BossFeed Briefing for March 1, 2022. The Tuesday before last was the 3rd anniversary of anti-tax initiative peddler Tim Eyman stealing an office chair. Last Tuesday, a hedge fund bought KING 5 News parent company Tegna for $5.4 billion. Last Saturday marked 10 years since the murder of Trayvon Martin. Yesterday, the Seattle eviction moratorium ended after Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order to end it and the Seattle City Council voted 5-3 not to extend it. This Thursday marks the start to the last week of this year’s WA legislative session.
Three things to know this week:
Gig workers delivered 400 to-go bags to Seattle City Hall, each bag showing how little an actual delivery paid after expenses. Workers are calling on City leaders to pass the PayUp Policy to end subminimum wages for 40,000 people working on apps like DoorDash, Instacart, and TaskRabbit.
Lawyers hired by Starbucks sent an email 8 minutes late and missed a legal deadline in their attempt to fight union elections at several New York stores. The 30-person legal team blamed the snafu on a Microsoft Outlook crash.
Providence-owned hospitals across WA—including in Everett, Olympia, Walla Walla, and Spokane, as well as five Swedish hospitals in the Seattle area—have been collecting on medical debt from 54,000 low-income patients, ignoring the fact that the patients were eligible for financial assistance under state law. The state Attorney General’s Office has filed a lawsuit against Providence to eliminate the debt, which totals more than $70 million.
Two things to ask:
What happens when humane policy hits rock-bottom? The WA State Department of Transportation filled a Wenatchee homeless camp with boulders to prevent residents from remaining at the site. The Wenatchee World settled on the word “scatter” to describe homeless people displaced by the state’s cruel decision.
Is it supposed to be a pun on “offensive”? As Russia invaded Ukraine—and as other wars continued in Yemen, Ethiopia, and elsewhere—investment blog MarketBeat counted down their list of “Three Defense Stocks to Own During Geopolitical Strife.” The article encourages investors to “launch an offensive attack” of their own.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Punitive court fines and fees trap low-income defendants in insurmountable cycles of debt—but a proposed new WA law would begin to unwind that predatory system, writes Simon J. Davis-Cohen for We Out Here Magazine. Across the state, municipal courts charge defendants hundreds or even thousands of dollars in fees—euphemistically called “legal financial obligations”—which are impossible for many people to pay back, and which, if left unpaid, lead to severe consequences including wage garnishment and lawsuits brought by private collections agencies. Because the criminal justice system particularly targets communities of color, these fees hit low-income people of color especially hard: Eddie Lemmon, a Black disabled man interviewed by We Out Here, originally owed $900 to Pierce County Superior Court, but that debt doubled to $2,000 after it was sent to a private collections agency, which jacked up the interest rate and added their own exorbitant fee. Earlier this month, the WA State House passed HB 1412, which would help low-income people like Eddie get these debts erased and limit fines courts can impose in the first place; the bill is now under consideration by the WA State Senate.
Read this far? Consider yourself briefed, boss.
Let us know what you think about this week's look at the world of work, wages, and inequality!