Vail Kohnert-Yount is a student at Harvard Law School.
More than 32,000 teachers in Los Angeles went on strike yesterday asking for higher pay, smaller class sizes, and schools fully staffed with nurses, counselors, and librarians. After negotiations stalled between the school district and the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, an overwhelming 98% of teachers voted to authorize a strike. LAUSD is the country’s second largest school district, where eight in 10 students receive free or reduced-price lunches. UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl described the strike as “a fight for the soul of public education.” He told a picket line of educators outside a high school, “Here we are on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state as blue as it can be, in a city rife with millionaires, where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students.”
In the American Prospect, Joseph McCartin suggested that a “sickout” by unpaid federal employees could bring the impasse over the government shutdown, now in its 25th day, to an end. Although they have no legal right to strike, public sector workers have turned to calling out sick en masse in the past when no other means of protest was available. “Collective action by federal workers might be the most plausible mechanism at hand to free the nation from the impasse in which we now are mired,” he wrote.
In the New York Times, Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Stevenson advocated for TSA workers to go on “a genuine, old-fashioned strike” in response to the government shutdown. Although 5.6% of roughly 51,000 TSA workers called in sick last Saturday, the authors called for workers to take a more explicit stand against the shutdown, following in the footsteps of striking teachers.
NPR wrote about the pervasive discrimination faced by people with hearing disabilities in finding employment. The unemployment rate among the deaf and hard of hearing is disproportionately high, including for those with college and graduate degrees, and fewer than 40% of people with a hearing disability work full-time. Even as improvements in technology and accommodations make it easier for those who are hearing disabled to work and communicate with non-disabled colleagues, many deaf and hard of hearing job seekers report that prospective employers lose interest in their applications after they disclose their disability status.
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September 15
Unemployment claims rise; a federal court hands victory to government employees union; and employers fire workers over social media posts.
September 14
Workers at Boeing reject the company’s third contract proposal; NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cohen plans to sue New York over the state’s trigger bill; Air Canada flight attendants reject a tentative contract.
September 12
Zohran Mamdani calls on FIFA to end dynamic pricing for the World Cup; the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement opens a probe into Scale AI’s labor practices; and union members organize immigration defense trainings.
September 11
California rideshare deal advances; Boeing reaches tentative agreement with union; FTC scrutinizes healthcare noncompetes.
September 10
A federal judge denies a motion by the Trump Administration to dismiss a lawsuit led by the American Federation of Government Employees against President Trump for his mass layoffs of federal workers; the Supreme Court grants a stay on a federal district court order that originally barred ICE agents from questioning and detaining individuals based on their presence at a particular location, the type of work they do, their race or ethnicity, and their accent while speaking English or Spanish; and a hospital seeks to limit OSHA's ability to cite employers for failing to halt workplace violence without a specific regulation in place.
September 9
Ninth Circuit revives Trader Joe’s lawsuit against employee union; new bill aims to make striking workers eligible for benefits; university lecturer who praised Hitler gets another chance at First Amendment claims.