More than 55,000 LA County workers go on strike, disrupting numerous public services
More than 55,000 LA County workers go on strike, disrupting numerous public services
Tens of thousands of Los Angeles County workers went on strike Monday night, citing county management's "law-breaking and failure to bargain in good faith."
"The ULP Strike will directly impact more than 55,000 LA employees represented by SEIU 721 as well as nearly 10 million county residents," the union said in a news release on April 18.
The union said that although plans will be put in place to ensure that emergency health services continue unimpeded, SEIU 721's LA County ULP Strike "would be the first of its kind in Los Angeles County history."
The union represents county workers across many sectors, including public health, social workers, parks & recreation staff, clerical workers, beaches & harbors staff, and custodians, among others, according to the news release.
'This is the workforce that got LA County through emergency after emergency: the January wildfires, public health emergencies, mental health emergencies, social service emergencies and more,' said David Green, SEIU 721's Executive Director and President, in the news release.
'From the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Valley, from the foothills to the beaches, all across LA County, we get the job done. That's why we have had it with the labor law violations and demand respect for our workers," Green said.
SEIU 721 and the Los Angeles County government did not immediately respond to a USA TODAY request for comment Tuesday morning.
Why are LA County workers striking?
SEIU 721 said in the news release that since servicing LA County through the COVID pandemic and the recent wildfires, it has been on the "receiving end of management's repeated law-breaking, bearing the brunt of at least 44 alleged labor law violations during this contract bargaining cycle."
The union alleges that LA County is refusing to bargain with union members in good faith and has been conducting "surveillance and retaliation against SEIU 721 members engaged in union activity." Additionally, the union says the county is restricting union organizers' access to worksites and contracting out of SEIU 721-represented positions.
The union's contract expired at the end of March.
2025 Kentucky Derby payout, purse: What to know about prize money at Churchill Downs
How long will the LA County workers strike last?
According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, the strike is set to last until 7 p.m. local time Wednesday.
Libraries and some healthcare clinics will be closed, wildfire beach debris cleanup may be paused, and service counters at the Hall of Administration could be shut down, the LA Times reports.
Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter at USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @GabeHauari or email him at Gdhauari@gannett.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Calif. to sue over National Guard deployment at protests
Good morning, all. If your neck starts bothering you from all that screen time this week, try one of these stretches. Now, on to the news. Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox each morning. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his state would sue the Trump administration today after it deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to L.A. over the weekend to quell protests against immigration raids. The deployment: Trump invoked a law under Title 10 of the U.S. Code to transfer National Guard control from California to the federal government in order to protect ICE — the first time since 1965 that they've been deployed without a state governor requesting it. [CNN] The protests: They began Friday after ICE detained at least 44 people in four raids. The ensuing protests grew increasingly violent, with demonstrators throwing rocks, blocking freeways and burning cars. Police responded by firing tear gas and using flash-bang grenades. [USA Today] Newsom responds: Newsom asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind the order, calling the deployment 'unlawful.' Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said the raids would continue and threatened arrest for anyone who obstructs. 'Arrest me,' Newsom said. [Politico/NBC News] 🏀 Thunder rebound Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tallied 34 points in Game 2 of the NBA Finals last night, leading his team to a decisive 123-107 victory against the Pacers and tying the series 1-1. SGA credited his team for the win. [Yahoo Sports] ➡️ Freedom Flotilla crew seized Israel seized a boat carrying humanitarian aid and detained Greta Thunberg and other activists who attempted to break Israel's long-standing blockade on Gaza, where nearly 2 million Palestinians are at risk of famine. [AP] 🍳 Egg recall The August Egg Company issued a voluntary recall of 1.7 million dozen of its brown cage-free eggs and brown certified organic eggs distributed in nine states. The FDA has linked the eggs to a salmonella outbreak that's sickened at least 79 people. [Delish] 🎭 Tony Awards highlights Sunset Blvd. star Nicole Scherzinger won Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jonathan Groff straddled Keanu Reeves while performing and Oprah mentioned the Patti LuPone drama. Here are the most memorable moments. See who won. [Time/Variety] 🦓 Runaway equine After more than a week on the run, 'Ed,' the escaped zebra whose escapades went viral, was captured yesterday and airlifted to safety. See the photos. [USA Today/People] 📺 On the tube: Celebs and music stars gather for the 2025 BET Awards, airing at 8 p.m. ET on BET. Kendrick Lamar leads with 10 nominations, but here's who else is nominated. [Billboard] 🏒 On the ice, the Panthers and the Oilers try to break their 1-1 series tie in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final at 8 p.m. ET on TNT. [USA Today] ⚾ On the field, the I-5 rivalry continues when the Dodgers take on the Padres at 9:40 p.m. ET on the MLB app. [AP] ☀️ And don't forget to: Read your daily horoscope. Play the crossword. Check the forecast in your area. In 1993, Jurassic Park had its world premiere. More than 30 years later, Scarlett Johansson, a self-proclaimed 'geeked-out fangirl' of the film is set to star in the franchise's seventh installment, Jurassic Park: Rebirth. It's a casting that was 15 years in the making. [Hollywood Reporter] Psst: Father's Day is this Sunday. If you haven't gotten something for Dad yet, Yahoo Gifting Editor Amanda Garrity has some ideas. When you buy through links in this article, Yahoo may receive compensation. Amanda: If you can get your hands on the Nintendo Switch 2, then you'll be Dad's favorite. Other buzzy buys that I'm seeing include Lego's all-new Pixar lamp set, a smart meat thermometer and Hoka recovery slides. Amanda: Act fast and you'll still be able to get a custom photo book from Papier or this coffee table book from Wonderbly, which compiles newspaper headlines from Dad's birthday throughout the years. It's pretty cool! Amanda: I have tons in this gift guide! Every dad needs this leakproof backpack cooler ahead of the summer. Yahoo readers are also buying these battery storage systems and barbecue resting blankets in droves — what can I say: Dad loves a practical buy! Need more ideas? Amanda's got you covered. Sir J. Starks recently surprised his wife, Maurissa, with a six-minute Sephora shopping spree to celebrate their anniversary. The staff and fellow shoppers quickly joined in to help her fill her basket. 'The support staff just converged like the Avengers. It was wild,' Starks said. [People] Have a great day. See you tomorrow! 💡 P.S. Before you go, your daily advice: Give yourself at least three hours between dinner and bedtime to allow for proper digestion and improve the quality of your sleep. [Delish] About The Yodel: The Yodel is a morning newsletter from Yahoo News. Start your day with The Yodel to get caught up on weather, national news, politics, entertainment and sports — in four minutes or less. Did you like this morning's newsletter? Subscribe to have it sent to you on weekdays. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.
Atlantic
36 minutes ago
- Atlantic
‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled
