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SSA code | TA rejected at PeaceHealth | Unions defiant

Monday, March 31, 2025

 

LOCAL

► From Cascade PBS — How Seattle’s record-high minimum wage has — and hasn’t — paid off — “People understand that it’s tough to live out there, and we need to raise the standards,” said Colton Rose, a community and labor organizer with UFCW Local 367, which is gathering signatures to support Tacoma’s minimum wage ballot initiative…Business owners opposed to recent wage increases argue that small businesses operate on incredibly thin margins, and that being forced to pay employees more could mean laying off staff or even closing altogether. According to Vigdor’s research in Seattle, these concerns are largely unfounded. About 99% of businesses survived the first year and nine months of Seattle’s wage increase, he said, and most workers kept their jobs. “If a business can’t figure out how to accommodate higher labor costs, then the odds are that there was something about the business that put them at higher risk beforehand,” Vigdor said.

► From KUOW — Vaccine clinics canceled, health jobs cut as feds rescind grants to Washington state — Those cuts and more are just beginning to be felt in Washington state. Some effects are small, like funding for two staff who help low-income people sign up for Apple Health, SNAP or WIC benefits. Others are bigger, like Valley Medical Center announcing it’s laying off over a hundred non-medical staff due to non-renewal of a Medicaid program (the hospital insists those cuts won’t affect patients). The CDC cuts alone have Seattle and King County’s public health department “reeling,” said Dr. Faisal Khan, after a 3 a.m. email from feds on Monday told his staff another $3 million in local funds had been terminated.

► From NW Public Broadcasting — Immigration enforcement concerns cause mixed attendance trends in North Central WA schools — The changes come after the Trump administration removed a federal policy in January that protected certain areas — including churches, schools and health care facilities  — from immigration enforcement actions. Under the previous policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were largely barred from making arrests, searches or surveillance in these locations.

► From KUOW — Hundreds rally at ICE center in Tacoma after detention of union members — “You know when you target one of us, you target all of us,” said Cherika Carter, secretary treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council AFL-CIO, who spoke at the rally. “The freedom to protest, to speak, to organize, to win is under attack.”…According to the most recent data published on ICE’s website, 59% of detainees held at the Tacoma facility are listed as non-criminal, which the agency describes as “immigration violators without any known criminal convictions or pending charges” at the time of arrest.

► From the Seattle Times — Seattle-area hospital loses 101 staffers after Medicaid payment pause — Valley Medical Center has laid off 101 nonclinical staff members, following a recent halt to federal Medicaid payments that’s causing problems for hospitals throughout the state. The Renton hospital is the first in Washington to announce mass staffing cuts and to blame those reductions on an end to reimbursements this year from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The pause of these payments has created “rapid and unsustainable financial impacts,” the hospital said in a statement this week.

 

CONTRACT FIGHTS

► From the Cascadia Daily News — Nurses reject PeaceHealth contract — Kelly Skahan, labor counsel for Washington State Nurses Association, said wages and a change in insurance providers were the two big issues for union members. More than 84% of nurses at the hospital, or 913 people, cast their ballots “in our bargaining unit’s first ever electronic vote, making this [the union’s] highest ever ratification vote turnout on record,” according to an update from the WSNA on Thursday, March 27.  “When polls closed a few minutes ago, one thing was abundantly clear,” the update continued, “nurses at St. Joe’s know their worth and demand better from PeaceHealth in our 2025-28 contract.”

 

NATIONAL

► From the AP — Minnesota officials seek answers in case of graduate student detained by ICE — “An increasing number of international students are being detained without due process across the country,” leaders of the University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union-United Electrical Local 1105 said in a statement. “These constitutional violations are part of a larger plan to continue stripping our rights away from us, starting with immigrants. It will not stop there.”

► From NPR — Police say ICE tactics are eroding public trust in local law enforcement — It’s not uncommon for many people living in the U.S. without legal status to be wary of police. But as the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have intensified, local police leaders say the fear many immigrants experience has also ramped up, and it’s making their jobs harder. Many police want federal immigration authorities to detain people without legal status who have committed violent crimes or other felonies, but they don’t want to scare away immigrants who are following the law — which they are more likely to do than citizens — from calling the police. But the Trump administration is not targeting only people accused of committing crimes.

► From AP — Norfolk Southern derailment: Trial will determine who will pay $600 million settlement — The railroad filed the motion that is set to go to trial starting Monday to force the railcar owner GATX and the chemical manufacturer OxyVinyls to share the cost of the settlement because Norfolk Southern believes those companies are partly responsible for what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, 2023. This lawsuit won’t change anything about how much money residents will receive from the settlement or any payments the village or anyone else is set to receive because those are all established in various settlement agreements. This case will only affect which company has to write the checks to pay for the class-action settlement.

► From the Seattle Times — Under the new Trump administration, this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility has a different tenor — There has been a decades-old effort “to reinstate Christian nationalist principles as the law of the land” that increased its focus on transgender people after a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling recognizing same-sex marriage nationwide. It took a few years, but some of the positions gained traction. One factor: Proponents of the restrictions lean into broader questions of fairness and safety, which draw more public attention…Jay Jones, the student government president at Howard University and a transgender woman, said her peers are largely accepting of transgender people. “The Trump administration is trying to weaponize people of the trans experience … to help give an archenemy or a scapegoat,” she said. But “I don’t think that is going to be as successful as the strategy as he thinks that it will be.”

► From the United Farm Workers:

 

POLITICS & POLICY

Federal updates here, local news and deeper dives below:

► From Common Dreams — ‘Fall in Line or Else’: Latest Trump Order Seen as Message to Workers — Shuler said the order is clearly designed as “punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court—and a blatant attempt to silence us.” The White House practically admitted as much, saying in a statement that “Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he will not tolerate mass obstruction..” In effect…the president has told an estimated two-thirds of government workers they are no longer allowed to disagree with or obstruct his efforts as they organize to defend their jobs or advocate for better working conditions.

► From CNN — Court lets Trump fire labor and worker protection board members while they fight to keep their jobs — The emergency order issued by the DC US Circuit Court of Appeals removes Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) chairwoman Cathy Harris and NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox from their posts while their legal cases move forward. They previously argued that Trump can’t summarily fire them because federal statutes specify that he can only dismiss them for cause. This is a significant win for Trump, who has now succeeded at firing a number of independent watchdogs within the executive branch. The latest ruling isn’t the final word in the matter, but the outcome bodes well for Trump and shows that the judges are receptive to his arguments.

► From the Washington Post — DOGE wants businesses to run government services ‘as much as possible’  — The slash-and-burn approach of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is paving the way for a new shift to the private sector, reducing the size and power of the federal bureaucracy in a real-world test of the conservative theory — a version of which is also widely popular in Silicon Valley — that companies are better than government at saving money and responding to people’s needs.

Editor’s note: it would appear we’re being haunted by the ghost of Ronald Reagan past, present and future. 

► From Truthout — Postal Workers Defend USPS Against DOGE Attack — Days later the Washington Post broke the news that Trump was on the verge of signing an executive order to bring the currently independent USPS under the Commerce Department, an illegal move that would presumably curtail union rights. Unlike other federal workers, postal workers since their 1970 strike have enjoyed full collective bargaining rights and the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. The executive order still hasn’t arrived — but the threat set many dominos tumbling.

► From Safety & Health Magazine — USDA moves to ‘formalize’ faster line speeds in meat-processing plants — [Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] added: “Worker safety must be a priority, and these facilities cannot operate at these speeds without increased staffing, which cannot happen the way they are constructed now. Issuing waivers to a multi-billion dollar industry with no oversight to ensure it’s done safely and properly is a recipe for disaster.”

► From Portside — Unions Rise As America’s Defiant Shield Against Trump’s Authoritarianism — April Verrett, SEIU President, remembers that unions will not stay and still. “Working people are not going to stand idly by while this administration destroys public education and other services, we all rely on—just to give tax breaks to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Education workers—from food service workers, janitors, and bus drivers to higher education workers, teachers, special education support staff, and administrators—stand united in this moment to protect the interests of the students and communities they serve.”

 

INTERNATIONAL

► From the American Prospect — Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers — When workers in Michigan demand higher wages, employers threaten to move production to Mexico. When workers in Alabama organize, companies say, “It’s cheaper for us to do this in China.” Unchecked power of multinational corporations forces the most vulnerable workers across the globe to endure poverty wages and unsafe conditions. This is true here at home and abroad. This is why we need an economic policy that prioritizes the well-being of workers around the world. We need a policy that recognizes that the right to organize is good for all workers, and that trade should be used to create opportunity, grow good jobs, and build a strong middle class everywhere.

► From the AP — French far-right leader Marine Le Pen barred from seeking office for 5 years, a political earthquake  — A French court on Monday convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzlement and barred her from seeking public office for five years — a hammer blow to the far-right leader’s presidential hopes and an earthquake for French politics.

 

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► From Wired — DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse — The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months. Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

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

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