Worker power = Joy | Electrical job training | Taco Bell strike

Friday, February 13, 2026

STRIKES

► From Complex — Taco Bell Workers Go On Strike Over Alleged Racial Abuse by Manager — Employees at a Taco Bell in Northern California stepped off the job this week, launching a two-day strike over what they describe as repeated racial harassment and unsafe working conditions. According to local station Fox40, the walkout began at 3 p.m. Monday outside the Taco Bell located at 3967 Park Drive in El Dorado Hills. Cooks and cashiers gathered along the sidewalk with signs stating the protest was meant to draw attention to allegations involving a store manager…“The store manager expresses his anger at us with ongoing verbal racist threats and abuse, including nearly every shift calling both of us stupid, motherf**kers, and f**king Mexicans and making racist statements when he sees Latino customers who do not speak English,” the employees wrote.

► From the Washington Post — San Francisco teachers, district reach deal to end first strike in decades — San Francisco teachers have reached a tentative agreement with the school district to end their strike, the first such walkout in nearly 50 years. San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su said schools will reopen to staff Friday and to students Wednesday after two holidays.  Teachers joined picket lines after last-ditch negotiations failed to reach a new contract. They were demanding higher wages, more health benefits, and more resources for students with special needs.

LOCAL

► From the Everett Herald — High schoolers construct, compete and get career-ready — These classes offer a variety of hands-on learning opportunities throughout the state — including construction, American Sign Language, medical assisting and others — for middle and high school students…“This I’ve done many times before,” said Gage Wolfe, an Arlington High School senior, as he worked on wiring two outlets, a light switch and a junction box for testing purposes. “I enjoy the hands-on part of it. I’ve never been successful just sitting down and being told to do things.” His focus right now is graduating from high school, Wolfe said, but he wants to get an electrical apprenticeship. “This program is my whole entire plan because you can take this program and get an interview with a union,” he said.

► From KIMA — Congdon Packing Company plans to lay off 102 employees in Yakima — Congdon Packing Company announced their plans on Monday for a mass layoff, which will terminate approximately 102 employees. Management at the company confirmed that the layoffs will not involve relocation or outsourcing and that the employees are not represented by a union.

► From OPB — Neighbors of Portland ICE facility to go before federal judge over chronic tear gas — The neighbors and property management group of Gray’s Landing, which sits kitty-corner from the embattled immigration facility, aim to limit federal officers from clouding the neighborhood with stinging gas and other munitions. The crux of their argument: The chemicals are not only infiltrating homes, but wreaking havoc on their bodies and lives. They’ve described in court filings times they’ve slept with gas masks and sealed gaps in doors and windows with wet towels…As OPB previously reported, federal officers fired a projectile on Jan. 31 that damaged a Gray’s Landing tenant’s window. The gas that entered the apartment that day led a Yemen-born woman and her mother both to vomit.

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the Colorado Sun — Workers at Greeley JBS plant preparing for rare meatpacking strike — Union workers at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley plan to spend Saturday preparing for what could become the nation’s first meatpacker strike in decades. Some will train to be picket captains, while others make picket signs. As for the actual walkout of nearly 3,800 JBS workers in Greeley? A decision could be made by Feb. 20, the one day JBS is willing to negotiate, union officials said…Cordova said the plant has sped up the production line to process 420 animals per hour, up from 390. “It’s not just safety for the worker but safety for the consumer. You want to make sure that … any part of that cow is properly inspected and processed,” she said. “They’re just shutting down operations one day a week and that’s why they’re speeding up the lines. They want you to do all the work that normally would take five days in four days.”

► From Variety — Hearst Magazines Union Authorizes Strike for 410 Members if It Fails to Reach New Deal With Company — The WGAE Council said it authorized a strike for the 410-member Hearst Magazines unit should “management fail to reach a fair contract” on Friday, the last scheduled day of bargaining. The union has engaged in more than two months of negotiations with Hearst Magazine, during which the guild agreed to continue talks past the previous contract’s Jan. 31, 2026, expiration date. According to WGA East, the company’s management “failed to meet the workers’ reasonable demands for job protections and sustainable careers during a dire time in journalism. Management has refused to bargain on reasonable in-office expectations and offered zero protections against AI.”

► From the New York Times’ Athletic — What would MLB look like with a salary cap? Explaining the wide-ranging, game-changing effects — A salary cap would be a seismic shift for Major League Baseball, changing far more than how much teams can spend. Team and league officials describe a cap as an egalitarian reset, a leveling of the playing field that would allow teams in all markets to more fairly compete. To the Players Association, such competitive balance arguments are age-old red herrings, distractions from the owners’ ultimate goal of increasing their franchise values and lining their own pockets…The union has opposed the concept for decades.  “Salary caps in the other sports have not led to competitive balance,” said Bruce Meyer, the deputy director of the union, in an interview with The Athletic. “In fact — baseball, which is the only one of the four major sports that does not have a salary cap — actually has better competitive balance than the other sports.”

NATIONAL

► From the Guardian — ‘Standing up for our workers’: US unions raise thousands for victims of ICE crackdown — Foreign-born workers make up 15% of all US union members, with more than 2.2 million workers in 2024, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, an AFL-CIO affiliate, has raised more than $126,000 to support workers in Minnesota with legal assistance, including representation when attending asylum hearings. “Things that used to just be simple immigration-related activities to keep people’s status current have turned into things that we have to really support and could put them at risk because of the profiling that’s being done,” said Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, the union federation’s president.

► From the Minnesota Star Tribune — Minnesota resistance movement says drawdown is ‘hard-fought community victory’ — But even as leaders of Minnesota’s globally recognized resistance movement claimed victory, they acknowledged a long road ahead of picking up the pieces. Immigration agents shot three people in Minneapolis, killing two: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Prominent activists and journalists continue to face federal charges for demonstrating against the Trump administration’s policies and covering those protests. Immigrant business corridors have become dead zones, school attendance plummeted and many immigrant families who haven’t been detained and deported are now facing the prospect of eviction after weeks of sheltering in place.

► From the Washington State Standard — Many middle-income families spend at least a tenth of their income on health insurance — The share of the median household income spent on premium contributions and deductibles for family coverage ranged from a low of 5.7% in the District of Columbia to a high of 15.6% in Louisiana. The states with the highest percentages were concentrated in the South — Florida, Mississippi and North Carolina, all at 13.7%, were the only other states that topped 13%. The federal affordability standard  for health care costs in 2024 was 8.4% for employer-sponsored health plans. “Southern workers face some of the highest cost burdens because wages in the region are lower, so families spend a bigger share of their pay on employer coverage,” said Kristen Kolb, lead author of the report and a research associate at Commonwealth Fund, in a statement to Stateline.

► From the AP — Amazon scraps partnership with surveillance company after Super Bowl ad backlash — Amazon’s smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety. The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance society. But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And Ring’s announcement doesn’t cite the ad as a reason for the “joint decision” for the cancellation.

► From Yahoo News — After deadly explosion at US Steel mill outside Pittsburgh, maintaining safety now falls to Nippon — For Don Furko, Aug. 11, 2025, was a normal shift. Until it became the shift he would never forget. At 10:47 a.m., U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works outside Pittsburgh — a sprawling riverside industrial facility and the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere — erupted in an ear-piercing boom. A steelworker for 25 years and former Clairton local union president, Furko pulled on flame-retardant jacket and pants, a hard hat and safety glasses, left his post and rushed to the black plume of smoke rising from the facility’s batteries…Six months later, workers remain rattled and community concerns about air pollution from the plant are heightened. The blast comes on top of a string of other accidents at the Clairton plant over time as well as a long history of legal battles between U.S. Steel and Allegheny County regulators, who regularly accuse the company of flouting environmental rules at the facility.

POLITICS & POLICY

► From CNN — Department of Homeland Security on track to shut down with lawmakers leaving Washington and an unresolved ICE fight — With lawmakers leaving town Thursday, funding for the department is set to expire Friday at midnight. GOP leaders sent their members home after the two parties made no concrete progress toward a deal that Democrats are demanding must rein in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations after last month’s fatal shootings by federal agents of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota. The next steps are uncertain. With talks ongoing between the White House and Democrats, the two chambers aren’t scheduled to return to Washington for 11 days, though GOP leaders could still call members back if a deal is reached.

► From Reuters — Trump revokes basis of US climate regulation, ends vehicle emission standards — While many industry groups back the repeal of stringent vehicle emission standards, others have been reluctant to show public support for rescinding the endangerment finding because of the legal and regulatory uncertainty it could unleash. Legal experts said the policy reversal could, for example, lead to a surge in lawsuits known as “public nuisance” actions, a pathway that had been blocked following a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that GHG regulation should be left in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency instead of the courts. “This may be another classic case where overreach by the Trump administration comes back to bite it,” said Robert Percival, a University of Maryland environmental law professor.

► From the New York Times — Americans Are Paying the Bill for Tariffs, Despite Trump’s Claims — Research published on Thursday by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Columbia University suggests that, through November 2025, 90 percent of the economic burden of the president’s tariffs fell on U.S. companies and consumers…The same researchers studied the effect of tariffs in Mr. Trump’s first term, where they found that tariffs in 2018 and 2019 were wholly passed on to American businesses and consumers.

► From the Stranger — OPINION: Guest Rant: We Can’t Resist Trump Without Revenue — We cannot keep our communities housed, fed, and safe without new tools for revenue at the state and local level—and we cannot possibly fill the gaps left by looming federal funding cuts, which will leave cities and counties like ours (and its population of 2.4 million) without the money for  basic community and infrastructure needs, like roads, sidewalks, childcare, food assistance, affordable housing, and other critical services…We are a region of abundance, rich in resources, with remarkable workers, small businesses and communities. We resist and reject federal attacks on fundamental rights and essential federal funding. We believe in shared responsibility, opportunity for all, and a level playing field. We believe in everyone doing their part. And this bill is one part of how we fight back and act locally to protect Washington residents.  

JOLT OF JOY

Worker power always sparks joy — here’s some of my favorite signs from the rally for revenue at the Capitol this week.

(But if you need something just plain silly to brighten your morning — don’t we all — may I present a cat that genuinely looks like Seahawks QB Sam Darnold.)

The Stand posts links to local, national and international labor news every weekday morning. Subscribe to get daily news in your inbox.