News of the Week — Obama praises Healthcare For All
Each week we share articles on subjects that are important to NUHW and its members. Here are several must-read stories over the past seven days:
Former President Barack Obama endorsed universal healthcare in a major speech, Common Dreams reports. Speaking at the University of Illinois in his first explicit rebuke of President Donald Trump and what was seen as his first major campaign speech for Democrats in 2018, Obama said that progressives “aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like Medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate debt-free.”
The Trump administration moved on Thursday to remove court-imposed time limits on the detention of migrant children, The New York Times reports. The proposal would end 20 years of judicial oversight and allow families to be held indefinitely in secure facilities as their cases wend through the immigration courts.
The Trump administration’s weekly report on efforts to reunite children it separated from their parents at the border shows 416 children, including 14 under age 5, remain in custody, HuffPosts reports. The latest status report, filed Thursday as part of an ACLU lawsuit, shows the government continues to make slow progress in returning children to their families. It has been more than a month since a federal judge’s July 26 deadline to reunite all of the more than 2,600 children detained under the Trump administration’s highly criticized zero-tolerance immigration policy.
Employees of Marriott hotels in four cities are inching closer to going on strike after months of negotiations with the hotel chain have failed to secure new collective bargaining agreements, HuffPost reports. The hospitality union Unite Here says affiliates around the country will be holding a series of strike authorization votes involving as many as 12,000 members starting on Sept. 10. Local unions in four cities ― Waikiki, Maui, San Francisco and Boston ― have already scheduled their votes. Local unions in five other cities ― Seattle, Oakland, San Jose, Detroit and Boston ― may follow them.