Strikes | Congressional standstill | Amber Czech

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

STRIKES

► From KREM — Moses Lake teachers hit the picket line as union and district fail to reach agreement –Teachers in the Moses Lake School District hit the picket lines Monday morning after the teachers’ union and the district failed to reach a labor agreement…Educators authorized a strike on Friday, November 28. “We have bargained in good faith since June and have made significant concessions to settle this bargain,” Heather Whittall, president of the Moses Lake Education Association, said. “But district Superintendent Lewis continues to place the financial burden for her personal agenda directly on the backs of teachers without adequately justifying why reducing funds for our classrooms is beneficial to Moses Lake students.”

► From Oregon Live — Legacy Health nurse practitioners, other medical specialists on strike in Oregon, SW Washington — Nurse practitioners, physician associates, clinical nurse specialists and others Legacy Health medical professionals are on strike, the Oregon Nurses Association said. The open-ended walkout, coming after a more than a year of stalled contract talks, will hit Legacy’s hospitals and clinics in Oregon and Southwest Washington starting Tuesday morning.

► From the Seattle Times — Starbucks union says strike is longest in company history — Around 2,500 baristas from more than 120 stores in 85 cities are part of the strike, Workers United said Friday. Participating coffeehouses include two in Seattle — University District, 4147 University Way N.E., and West Queen Anne, 1144 Elliott Ave. W. — and one in Redmond, 7625 170th Ave. N.E. All three are marked as closed on the Starbucks app. “Union baristas from the three Seattle area stores that have been out on strike remain out,” a Workers United spokesperson said Monday. Picket lines are set to take place at the University District location on Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon.

Editor’s note: find and RSVP to a picket line near you at NoContractNoCoffee.org

► From the Guardian — ‘We’re not going anywhere’: how unionization ‘whirlwind’ set stage for historic Starbucks strike — “It’s still shocking to me to wake up and have them every day still fighting us the way that they’re fighting us,” Michelle Eisen, spokesperson for Starbucks Workers United, told the Guardian. “Because we have proven time and time again that we’re not going anywhere.”…Michelle Eisen started working at the Buffalo store in August 2010, to supplement her job as a production stage manager, in between theater shows. She was a longtime Starbucks customer, and trusted its reputation for treating workers well. And for years, Eisen felt valued as an employee, receiving regular wage increases and working around her production schedule. But things started to change in about 2016, according to Eisen. “We saw our benefits costs go up significantly. Those twice a year raises went away completely,” she said in an interview.

LOCAL

► From the Seattle Times — CEO pay spiked at Microsoft, Starbucks. How much do Seattle’s chiefs make? — Packages for Nadella and Niccol, the Seattle area’s highest-paid CEOs leading large, publicly traded companies, show a jump from the year before. In a regulatory filing from October, Microsoft disclosed the total compensation for CEO Satya Nadella had reached nearly $100 million for the company’s 2025 fiscal year, which ran from July 2024 through June 2025. The year before, Nadella’s pay totaled almost $80 million…Microsoft’s stock price has suffered lately, but on the year so far it’s up by more than 16% compared to the Nasdaq’s 20% gain. Starbucks’ stock price is down about 8% this year. Niccol, who joined Starbucks from Chipotle in September 2024, had a $97.8 million compensation package for his first few months on the job. His predecessor, Laxman Narasimhan, had made $14.6 million the year before.

► From KUOW — Thousands of Washington state Medicare users could soon have claims denied by AI — Starting Jan. 1, traditional Medicare recipients in Washington state will face a new hurdle to get certain procedures covered — private AI companies that get paid based on how many claims they deny…The federal agency that runs Medicare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has hired private companies in each pilot state — Washington, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and Texas — who will use AI tools to determine whether traditional Medicare patients qualify for certain procedures.

► From the Yakima Herald — Peaceful protest in downtown Yakima raises awareness of ICE actions — The Saturday gathering happened as ICE arrests appear to have ramped up, with some apparently happening in the busy areas of Yakima and Union Gap. According to the Deportation Data Project, 215 people from Washington were arrested by ICE in Washington in July, compared to 85 in July 2024 and 107 in January. Those are the latest numbers available. Most arrested do not have a criminal record, according to the Deportation Data Project, which uses information provided by ICE through Freedom of Information Act request.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From CBS Sports — WNBA CBA negotiations: League, players union agree to additional extension of 40 days to continue talks — Just minutes before the current collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, the WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association agreed to a 40-day extension, the league announced Sunday night. The new expiration date for the current CBA is Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. Either party can terminate the extension at any point with 48-hour notice. This is the second time that the current CBA has been extended. It was originally set to expire on Oct. 31, but days before that deadline the two sides agreed to a 30-day extension that pushed the expiration date back to Nov. 30. There was little movement — at least publicly — over the last 30 days, and it seemed as though the two sides may be heading for a status quo period until their last-minute extension late on Sunday night.

► From the Wichita Business Journal — Spirit AeroSystems prepares to begin contract negotiations with SPEEA union — On Dec. 9, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace will begin negotiations on behalf of white-collar employees in non-engineering roles at Spirit AeroSystems (NYSE: SPR), SPEEA said in a news release.
At stake is a labor contract that will span the aerospace supplier’s transition to the Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA). The $8.3 billion acquisition of Spirit, which spun off from Boeing in 2005, is expected to be finalized before the end of the year pending final regulatory approval…The agreement between Spirit and SPEEA’s Wichita Technical and Professional Unit expires Jan. 31, 2026. The six-year contract was approved in December 2019. The union has surveyed members about what they would like to see in their next contract. As grocery costs continue to climb, compensation will be an important element of the new contract, Corliss said.

NATIONAL

► From the 19th — Amber Czech was murdered at work. Tradeswomen say it could have happened to any of them. — As the news spread across social media, stories poured in on Instagram and TikTok from tradeswomen expressing their anger and frustration. Over the last week they have shared their own experiences of working with men who threatened them, made sexual advances or joked about their incompetence. They pondered how their story could have ended differently, how their life could have ended like Czech’s…Only about 4 percent of tradesworkers are women, but if they can find their way into the field, the jobs, which do not require a degree, offer middle-class wages, pensions and other benefits that are often not available in women-dominated industries like caregiving or the service industry. But Czech’s death has Cacace questioning the workplace she’s urging girls to enter. “She did everything that we want these girls to do. She did a high school welding program. She went to a community college,” she said. “It’s just a sharp reminder that there’s just a lot of work to do and figuring out how to better advocate and make sure that these young women are safe.”

► From Gothamist — Starbucks to pay $35M to NYC workers after city alleges years of abuses — Starbucks will pay about $35 million to more than 15,000 workers in what officials are calling the largest worker protection settlement in New York City history — after the company allegedly denied thousands of workers stable schedules and cut their hours arbitrarily. The agreement, announced Monday, could mean thousands of dollars for many Starbucks employees, with checks coming in the mail this winter. It calls for most hourly workers employed by the company in New York City from July 2021 through early July 2024 to get $50 for each week worked. An employee who worked for a year and a half during that period would get $3,900, according to a city announcement.

► From France 24 — ‘Empty building sites’: North Carolina immigration crackdown sparks fear among workers — In a statement released on November 19, the North Carolina State American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), one of the largest federations of unions in the US, demanded the Trump administration “end its reign of terror on immigrant workers”, blasting the operation as “a serious threat to the basic rights of all working people”. Its president, Braxton Winston, personally witnessed the operation. A video he livestreamed to Facebook on November 16 shows residents chasing Border Patrol agents through the woods as the agents approached a forestry site. “They focus on messing with people at work, generating revenue, building our city,” he says in the video. “They are not going up with people who are doing things wrong; they’re dealing with people who are at work.”

POLITICS & POLICY

► From Politico — Thune casts doubt on passing government funding bills before Christmas — Faced with another looming shutdown threat on Jan. 30, Thune has been seeking approval from all 100 senators to bundle together a slate of spending measures for floor consideration. But objections from individual lawmakers have hindered progress on another grouping of bills to fund most federal agencies through next September…Even if the Senate passes another spending package in the coming weeks, most federal agencies won’t be funded past January if Senate leaders don’t reach a compromise that can pass the House.

► From Politico — Jeffries says Johnson ‘tanked’ Trump’s health care proposal — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is accusing Speaker Mike Johnson of undermining a White House proposal to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies for two years as Congress stares down a fast-approaching deadline to avoid massive premium hikes. “It even appears that the Trump administration was ready to put forth a plan that would at least have been worthy of consideration, and that Mike Johnson tanked it,” Jeffries said at a press conference Monday…“Obviously, Mike Johnson has zero interest in protecting the health care of the American people,” said Jeffries, adding that while Republicans “consistently said” they would discuss an extension of the subsidies after the end of the shutdown, “now we get nothing but crickets.”

► From the Federal News Network — 3 federal workforce bills to watch in House Oversight Committee markup — Lawmakers are expected to consider bills covering everything from whistleblower protections and skills-based hiring for federal contractors, to relocation incentives for federal employees. Several other legislative changes may be on the horizon as well. Here are three key bills up for the committee’s consideration that may bring significant changes for the federal workforce.

► From Semafor — Fight over state-level AI rules heats up in Congress — Washington will focus intensely this month on the Senate’s vote to extend expiring enhanced health insurance tax credits, but don’t lose sight of the must-pass defense policy bill. That’s where the White House and its allies are pushing language to block states from establishing their own artificial intelligence regulations — a fight that played out over the Thanksgiving recess, according to a person familiar with the matter. House GOP leaders want to add the AI moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act at Trump’s request, but some Republicans don’t like it and most Democrats oppose it, too.

► From the New York Times — FEMA Won’t Reinstate Suspended Workers Who Signed Letter Criticizing Trump — The Trump administration said on Monday that it was revoking the reinstatement of 14 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who have been on administrative leave since August, when they wrote a letter to Congress warning that President Trump was gutting disaster response in the United States. The move was an abrupt reversal from last week, when FEMA sent notices to the employees stating that “you are being removed from administrative leave,” according to copies of the notices reviewed by The New York Times. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of FEMA, said in an email on Monday that rogue “bureaucrats” had sent those notices without the approval of senior department leaders.

► From the Washington State Standard — WA lawmakers will gather in Olympia to gear up for 2026 session –This year, both chambers will be in town at the same time. It will provide a sense of the pace and tenor of policy debates to come in next year’s 60-day session. Wednesday, Dec. 3, is reserved for meetings of seven committees composed of House and Senate members. On Thursday and Friday, individual House and Senate committees will meet starting at 8 a.m. each day…For the full schedule, agendas and documents, visit the Legislature’s website. All meetings will be livestreamed on TVW.

► From the Olympian — WA sues to protect SNAP benefits for legal immigrants in multi-state complaint — Washington state sued on Nov. 26 to prevent the federal government from “unlawfully” blocking food benefits from legal immigrants, according to a news release from Attorney General Nick Brown’s office…Plaintiffs want the court to stop new USDA guidance that they argue treats certain legal immigrants as ineligible for SNAP in error. Such permanent residents include refugees and people granted asylum. The AGs also say the USDA’s guidance runs counter to federal law and could lead states to be on the hook for significant financial penalties.

► From KFF Health News — Medicaid Work Rules Exempt the ‘Medically Frail.’ Deciding Who Qualifies Is Tricky. — The 27-year-old resident of Bloomington, Indiana, has a pacemaker and a painful joint disease. She also has fused vertebrae in her neck from a spinal injury, preventing her from turning her head. Indiana’s Medicaid agency currently considers Brader “medically frail,” giving her access to an expanded set of benefits, such as physical therapy. New federal rules will require more than 18 million Medicaid enrollees nationwide to show they’re working, volunteering, or going to school for 80 hours a month starting in 2027 to keep their coverage. Brader is exempt as long as she’s deemed medically frail. But lacking sufficient federal guidance, states are wrestling with how to define medical frailty — a consequential decision that could cut Medicaid coverage for many people, said state officials, consumer advocates, and health policy researchers.

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