gains steam as smoke reaches Congress — For many senators from out West – whose states face more consistent problems of droughts and extreme heat – the issue of wildfires and subsequent air quality concerns is not a new one. However, if blazes continue burning at their current rates, 2026 could become one of the most severe wildfire seasons on record for parts of the country…Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon – where the Big Grass Fire that is still blazing became the largest in the state’s history last week – earlier this month raised concerns about the impacts of the Trump administration’s cuts to the Forest Service, housed within USDA.

► From On Labor — Does Mental Illness Count as Illness? Not in the Fifth Circuit — In 2022, OSHA issued a citation to Exxon Mobil for failing to record an employee’s PTSD diagnosis as a work-related illness.  The employee in question had helped firefighters respond to an explosion and the ensuing fire at a petroleum refinery…The Fifth Circuit’s Exxon decision is part of the fall-out of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.  Before Loper Bright, the Fifth Circuit would likely have deferred to OSHA’s interpretation of the scope of its authority to decide which illnesses employers need to report.  But Loper Bright invited judges to substitute their own judgment for the judgment of agency personnel with actual knowledge of the relevant field.

► From the AP — FTC proposal would require retailers to be transparent about personalized pricing — Companies that secretly vary prices based on how much they think individual customers will pay could face federal charges under a proposed policy released Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission…The FTC has had its eye on personalized pricing for several years. In a preliminary report filed in January 2025, the agency found that grocers, clothing companies and others were using third-party companies to help them individualize online prices based on shoppers’ locations, browsing histories and other factors, including how long they left items in their virtual shopping carts.

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