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BBC RADIO legend ‘Diddy’ David Dickinson has opened up about an affair he had with a sex worker behind his wife’s back, and said that “having children spoils a marriage”.

The well known broadcaster, 87, confessed all as he opened up about his astonishing personal life.

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David, who joined Radio 1 in the early seventies alongside other veteran DJs such as Tony Blackburn and Noel Edmunds, is a huge name at the BBC.

Today the former Top Of The Pops legend has talked about the affair he had behind his first wife’s back.

David wed make-up artist Sheila Moore in 1962, when he was just 24.

The couple went on to have two children, Jane and David Jr, before splitting up in 1970.

However, David, who is known as ‘Diddy’ thanks to a nickname given to him by the late Ken Dodd, has revealed all about an affair he had when he was wed to Shelia.

Speaking to this week’s Best magazine, he confessed: “I was happily married. Until I fell in love with someone else.

“I went to meet her at Liverpool Street station. She was sitting on her suitcase wearing a fur coat, which she told me later she’d borrowed.

“I just looked at her and thought, wow. I think if anything spoils a marriage, it’s children. Suddenly, the man is taking a back seat.

“Then he meets someone young free and single and thinks, ‘Crikey, I could go back to that happy state I was in before.'”

Continuing his story, David said: “My wife found out because I talked about Roz a lot. I was head over heels. I left my wife and children, and we lived together for four years.”

Speaking about his relationship with an escort David said: “She asked if I would open her new shop, and how much I’d charge. I said ‘£500’.

“She told me she charged £100 for her services, so ‘If you give me five I’ll give you one.’

“That sounded fair, so I collected the first one that evening.

“I thought that would be it. But we’d become very fond of each other.

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“She was still working at the club and I was getting in too deep.”

David is now married to second wife Dreena, an aerobics teacher, who he was set up with on a blind date.

They were wed in 1993, and have been together ever since.

Reflecting on the early years of their relationship, Dreena told the Mail: “There was quite a brouhaha when we got together.

“My friends did say, ‘You can’t marry him. He is a womaniser’, but we’ve been together for 40 years now, married for 30.

“And there are no regrets there.”

While David told Best magazine: “Dreena is the wind beneath my wings. One of the reasons it works is she doesn’t take any c**p from me!”

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SAN DIEGO — Six Democrats running for governor next year focused on housing affordability, the cost of living and healthcare cuts as the most daunting issues facing Californians at a labor forum on Saturday in San Diego.

Largely in lockstep about these matters, the candidates highlighted their political resumes and life stories to try to create contrasts and curry favor with attendees.

Former state Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, in his first gubernatorial forum since entering the race in late September, leaned into his experience as the first millennial elected to the state legislature.

“I feel like my experience and my passion uniquely positioned me in this race to ride a lane that nobody else can ride, being a millennial and being young and having a different perspective,” said Calderon, 39.

Concerns about his four children’s future as well as the state’s reliance on Washington, D.C., drove his decision to run for governor after choosing not to seek reelection to the legislature in 2020.

“I want [my children] to have opportunity. I want them to have a future. I want life to be better. I want it to be easier,” Calderon, whose family has deep roots in politics. State leaders must focus “on D.C.-proofing California. We cannot continue to depend on D.C. and expect that they’re going to give a s—t about us and what our needs are, because they don’t.”

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who also served as the state’s attorney general after a 24-year stint in Congress, argued that it is critical to elect a governor who has experience.

“Would you let someone who’s never flown a plane tell you, ‘I can fly that plane back to land’ if they’ve never done it before?” Becerra asked. “Do you give the keys to the governor’s office to someone who hasn’t done this before?”

He contrasted himself with other candidates in the race by invoking a barking chihuahua behind a chain-link fence.

“Where’s the bite?” he said, after citing his history, such as suing President Trump 122 times, and leading the sprawling federal health bureaucracy during the pandemic. “You don’t just grow teeth overnight.”

Calderon and Becerra were among six Democratic candidates who spoke at length to about 150 California leaders of multiple chapters of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The union has more than 200,000 members in California and is being battered by the federal government shutdown, the state’s budget deficit and impending healthcare strikes. AFSCME is a powerful force in California politics, providing troops to knock on voters’ doors and man phone banks.

The forum came as the gubernatorial field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is in flux.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced earlier this summer that she has opted against running for the seat. Former Senate Leader Toni Atkins suspended her gubernatorial campaign in late September.

Rumors continue to swirl about whether billionaire businessman Rick Caruso or Sen. Alex Padilla will join the field.

“I am weighing it. But my focus is first and foremost on encouraging people to vote for Proposition 50,” the congressional redistricting matter on the November ballot, Padilla told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday. “The other decision? That race is not until next year. So that decision will come.”

Wealthy Democratic businessman Stephen J. Cloobeck and Republican Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco declined an invitation to participate in the forum, citing prior commitments.

The union will consider an endorsement at a future conference, said Matthew Maldonado, executive director for District Council 36, which represents 25,000 workers in Southern California.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaned into his longtime roots in labor before he ran for office. But he also alluded to tensions with unions after being elected mayor in 2006.

Labeled a “scab” when he crossed picket lines the following year during a major city workers’ strike, Villaraigosa also clashed with unions over furloughs and layoffs during the recession. His relationship with labor hit a low in 2010 when Villaraigosa called the city’s teachers union, where he once worked, “the largest obstacle to creating quality schools.”

“I want you to know something about me. I’m not going to say yes to every darn thing that everybody comes up to me with, including sometimes the unions,” Villaraigosa said. “When I was mayor, they’ll tell you sometimes I had to say no. Why? I wasn’t going to go bankrupt, and I knew I had to protect pensions and the rest of it.”

He pledged to work with labor if elected governor.

Labor leaders asked most of the questions at the forum, with all of the candidates being asked about the same topics, such as if they supported and would campaign for a proposed state constitutional amendment to help UC workers with down-payment loans for houses.

“Hell yes,” said former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who teaches at UC Irvine’s law school and benefited from a program created by state university leaders to allow faculty to buy houses priced below the market rate in costly Orange County because the high cost of housing in the region was an obstacle in recruiting professors.

“I get to benefit from UC Irvine’s investment in their professionals and professors and professional staff housing, but they are not doing it for everyone,” she said, noting workers such as clerks, janitors, and patient-care staff don’t have access to similar benefits.

State Supt. of Instruction Tony Thurmond, who entered the gathering dancing to Dr. Dre and Tupac’s “California Love,” agreed to support the housing loans as well as to walk picket lines with tens of thousands of Kaiser health employees expected to go on strike later this month.

“I will be there,” Thurmond responded, adding that he had just spoken on the phone with Kaiser’s CEO, and urged him to meet labor demands about staffing, pay, retirement and benefits, especially in the aftermath of their work during the pandemic. “Just get it done, damn it, and give them what they’re asking for.”

Former state Controller Betty Yee agreed to both requests as well, arguing that the healthcare employers are focused on profit at the expense of patient care.

“Yes, absolutely,” she said when asked about joining the Kaiser picket line. “Shame on them. You cannot be expected to take care of others if you cannot take care of yourselves.”

AFSCME local leaders listening to former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra speak at a gubernatorial forum Saturday in San Diego.

(Seema Mehta / Los Angeles Times)

Google said it plans to lay off dozens of workers at its Sunnyvale offices, following job reductions at other large tech firms.

Google notified the California Employment Development Department on Monday that it will lay off 50 workers in Sunnyvale, according to a notice obtained by The Times.

Tech companies are cutting jobs in preparation for a possible recession, as well as anticipating efficiencies gained from artificial intelligence, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Oregon-based advisory services firm Enderle Group.

“We’re preparing for a bit of a downturn and companies often like to cut ahead of bad news like that so they can keep their financials solid,” he said.

In August, Salesforce said it cut 4,000 support roles due to AI helping automate tasks. Other tech businesses, including Intel, Microsoft and Meta have also reduced staff while investing more in AI this year.

CNBC reported on Wednesday that Google laid off more than 100 people in design-related roles in its cloud division.

In Google’s notice that it filed with the state, the jobs affected by the cuts included roles in user experience, software engineers and business program managers. The layoffs in the cloud division were first reported by Business Insider.

“AI is pretty good at coding right now and anything to do with design … as long as someone can describe what it is they want, that significantly increases the productivity of the folks you have in design,” Enderle said. “Unless you’re increasing the workload just as dramatically, you’re going to have too many people.”

Google, which is based in Mountain View, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Times staff writer Queenie Wong contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has seized on the government shutdown as an opportunity to reshape the federal workforce and punish detractors, meeting with budget director Russ Vought on Thursday to talk through “temporary or permanent” spending cuts that could set up a lose-lose dynamic for Democratic lawmakers.

Trump announced the meeting on social media Thursday morning, saying he and Vought would determine “which of the many Democrat Agencies” would be cut — continuing their efforts to slash federal spending by threatening mass firings of workers and suggesting “irreversible” cuts to Democratic priorities.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump wrote on his social media account. “They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The post was notable in its explicit embrace of Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from during his reelection campaign. The effort aimed to reshape the federal government around right-wing policies, and Democrats repeatedly pointed to its goals to warn of the consequences of a second Trump administration.

Vought on Wednesday offered an opening salvo of the pressure he hoped to put on Democrats. He announced he was withholding $18 billion for the Hudson River rail tunnel and Second Avenue subway line in New York City that have been championed by both Democratic leaders, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, in their home state. Vought is also canceling $8 billion in green energy projects in states with Democratic senators.

Meanwhile, the White House is preparing for mass firings of federal workers, rather than simply furloughing as is the usual practice during a shutdown. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week that layoffs were “imminent.”

“If they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government,” Leavitt said Thursday said of Democrats.

A starring role for Russ Vought

The bespectacled and bearded Vought has emerged as a central figure in the shutdown — promising possible layoffs of government workers that would be a show of strength by the Trump administration as well as a possible liability given the weakening job market and existing voter unhappiness over the economy.

The strategic goal is to increase the political pressure on Democratic lawmakers as agencies tasked with environmental protection, racial equity and addressing poverty, among other things, could be gutted over the course of the shutdown.

But Democratic lawmakers also see Vought as the architect of a strategy to refuse to spend congressionally approved funds, using a tool known as a “pocket rescission” in which the administration submits plans to return unspent money to Congress just before the end of the fiscal year, causing that money to lapse.

All of this means that Democratic spending priorities might be in jeopardy regardless of whether they want to keep the government open or partially closed.

Ahead of the end of the fiscal year in September, Vought used the pocket rescission to block the spending of $4.9 billion in foreign aid.

White House officials refused to speculate on the future use of pocket rescissions after rolling them out in late August. But one of Vought’s former colleagues, insisting on anonymity to discuss the budget director’s plans, said that future pocket rescissions could be 20 times higher.

Shutdown continues with no endgame in sight

Thursday was Day 2 of the shutdown, and already the dial is turned high. The aggressive approach coming from the Trump administration is what certain lawmakers and budget observers feared if Congress, which has the responsibility to pass legislation to fund government, failed to do its work and relinquished control to the White House.

Vought, in a private conference call with House GOP lawmakers Wednesday, told them of layoffs starting in the next day or two. It’s an extension of the Department of Government Efficiency work under Elon Musk that slashed through the federal government at the start of the year.

“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since January 20th,” said Jeffries, referring to the president’s first day in office. “The cruelty is the point.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) underscored Thursday that the shutdown gives Trump and Vought vast power over the federal government. He blamed Democrats and said “they have effectively turned off the legislative branch” and “handed it over to the president.”

Still, Johnson said that Trump and Vought take “no pleasure in this.”

Trump and the congressional leaders are not expected to meet again soon. Congress has no action scheduled Thursday in observance of the Jewish holy day, with senators due back Friday. The House is set to resume session next week.

The Democrats are holding fast to their demands to preserve health care funding and refusing to back a bill that fails to do so, warning of price spikes for millions of Americans nationwide.

The shutdown is likely to harm the economy

With no easy endgame at hand, the standoff risks dragging deeper into October, when federal workers who remain on the job will begin missing paychecks. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated roughly 750,000 federal workers would be furloughed on any given day during the shutdown, a loss of $400 million daily in wages.

The economic effects could spill over into the broader economy. Past shutdowns saw “reduced aggregate demand in the private sector for goods and services, pushing down GDP,” the CBO said.

“Stalled federal spending on goods and services led to a loss of private-sector income that further reduced demand for other goods and services in the economy,” it said. Overall CBO said there was a “dampening of economic output,” but that reversed once people returned to work.

How Trump and Vought can reshape the federal government

With Congress as a standstill, the Trump administration has taken advantage of new levers to determine how to shape the federal government.

The Trump administration can tap into funds to pay workers at the Defense Department and Homeland Security from what’s commonly called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that was signed into law this summer, according to the CBO.

That would ensure Trump’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation agenda is uninterrupted. But employees who remain on the job at many other agencies will have to wait for government to reopen before they get a paycheck.

Mascaro, Boak and Kim write for the Associated Press. AP writers Chris Megerian, Stephen Groves, Joey Cappelletti, Matt Brown, Kevin Freking, and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Responding to the Trump administration‘s hampering of federal regulators, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed a bill greatly expanding California’s power over workplace disputes and union elections.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 288, gives the state authority to step in and oversee union elections, charges of workplace retaliation and other disputes between private employers and workers in the event the National Labor Relations Board fails to respond.

As Newsom signed the worker rights bill, his office drew a sharp contrast with the gridlock in Washington, D.C., where a government shutdown looms.

“With the federal government not only asleep at the wheel, but driving into incoming traffic, it is more important than ever that states stand up to protect workers,” Newsom said in a statement. “California is a proud labor state — and we will continue standing up for the workers that keep our state running and our economy booming.”

The NLRB, which is tasked with safeguarding the right of private employees to unionize or organize in other ways to improve their working conditions, has been functionally paralyzed since it lost quorum in January, when Trump fired one of its board members.

The Trump administration has also proposed sweeping cuts to the agency’s staff and canceled leases for regional offices in many states, while Amazon, SpaceX and other companies brought lodged challenges to the 90-year-old federal agency’s constitutionality in court.

With this law in place, workers unable to get a timely response at the federal level can petition the California Public Employment Relations Board to enforce their rights.

The law creates a Public Employee Relations Board Enforcement Fund, financed by civil penalties paid by employers cited for labor violations to help pay for the added responsibilities for the state labor board.

“This is the most significant labor law reform in nearly a century,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “California workers will no longer be forced to rely on a failing federal agency when they join together to unionize.”

The state’s labor board can choose to take on a case when the NLRB “has expressly or impliedly ceded jurisdiction,” according to language in the law. That includes when charges filed with the agency or an election certification have languished with a regional director for more than six months — or when the federal board doesn’t have a quorum of members or is hampered in other ways.

The law could draw legal challenges over whether the bill infringes on federal law.

It was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce, which warned that the bill improperly attempts to give California’s labor board authority even as the federal agency’s regional offices continuing to process elections as well as charges filed by workers and employers.

The chamber argued that “courts have repeatedly held that states are prohibited from regulating this space.”

Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law counters, however, that in the first few decades of the NLRB’s functioning, state labor agencies had much more leeway to enforce federal labor rights.

She said the law “simply proposes going back to the system that existed for three decades.”

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) said the bill will ensure California workers can continue to unionize and bargain.

“The current President is attempting to take a wrecking ball to public and private sector employees’ fundamental right to join a union,”McKinnor said in a statement. “This is unacceptable and frankly, un-American. California will not sit idly as its workers are systematically denied the right to organize.”

NEW YORK — In the days since the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, workers in a variety of industries have been fired for their comments on his death.

It’s hardly the first time workers have lost their jobs over things they say publicly — including in social media posts. In the U.S., laws can vary across states, but overall, there’s very few legal protections for employees who are punished for speech made in or out of private workplaces.

“Most people think they have a right to free speech … but that doesn’t necessarily apply in the workplace,” said Vanessa Matsis-McCready, associate general counsel and vice president of HR Services for Engage PEO. “Most employees in the private sector do not have any protections for that type of speech at work.”

Add to that the prevalence of social media, which has made it increasingly common to track employees’ conduct outside of work or for internet users to publish information about them with the intent of harming or harassing them.

Employers have leeway

Protections for workers vary from one state to the next. In New York, if an employee is participating in a weekend political protest, but not associating themselves with the organization that employs them, their employer cannot fire them for that activity when they return to work. But if that same employee is at a company event on a weekend and talks about their political viewpoints in a way that makes others feel unsafe or the target of discrimination or harassment, then they could face consequences at work, Matsis-McCready said.

Most of the U.S. defaults to “at-will” employment law — which essentially means employers can choose to hire and fire as they see fit, including over employees’ speech.

“The 1st Amendment does not apply in private workplaces to protect employees’ speech,” said Andrew Kragie, an attorney who specializes in employment and labor law at Maynard Nexsen. “It actually does protect employers’ right to make decisions about employees, based on employees’ speech.”

Kragie said there are “pockets of protection” around the U.S. under various state laws, such as statutes that forbid punishing workers for their political views. But the interpretation of how that gets enforced changes, he notes, making the waters murky.

Steven T. Collis, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and faculty director of the school’s Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, also points to some state laws that say employers can’t fire their workers for “legal off-duty conduct.” But there’s often an exception for conduct seen as disruptive to an employer’s business or reputation, which could be grounds to fire someone over public comments or social media posts.

“In this scenario, if somebody feels like one of their employees has done something that suggests they are glorifying or celebrating a murder, an employer might still be able to fire them even with one of those laws on the books,” Collis said.

For public employees, including school teachers, postal workers and elected officials, the process is a bit different. That’s because the 1st Amendment plays a unique role when the government is the employer, Collis explains — and the Supreme Court has ruled that if an employee is acting in a private capacity but speaking on a matter of public concern, they’re protected.

However, that has yet to stop the public sector from restricting speech in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. For instance, leaders at the Pentagon unveiled a “zero tolerance” policy for any posts or comments from troops deemed to be making light of or celebrating the killing of Kirk.

The policy, announced by the Defense Department’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, on social media Thursday, came hours after numerous conservative military influencers and activists began forwarding posts they considered problematic to Parnell and his boss, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Parnell wrote Thursday, referring to the Department of Defense by the name adopted recently by President Trump.

A surge of political debate

The ubiquity of social media is making it easier than ever to share opinions about politics and major news events as they’re unfolding. But posting on social media leaves a record, and in times of escalating political polarization, those declarations can be seen as damaging to the reputation of an individual or their employer.

“People don’t realize when they’re on social media, it is the town square,” said Amy Dufrane, chief executive of the Human Resource Certification Institute. “They’re not having a private conversation with the neighbor over the fence. They’re really broadcasting their views.”

Political debates are certainly not limited to social media and are increasingly making their way into the workplace as well.

“The gamification of the way we communicate in the workplace — Slack and Teams, chat and all these things — they’re very similar to how you might interact on Instagram or other social media, so I do think that makes it feel a little less formal and somebody might be more inclined to take a step and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this happened,’” Matsis-McCready said.

Many employers unprepared

In the tense, divided climate in the United States at the moment, many human resource professionals have expressed that they’re unprepared to address politically charged discussions in the workplace, according to the Human Resource Certification Institute. But those conversations are going to happen, so employers need to set policies about what is acceptable or unacceptable workplace conduct, Dufrane said.

“HR has got to really drill down and make sure that they’re super clear on their policies and practices and communicating to their employees on what are their responsibilities as an employee of the organization,” Dufrane said.

Many employers are reviewing their policies on political speech and providing training about what appropriate conduct looks like, both inside and outside the organization, she said. And the brutal nature of Kirk’s killing may have led some of them to react more strongly in the days since his death.

“Because of the violent nature of what some political discussion is now about, I think there is a real concern from employers that they want to keep the workplace safe and that they’re being extra vigilant about anything that could be viewed as a threat, which is their duty,” Matsis-McCreedy said.

Employees can also be seen as ambassadors of a company’s brand, and their political speech can dilute that brand and hurt its reputation, depending on what is being said and how it is being received. That is leading more companies to act on what employees are saying online, she said.

“Some of the individuals that had posted and their posts went viral, all of a sudden the phone lines of their employers were just nonstop calls complaining,” Matsis-McCready said.

Still, experts such as Collis don’t anticipate a significant change in how employers monitor their workers’ speech — noting that online activity has been in the spotlight for at least the last 15 years.

“Employers are already — and have been for a very long time — vetting employees based on what they’re posting on social media,” he said.

Bussewitz and Grantham-Philips write for the Associated Press. AP writer Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

Ever since a massive immigration raid on a Hyundai manufacturing site swept up nearly 500 workers in southeast Georgia this month, Rosie Harrison said her organization’s phones have been ringing nonstop with panicked families in need of help.

“We have individuals returning calls every day, but the list doesn’t end,” Harrison said. She runs a nonprofit called Grow Initiative that connects low-income families — immigrant and nonimmigrant alike — with food, housing and educational resources.

Since the raid, Harrison said, “families are experiencing a new level of crisis.”

A majority of the 475 people who were detained in the workplace raid — which U.S. officials have called the largest in two decades — were Korean and have returned to South Korea. But lawyers and social workers say many of the non-Korean immigrants ensnared in the crackdown remain in legal limbo or are otherwise unaccounted for.

As the raid began the morning of Sept. 4, workers almost immediately started calling Migrant Equity Southeast, a local nonprofit that connects immigrants with legal and financial resources. The small organization of approximately 15 employees fielded calls regarding people from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela, spokesperson Vanessa Contreras said.

Throughout the day, people described federal agents taking cellphones from workers and putting them in long lines, Contreras said. Some workers hid for hours to avoid capture in air ducts or remote areas of the sprawling property. The Department of Justice said some hid in a nearby sewage pond.

People off-site called the organization frantically seeking the whereabouts of loved ones who worked at the plant and were suddenly unreachable.

Like many of the Koreans who were working there, advocates and lawyers representing the non-Korean workers caught up in the raid say that some who were detained had legal authorization to work in the United States.

Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to emailed requests for comment Friday. It is not clear how many people detained during the raid remain in custody.

Atlanta-based attorney Charles Kuck, who represents both Korean and non-Korean workers who were detained, said two of his clients were legally working under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which was created under President Obama. One had been released and “should have never been arrested,” he said, while the other was still being held because he was recently charged with driving under the influence.

Another of Kuck’s clients was in the process of seeking asylum, he said, and had the same documents and job as her husband, who was not arrested.

Some even had valid Georgia driver’s licenses, which aren’t available to people in the country illegally, said Rosario Palacios, who has been assisting Migrant Equity Southeast. Some families who called the organization were left without access to transportation because the person who had been detained was the only one who could drive.

“It’s hard to say how they chose who they were going to release and who they were going to take into custody,” Palacios said, adding that some who were arrested didn’t have a so-called alien identification number and were still unaccounted for.

Kuck said the raid is an indication of how far reaching the Trump administration crackdown is, which officials claim is targeting only criminals.

“The redefinition of the word ‘criminal’ to include everybody who is not a citizen, and even some that are, is the problem here,” Kuck said.

Many of the families who called Harrison’s initiative said their detained relatives were the sole breadwinners in the household, leaving them desperate for basics like baby formula and food.

The financial impact of the raid at the construction site for a battery factory that will be operated by HL-GA Battery Co. was compounded by the fact that another large employer in the area — International Paper Co. — is closing at the end of the month, laying off 800 more workers, Harrison said.

Growth Initiative doesn’t check immigration status, Harrison said, but almost all families who have reached out to her have said that their detained loved ones had legal authorization to work in the United States, leaving many confused about why their relative was taken into custody.

“The worst phone calls are the ones where you have children crying, screaming, ‘Where is my mom?’” Harrison said.

Riddle writes for the Associated Press. R

The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.

I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.

“Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody’s worried.”

The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.

“We’re still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”

Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.

There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.

And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywall, Nickelsburg told me, it “means you finish homes much more slowly, and that means fewer people are employed.”

Now look, I’m no economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country we were headed for a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been in his best interest to stifle the state with the largest economy in the nation.

Especially when many national economic indicators aren’t exactly rosy, when we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of groceries and consumer goods, and when the labor statistics were so embarrassing he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with another one, only to see more grim jobs numbers a month later.

I had just one economics class in college, but I don’t recall a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washers, elder-care workers, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other people whose only crime — unlike the violent offenders we were allegedly going to round up — is a desire to show up for work.

Now here, let me give you my email address. It’s [email protected].

And why am I telling you that?

Because I know from experience that some of you are frothing, foaming and itching to reach out and tell me that illegal means illegal.

So go ahead and email me if you must, but here’s my response:

We’ve been living a lie for decades.

People come across the border because we want them to. We all but beg them to. And by we, I mean any number of industries — many of them led by conservatives and by Trump supporters — including agribusiness, and hospitality, and construction, and healthcare.

Why do you think so many employers avoid using the federal E-Verify system to weed out undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.

In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and they can’t stop introducing bills by the dozens to mandate wider use of E-Verify. But the most recent one, like all the ones before it, just died.

Why?

Because the tough talk is a lie and there’s no longer any shame in hypocrisy. It’s a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity to admit what’s clear — that the Texas economy is propped up in part by an undocumented workforce.

At least in California, six Republican lawmakers all but begged Trump in June to ease up on the raids, which were affecting business on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Please do some honest work on immigration reform instead, they pleaded, so we can fill our labor needs in a more practical and humane way.

Makes sense, but politically, it doesn’t play as well as TV ads recruiting ICE commandos to storm the streets and arrest tamale vendors, even as the barbarians who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops enjoy their time as presidentially pardoned patriots.

Small businesses, restaurants and mom and pops are being particularly hard hit, says Maria Salinas, chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those who survived the pandemic were then kneecapped again by the raids.

With the Supreme Court ruling, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this is going to come back harder than before.”

From a broader economic perspective, the mass deportations make no sense, especially when it’s clear that the vast majority of people targeted are not the violent criminals Trump keeps talking about.

Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, noted that we’re in the midst of a demographic transformation, much like that of Japan, which is dealing with the challenges of an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.

“We’ll lose almost a million working-age Americans every year in the next decade just because of aging,” Peri told me. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will demand a lot of services in … home healthcare [and other industries], but there will be fewer and fewer workers to do these types of jobs.”

Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, has been studying these trends for years.

“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Each year, the worker-to-retiree ratio decreases, and it will continue to do so. This means we’re headed for a critical shortage of working people who pay into Social Security and Medicare even as the number of retirees balloons.

If we truly wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, we should “send all ICE workers to the border. But if you take people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there’s an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”

At the Pasadena Home Depot, where day laborers still gather despite the risk of raids, three men held out hope for work. Two of them told me they have legal status. “But there’s very little work,” said Gavino Dominguez.

The third one, who said he’s undocumented, left to circle the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.

Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was loading concrete and other supplies into his truck. He told me he lost one fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They came back because they’re desperate and need to pay their bills.

“The housing shortage in California was already terrible before the fires, and now it’s 10 times worse,” said real estate agent Brock Harris, who represents a developer whose Altadena rebuilding project was temporarily slowed after a visit from ICE agents in June.

With building permits beginning to flow, Harris said, “for these guys to slow down or shut down job sites is more than infuriating. You’re going to see fewer people willing to start a project.”

Most people on a job site have legal status, Harris said, “but if shovels never hit the ground, the costs are being borne by everybody, and it’s slowing the rebuilding of L.A.”

Lots of bumps on the road to the golden age of prosperity.

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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s president said Thursday that Korean companies probably will hesitate to make further investments in the United States unless Washington improves its visa system for their employees, as U.S. authorities released hundreds of workers who were detained at a Georgia factory site last week.

In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee Jae Myung called for improvements in the U.S. visa system as he spoke about the Sept. 4 immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory under construction at Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant west of Savannah.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry later confirmed that U.S. authorities had released the 330 detainees — 316 of them South Koreans — and that they were being transported by buses to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, where they will board a charter flight scheduled to arrive in South Korea on Friday afternoon. The group also includes 10 Chinese nationals, three Japanese nationals and one Indonesian.

The massive roundup and U.S. authorities’ release of video showing some workers being chained and taken away sparked widespread anger and a sense of betrayal in South Korea. The raid came less than two weeks after a summit between President Trump and Lee, and just weeks after the countries reached a July agreement that spared South Korea from the Trump administration’s highest tariffs — but only after Seoul pledged $350 billion in new U.S. investments, against the backdrop of a decaying job market at home.

Lawmakers from both Lee’s Liberal Democratic Party and the conservative opposition decried the detentions as outrageous and heavy-handed, while South Korea’s biggest newspaper compared the raid to a “rabbit hunt” executed by U.S. immigration authorities in a zeal to meet an alleged White House goal of 3,000 arrests a day.

During the news conference, Lee said South Korean and U.S. officials are discussing a possible improvement to the U.S. visa system, adding that under the current system South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making direct investments in the U.S.

Lee: ‘It’s not like these are long-term workers’

U.S. authorities said some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others entered legally but had expired visas or entered on visa waivers that prohibited them from working.

But South Korean officials expressed frustration that Washington has yet to act on Seoul’s years-long demand to ensure a visa system to accommodate skilled Korean workers, though it has been pressing South Korea to expand U.S. industrial investments.

South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visitor visas or Electronic System for Travel Authorization to send workers who are needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.

Lee said that whether Washington establishes a visa system allowing South Korean companies to send skilled workers to industrial sites will have a “major impact” on future South Korean investments in America.

“It’s not like these are long-term workers. When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work,” he said.

“If that’s not possible, then establishing a local factory in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies. They will wonder whether they should even do it,” Lee added.

Lee said the raid showed a “cultural difference” between the two countries in how they handle immigration issues.

“In South Korea, we see Americans coming on tourist visas to teach English at private cram schools — they do it all the time, and we don’t think much of it, it’s just something you accept,” Lee said.

“But the United States clearly doesn’t see things that way. On top of that, U.S. immigration authorities pledge to strictly forbid illegal immigration and employment and carry out deportations in various aggressive ways, and our people happened to be caught in one of those cases,” he added.

South Korea, U.S. agree on working group to settle visa issues

After a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that U.S. officials have agreed to allow the workers detained in Georgia to later return to finish their work at the site. He added that the countries agreed to set up a joint working group for discussions on creating a new visa category to make it easier for South Korean companies to send their staff to work in the United States.

Before leaving for the U.S. on Monday, Cho said more South Korean workers in the U.S. could be vulnerable to future crackdowns if the visa issue isn’t resolved, but said Seoul does not yet have an estimate of how many might be at risk.

The State Department announced Thursday that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau would visit Seoul this weekend as part of a three-nation Asia-Pacific trip that will also include Papua New Guinea and the Marshall Islands.

The Georgia battery plant is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that South Korean companies are building in the United States. They include other battery factories in Georgia and several other states, a semiconductor plant in Texas and a shipbuilding project in Philadelphia, a sector that Trump has frequently highlighted in relation to South Korea.

Min Jeonghun, a professor at South Korea’s National Diplomatic Academy, said it’s chiefly up to the United States to resolve the issue, either through legislation or by taking administrative steps to expand short-term work visas for training purposes.

Without an update in U.S. visa policies, Min said, “Korean companies will no longer be able to send their workers to the United States, causing inevitable delays in the expansion of facilities and other production activities, and the harm will boomerang back to the U.S. economy.”

Hyung-jin and Tong-Hyung write for the Associated Press. Tong-Hyung reported from Seoul.

SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean charter plane left for the U.S. on Wednesday to bring back Korean workers detained in an immigration raid in Georgia last week, though officials said the return of the plane with the workers onboard will not happen as quickly as they had hoped.

A total of 475 workers, more than 300 of them South Koreans, were rounded up in the Sept. 4 raid at the battery factory under construction at Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant. U.S. authorities released video showing some being shackled with chains around their hands, ankles and waists, causing shock and a sense of betrayal among many in South Korea, a key U.S. ally.

South Korea’s government later said it reached an agreement with the U.S. for the release of the workers.

Korean workers expected to be brought back home after days of detention

South Korean TV footage showed the charter plane, a Boeing 747-8i from Korean Air, taking off at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul. South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said it was talking with U.S. officials about letting the plane return home with the released workers as soon as possible. But it said the plane cannot depart from the U.S. on Wednesday as South Korea earlier wished due to an unspecified reason involving the U.S. side.

The Korean workers are currently being held at an immigration detention center in Folkston in southeast Georgia. South Korean media reported they will be freed and driven 285 miles by bus to Atlanta to take the charter plane.

South Korean officials said they’ve been negotiating with the U.S. to win “voluntary” departures of the workers, rather than deportations that could result in making them ineligible to return to the U.S. for up to 10 years.

The workplace raid by the U.S. Homeland Security agency was its largest yet as it pursues its mass deportation agenda. The Georgia battery plant, a joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that South Korean companies are currently building in the United States.

Many South Koreans view the Georgia raid as a source of national disgrace and remain stunned over it. Only 10 days earlier, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and President Trump held their first summit in Washington on Aug. 25. In late July, South Korea also promised hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. investments to reach a tariff deal.

Experts say South Korea won’t likely take any major retaliatory steps against the U.S., but the Georgia raid could become a source of tensions between the allies as the Trump administration intensifies immigration raids.

South Korea calls for improvement in U.S. visa systems

U.S. authorities said some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working. But South Korean experts and officials said Washington has yet to act on Seoul’s yearslong demand to ensure a visa system to accommodate skilled Korean workers needed to build facilities, though it has been pressing South Korea to expand industrial investments in the U.S.

South Korean companies have been relying on short-term visitor visas or Electronic System for Travel Authorization to send workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.

LG Energy Solution, which employed most of the detained workers, instructed its South Korean employees in the U.S. on B-1 or B-2 short-term visit visas not to report to work until further notice, and told those with ESTAs to return home immediately.

During his visit to Washington, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met representatives of major Korean companies operating in the U.S. including Hyundai, LG and Samsung on Tuesday. Cho told them that South Korean officials are in active discussions with U.S. officials and lawmakers about possible legislation to create a separate visa quota for South Korean professionals operating in the U.S., according to Cho’s ministry.

Trump said this week the workers “were here illegally,” and that the U.S. needs to work with other countries to have their experts train U.S. citizens to do specialized work such as battery and computer manufacturing.

Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents several of the detained South Korean nationals, told the Associated Press on Monday that no company in the U.S. makes the machines used in the Georgia battery plant. So they had to come from abroad to install or repair equipment on-site — work that would take about three to five years to train someone in the U.S. to do, he said.

The South Korea-U.S. military alliance, forged in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War, has experienced ups and downs over the decades. But surveys have shown a majority of South Koreans support the two countries’ alliance, as the U.S. deployment of 28,500 troops in South Korea and 50,000 others in Japan has served as the backbone of the American military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

During a Cabinet Council meeting on Tuesday, Lee said he felt “big responsibility” over the raid and expressed hopes that the operations of South Korean businesses won’t be infringed upon unfairly again. He said his government will push to improve systems to prevent recurrences of similar incidents in close consultations with the U.S.

Kim and Tong-Hyung write for the Associated Press.

CATO, N.Y. — Federal agents forced open the doors of a snack bar manufacturer and took away dozens of workers in a surprise enforcement action that the plant’s co-owner called “terrifying.”

Video and photos taken at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant Thursday showed numerous law enforcement vehicles outside the plant and workers being escorted from the building to a Border Patrol van. Immigration agents ordered everyone to a lunchroom, where they asked for proof the workers were in the country legally, according to one 24-year-old worker who was briefly detained.

The reason for the enforcement action was unclear. Local law enforcement officials said the operation was led by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, which did not respond to requests for information. Nutrition Bar Confectioners co-owner Lenny Schmidt said he was also in the dark about the purpose of the raid.

“There’s got to be a better way to do it,” Schmidt told the Associated Press on Friday at the family-owned business in Cato, N.Y., about 30 miles west of Syracuse.

The facility’s employees had all been vetted and had legal documentation, Schmidt said, adding that he would have cooperated with law enforcement if he’d been told there were concerns.

“Coming in like they did, it’s frightening for everybody — the Latinos … that work here, and everybody else that works here as well, even myself and my family. It’s terrifying,” he said.

Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck said his deputies were among those on scene Thursday morning after being asked a month ago to assist federal agencies in executing a search warrant “relative to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

He did not detail the nature of the investigation.

The lack of explanation raised questions for state Sen. Rachel May, a Democrat who represents the district.

“It’s not clear to me, if it’s a long-standing criminal investigation, why the workers would have been rounded up,” May said by phone Friday. “I feel like there are things that don’t quite add up.”

Worker describes raid

The 24-year-old worker, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said that after he showed the agents he is a legal U.S. resident, they wrote down his information and photographed him.

“Some of the women started to cry because their kids were at school or at day care. It was very sad to see,” said the worker, who arrived from Guatemala six years ago and became a legal resident two years ago.

He said his partner lacked legal status and was among those taken away.

The two of them started working at the factory about two years ago. He was assigned to the snack bar wrapping department and she to the packing area. He said he couldn’t talk to her before she was led away by agents and didn’t know Friday where she had been detained.

“What they are doing to us is not right. We’re here to work. We are not criminals,” he said.

Schmidt said he believed immigration enforcement agents are singling out any company with “some sort of Hispanic workforce, whether small or large.”

The raid came the same day that immigration authorities detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, at a manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.

Without his missing employees, Schmidt estimated production at the food manufacturer would drop by about half, making it a challenge to meet customer demand. The plant employs close to 230 people.

“We’ll just do what we need to do to move forward to give our customers the product that they need,” he said, “and then slowly recoup, rehire where we need.”

Dozens held

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said the workers detained included parents of “at least a dozen children at risk of returning from school to an empty house.”

“I’ve made it clear: New York will work with the federal government to secure our borders and deport violent criminals, but we will never stand for masked ICE agents separating families and abandoning children,” she said in a statement.

The advocacy group Rural and Migrant Ministry said 50 to 60 people, most of them from Guatemala, were still being held Friday. Among those released late Thursday, after about 11 hours, was a mother of a newborn who needed to nurse her baby, said the group’s chief program officer, Wilmer Jimenez.

The worker who was briefly detained said he has been helping to support his parents and siblings, who grow corn and beans in Guatemala.

He said he took Friday off but plans to get back to work Monday.

“I have to go back because I can’t be without work,” he said.

Hill writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., contributed to this report.

Hundreds of federal agents descended on a sprawling site where Hyundai manufactures electric vehicles in Georgia and detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals.

This is the latest in a long line of workplace raids conducted as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. But the one on Thursday is distinct because of its large size and the fact that it targeted a manufacturing site state officials have long called Georgia’s largest economic development project.

The detainment of South Korean nationals also sets it apart, as they are rarely caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which data show has focused on Latinos.

Video released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday showed a caravan of vehicles driving up to the site and then federal agents directing workers to line up outside. Some detainees were ordered to put their hands up against a bus as they were frisked and then shackled around their hands, ankles and waist. Others had plastic ties around their wrists as they boarded a Georgia inmate-transfer bus.

Here are some things to know about the raid and the people impacted:

The workers detained

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Saturday that more than 300 South Koreans were among the 475 people detained.

Some of them worked for the plant operated by HL-GA Battery Co., a joint venture by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution that is set to open next year, while others were employed by contractors and subcontractors at the construction site, according to Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations.

He said that some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others had entered the country legally but had expired visas or had entered on a visa waiver that prohibited them from working.

But an immigration attorney representing two of the detained workers said his clients arrived from South Korea under a visa waiver program that allows them to travel for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa.

Attorney Charles Kuck said one of his clients has been in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, while the other has been in the country for about 45 days, adding that they had been planning to return home soon.

The detainees also included a lawful permanent resident who was kept in custody for having a prior record involving firearm and drug offenses, since committing a crime of “moral turpitude” can put their status in jeopardy, said Lindsay Williams, a public affairs officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, on Saturday.

Williams denied reports that U.S. citizens had been detained at the site, since “once citizens have identified themselves, we have no authority.”

Hyundai Motor Co. said in a statement Friday that none of its employees had been detained as far as it knew and that it is reviewing its practices to make sure suppliers and subcontractors follow U.S. employment laws. LG told the Associated Press that it couldn’t immediately confirm how many of its employees or Hyundai workers had been detained.

The South Korean government expressed “concern and regret” over the operation targeting its citizens and is sending diplomats to the site.

“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of U.S. law enforcement,” South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jaewoong said in a televised statement from Seoul.

Most of the people detained have been taken to an immigration detention center in Folkston, Ga., near the Florida state line. None of them have been charged with any crimes yet, Schrank said, but the investigation is ongoing.

Family members and friends of the detainees were having a hard time locating them or figuring out how to get in touch with them, James Woo, communications director for the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said Saturday in an email.

Woo added that many of the families were in South Korea because many of the detainees were in the United States only for business purposes.

Raid is the result of a months-long investigation

The raid was the result of a months-long investigation into allegations of illegal hiring at the site, Schrank said.

In a search warrant and related affidavits, agents sought items including employment records for current and former workers, timecards and video and photos of workers.

Court records filed last week indicated that prosecutors do not know who hired what it called “hundreds of illegal aliens.” The identity of the “actual company or contractor hiring the illegal aliens is currently unknown,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a Thursday court filing.

The sprawling manufacturing site

The raid targeted a manufacturing site widely considered one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile.

Hyundai Motor Group started manufacturing EVs at the $7.6-billion plant a year ago. Today, the site employs about 1,200 people in a largely rural area about 25 miles west of Savannah.

Agents homed in on an adjacent plant that is still under construction at which Hyundai has partnered with LG Energy Solution to produce batteries that power EVs.

The Hyundai site is in Bryan County, which saw its population increase by more than a quarter in the early 2020s and stood at almost 47,000 residents in 2023, the most recent year data are available. The county’s Asian population went from 1.5% in 2018 to 2.2% in 2023, and the growth was primarily among people of Indian descent, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Raid was the ‘largest single site enforcement operation’

The Trump administration has targeted an array of businesses in its workplace raids, including farms, construction sites, restaurants, car washes and auto repair shops. But most have been smaller, including a raid the same day as the Georgia one in which federal officers took away dozens of workers from a snack-bar manufacturer in Cato, N.Y.

Other recent high-profile raids have included one in July targeting Glass House Farms, a legal marijuana farm in Camarillo. More than 360 people were arrested in one of the largest raids since Trump took office in January. Another took place at an Omaha meat production plant and involved dozens of workers being taken away.

Schrank described the one in Georgia as the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the agency’s two-decade history.

The majority of the people detained are Koreans. During the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, 2024, 46 Koreans were deported out of more than 270,000 removals for all nationalities, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and other state Republican officials, who had courted Hyundai and celebrated the EV plant’s opening, issued statements Friday saying all employers in the state were expected to follow the law.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta described the raid in a joint statement as “unacceptable.”

“Our communities know the workers targeted at Hyundai are everyday people who are trying to feed their families, build stronger communities, and work toward a better future,” the statement said.

Sammie Rentz opened the Viet Huong Supermarket less than 3 miles from the Hyundai site six months ago and said he worries business may not bounce back after falling off sharply since the raid.

“I’m concerned. Koreans are very proud people, and I bet they’re not appreciating what just happened. I’m worried about them cutting and running, or starting an exit strategy,” he said.

Ellabell resident Tanya Cox, who lives less than a mile from the Hyundai site, said she had no ill feelings toward Korean nationals or other immigrant workers at the site. But few neighbors were employed there, and she felt like more construction jobs at the battery plant should have gone to local residents.

“I don’t see how it’s brought a lot of jobs to our community or nearby communities,” Cox said.

Golden writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mike Schneider in Orlando, Fla., contributed to this report.

President Trump is scheduled to dine with tech executives from Apple, Meta, Google and OpenAI on Thursday night at a White House event in the newly renovated Rose Garden.

The gathering is the latest example of how the world’s most powerful tech leaders are forging stronger ties with Trump’s second administration.

There’s one high-profile tech executive who won’t be at the gathering: Tesla and xAI Chief Executive Elon Musk, who backed Trump but then feuded with the president after temporarily leading an effort to slash government spending.

Musk posted on X that he “was invited, but unfortunately could not attend” and a representative would show up on his behalf.

The Hill first reported that roughly two dozen tech and business leaders, including Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, are on the invite list. The gathering is scheduled to take place after First Lady Melania Trump hosts an event for the new Artificial Intelligence Education task force.

“The president looks forward to welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Hill.

Meta declined to comment. Apple and xAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ahead of the dinner, Microsoft and OpenAI announced ways the companies are supporting the White House’s efforts to expand AI literacy. As AI disrupts industries including entertainment and healthcare, workers have expressed anxiety about whether they will lose their jobs.

OpenAI said it’s working with businesses such as Walmart and John Deere to build a platform that will help employers find workers with AI skills. The San Francisco tech company, which also has a platform where people can learn about AI, plans to offer certifications so workers can showcase how much they know about the technology. OpenAI said it aims to to certify 10 million Americans by 2030.

Microsoft outlined several ways it’s trying to help students and workers learn more AI skills through its grants, partnerships and products, including offering a year of Microsoft 365 Personal — which includes the company’s AI assistant Copilot — free for all U.S. college students if they sign up before the end of October.

“AI is the defining technology of our time, and how we empower people to use it will shape our country’s future,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, who is also expected to attend the dinner, in a video. “That’s why we are so grateful to the President, First Lady and the entire administration for making it a national priority to prepare the next generation to harness AI’s power.”

Silicon Valley tech executives had a contentious relationship with Trump during his first term, sparring with the president over issues such as immigration.

They’ve struck a more friendly tone with the president during his second term as they push for a more hands-off approach to regulation while competing to dominate the artificial intelligence race.

In July, the Trump administration released an action plan that aimed to cut “red tape” so tech companies can quickly develop and deploy AI technology as they go head-to-head with firms in China and elsewhere. Trump tapped venture capitalist David Sacks, who is also expected to attend Thursday’s dinner, to guide the White House’s policy on AI and cryptocurrency.

As tech companies charge ahead, child safety and advocacy groups have raised concerns there aren’t enough guardrails in place to protect the mental health of young people as they spill their darkest thoughts to chatbots.

Trump has also publicly criticized many tech executives before striking deals with them. After Trump called for the resignation of Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan over alleged conflicts related to his reported investments in Chinese companies, tensions cooled after they met. Intel then announced in August that the U.S. government would take a roughly 10% stake in the semiconductor company.

Trump also struck an unusual deal with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices that allows the companies to sell certain chips to China in exchange for giving the U.S. government a 15% cut of those sales.

This raised questions among politicians and legal experts about whether that agreement is legal. Nvidia previously said it would spend up to $500 billion over the next four years on AI infrastructure.

Other tech executives have shown support for building in the United States as they face the threat of tariffs from the Trump administration. They also donated to Trump’s inaugural fund after he won the presidential election and have been showing up at high-profile events.

Apple in August pledged to spend an additional $100 billion on domestic manufacturing, bringing its total U.S. investment commitment to $600 billion after Trump criticized the company for expanding iPhone manufacturing in India.

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced this year that they planned to invest a total of $500 billion in U.S. AI infrastructure over the next four years.

For two years, labor organizers tried to unionize employees at a trio of celebrated California national parks, but they couldn’t reach critical mass.

Then came mass firings of National Park Service employees in February under the Trump administration. Many employees were reinstated, but litigation concerning the legality of the firings winds on. The park service has lost about a quarter of its staff since Trump reclaimed the White House, and that’s on top of a proposed $1-billion budget cut to the agency.

This summer the scales tipped. More than 97% of employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks who cast ballots voted to unionize, with results certified last week. More than 600 staffers — including interpretive park rangers, biologists, firefighters and fee collectors — are now represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees.

Steven Gutierrez, national business representative with the National Federation of Federal Employees, said it took mass firings to “wake people up.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Culture is hard to change,” said Steven Gutierrez, a national business representative for the union. “It takes something like this administration firing people to wake people up, to say, ‘Hey, I’m vulnerable here and I need to invest in my career.’”

The unionized employees work at some of California’s most celebrated and highly visited national parks. Yosemite is famous for its awe-inspiring valley, while Sequoia and Kings Canyon are known for their giant sequoia trees.

Amid that beauty is a workforce that is frustrated and fearful. Two employees at Yosemite National Park described rock-bottom morale amid recent turmoil — and a sense that the union could provide an avenue for change. Both are union representatives and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“With this administration, I think there’s a lot more people who are scared, and I think the union definitely helps towards protections that we really want,” said one employee.

National Park Service Ranger Anna Nicks walks through a grove of sequoia trees in Sequoia National Park in May 2024.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Despite staff being depleted by buyouts and a hiring freeze, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered parks to remain “open and accessible.” As a result, the employee said visitors may not notice something is off.

“There’s a lot of folks doing multiple jobs and just trying to hold up the park,” she said, adding that she believes that the union will help ensure people get paid properly for the work they do and that their duties don’t shift.

The employees stressed that many workplace problems they want to see fixed — including low pay and squalid living conditions — predate Trump’s second stint in the White House. But recent developments have exacerbated the situation.

Because pay hasn’t kept pace with inflation, one employee said he’s unable to pay rent and lives out of his car for most of the year. Meanwhile, he said, those in park housing face safety threats such as hantavirus-carrying rodents that invade living spaces, caving-in roofs and unstable decks. Understaffing has plagued Yosemite for years.

“People that you see working here, they’re really at their wit’s end,” he said. “Personally speaking, it’s just a lot of work to handle. Years ago, we had twice as many people doing this work.”

Staffers are “worried about their futures,” he added.

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement to a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May, Burgum said the Trump administration remains committed to supporting the parks, while looking for ways to cut costs.

A waterfall is reflected in water in the meadow in the Yosemite Valley as the snowpack melts in April 2023.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

“Since becoming Interior Secretary, I’ve traveled to National Parks, historic sites, and wildlife refuges to learn and hear from leadership on the ground,” Burgum said. “We’re instituting changes to get more people actually working in the parks and are looking forward to what Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly forecasted to be an ‘outstanding summer.’ ”

The unionization vote comes as the Trump administration seeks to strip federal employees of labor protections many have long enjoyed. On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that directs certain federal agencies — including NASA, the National Weather Service and the Bureau of Reclamation — to end collective bargaining agreements with unions representing federal employees.

The Department of Veterans Affairs previously moved to terminate protections for more than 400,000 of its workers. The president’s overall effort on this front is being fought in court, although federal judges have so far sided with the administration.

As labor unrest mounts, Americans and foreign tourists are visiting national parks like never before. In 2024, there were a record 332 million visits to national parks, including 4 million to Yosemite. Crowds continued to stream into national parks over Labor Day weekend.

Groups that advocate for public lands say that short staffing is quietly adding to long-standing problems.

Preventative Search and Rescue Program Coordinator Anna Marini gives the Lutter family children junior guide books after they finished a hike in August 2024 in Joshua Tree National Park.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s clear staffing shortages are directly impacting park operations across the system,” the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Assn. said in a statement Wednesday.

“Parks like Joshua Tree and Yosemite are struggling with search and rescue, law enforcement and even basic medical services, while some parks have no maintenance staff at all. Seasonal roads, trails and campgrounds like those at Sequoia and Kings Canyon remain closed due to unaddressed damage.”

The union voting took place July 22 to Aug. 19, and included permanent and seasonal employees. The National Federation of Federal Employees represents workers at several other national parks, including Yellowstone and, in Ohio, Cuyahoga Valley, as well as those in the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

A union sign hailing federal workers is displayed at Sequoia National Park.

(Steven Gutierrez)

Federal employees don’t have the right to strike, Gutierrez said, meaning that much of employees’ advocacy has to happen in Washington, D.C. He said the union can bring workers face to face with congressional leaders to explain why their jobs matter — including the tourism dollars they help generate.

Next steps will include hammering out labor contracts for Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon, which can provide job protections.

Gutierrez said he’d like to see one drafted by December but acknowledged that it can be a long process.

“If Trump puts his fingers into it, it’s going to take longer,” he said.

THE family of a fairground worker who died after being “hit in the head by a ride” have paid tribute.

Corrie Lee Stavers, 28, tragically died in the accident at the Spanish City Summer Fair in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, on Saturday afternoon.

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The dad-of-one suffered fatal injuries after a ride hit his head while he was trying to retrieve his jacket, his family said.

Speaking to MailOnline, Corrie’s dad Lee Stavers, 50, paid tribute to his son as an “amazing father”.

He explained that Corrie’s son Lennie had been “left without a father”, saying: “He absolutely doted on that child. He was an absolutely wonderful father to him.”

Lee said he believed Corrie enjoyed his work, saying he was “happy” in pictures at fairground sites.

Describing his late son, Lee said: “He was just a very kind, loving lad. He would do anything for anybody, if anybody asked him to do anything, he would just do it regardless.

“He was always one of them lads who just wanted to please. He just wanted to be loved. He was a brilliant father.”

The 50-year-old also explained how the police had spoken to them about the “absolute tragedy”, saying they understood Corrie had been operating the ride when he was hit.

They believe he may have gone to grab his jacket or another item but had then been hit by the ride.

Lee, who does not use social media, tragically revealed that he only found out about his son’s death after a colleague told him to urgently contact his family. 

A GoFundMe page has also been setup in honour of “our beloved Corrie” by his family.

The fundraiser states: “It’s with broken hearts that we share the devastating news that our beloved Corrie has passed away.

“He was tragically taken from us in an accident while working on a fairground ride. None of us were prepared for this, and the pain of losing him so suddenly is impossible to put into words.

“Our lives will never be the same without him, but his memory will live on in our hearts forever.

“We love you endlessly Corrie, and we miss you more than words can ever say. Your with your mam now. Rest in peace Corrie.”

The family added that any donations would be “highly appreciated”, since the family were “not financially ready for this”.

They continued: “Any donation towards giving our beloved Corrie the send off he deserves our family will be ever so grateful.

“We know he was a much loved young lad,any donations left over after the funeral costs will be put in a trust fund for Corrie’s five-year-old son Lennie-Lee.”

Lee revealed that Corrie used to be a very keen boxer but had been forced to stop after suffering a nose injury.

Almost £3,000 of the £4,000 target has already been raised, at time of writing.

Northumbria Police is working alongside the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) to investigate the tragedy.

A former Walmart employee who tried to intervene as Border Patrol agents arrested an undocumented custodial worker in Pico Rivera in June was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday.

Adrian Martinez, 20, was indicted by a Santa Ana jury on the charge of conspiracy to impede a federal officer tied to the events of June 17, which unfolded at the height of the Trump administration’s immigration raids in the Los Angeles area. Martinez’s violent arrest was caught on video and quickly went viral.

According to the three-page indictment, Martinez confronted Border Patrol agents as they tried to arrest the custodial worker in the parking lot of a shopping center and blocked the agents’ vehicle with his own. Prosecutors allege that he positioned himself with a growing crowd to surround the agents’ vehicle and prevent it from leaving the area.

Martinez then allegedly grabbed a large trash can and moved it in front of the agents’ vehicle, blocking them from being able to pass.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A., Martinez faces up to six years in prison if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in downtown L.A. on Thursday.

“Make no mistake: There are serious, life-altering consequences for impeding law enforcement,” acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli said in a news release Wednesday.

Martinez’s lawyers released a statement noting that “just as in other cases arising out of recent illegal and inhumane ICE raids, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to travel out of Los Angeles county to secure this indictment.”

The Times previously reported on Essayli’s struggles to secure indictments in protest cases.

“Although we are disappointed that Adrian’s case has not been dismissed, we always anticipated being required to litigate this case post-indictment,” the Miller Law Group, which represents Martinez, said in its statement.

The lawyers also criticized Essayli for posting on X, “before we had even officially been notified of the outcome of the indictment” and using it “to maliciously spread falsehoods and fearmonger at our client’s expense.”

In a June interview with the Times, Martinez said he was on break when he spotted the custodial worker, “getting grabbed very aggressively, getting manhandled,” by the agents. Martinez said he drove over, told the agents that their actions weren’t right and they should leave the worker alone.

Surveillance and spectator video captured at the scene and looped in social media feeds show an agent rushing Martinez and shoving him to the ground. Martinez gets back up, there is more shoving, and he exchanges angry words with a masked officer carrying a rifle. Then other agents swarmed him, pushed him back down and dragged him to their truck.

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Agents ultimately arrested both the custodial worker and Martinez.

In the June interview with the Times, Martinez said after his arrest he was taken to a parking structure, where he was told he’d been arrested for assaulting a federal officer by striking an agent in the face and breaking his glasses. Martinez, who weighs around 150 pounds, said the agents arresting him pointed to the colleague he was being accused of attacking, who looked “like a grizzly bear.”

“I don’t even remember you,” Martinez recalled saying. “It just seemed like they were trying to get me to say like, ‘yes, you assaulted him,’ but I knew I didn’t.”

The next day, Essayli posted a photo on X of Martinez, still in his blue Walmart vest. Martinez, he wrote, had been arrested “for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face.”

Martinez was charged in a June 19 criminal complaint with conspiracy to impede a federal officer. The complaint makes no reference to a punch and neither does Wednesday’s indictment.

Bloomberg Law previously reported that Essayli had rejected office supervisors’ advice not to charge Martinez for assaulting a federal officer and that an an FBI agent felt there was insufficient evidence and declined to sign a complaint attesting probable cause to a judge.

Within a day, the outlet reported, another agent signed off on the charge of conspiracy to impede.

In an interview a week after his arrest, Martinez wore a brace on his right leg, where he’d suffered a contusion, and said he’d been bruised and scratched all over his body.

Walmart later terminated Martinez, citing “gross misconduct,” according to a separation notice reviewed by the Times.

“I was just speaking up for a man,” Martinez said. “How can I go from that to this?”

“People have the right to speak up for themselves and for someone else,” he added. “You don’t have to get treated like this, thrown on the floor and manhandled because of that.”

Arrest of Yann Vezilier, accused of trying to destabilise Mali, marks new low in relations between Paris and Bamako.

France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs has said that a French man recently arrested in Mali on “unfounded” charges of plotting a coup was a French embassy employee.

The Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that it was in talks with Bamako to “clear up any misunderstanding” and obtain the “immediate release” of Yann Vezilier, who had been arrested in recent weeks alongside two generals and other military personnel.

It added that the arrest of the French national was in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

Mali’s security minister, General Daoud Aly Mohammedine, had announced Vezilier’s arrest on Thursday, alleging that he had been working for the French intelligence services, mobilising “political leaders, civil society actors, and military personnel” to destabilise the country.

Mohammedine said that a full investigation into the alleged plot, which he said had been launched on August 1, was under way and that “the situation is completely under control”.

The arrests followed a crackdown on dissent following a pro-democracy rally in May, the first since the military government came to power after back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021.

France’s once close relationship with its former colony in West Africa’s Sahel region has soured since soldiers seized power nearly four years ago.

The military government, led by President Assimi Goita, has turned away from Western partners, notably former colonial power France, expelling its troops and turning to Russia for security assistance.

The country has since been gripped by a security crisis since 2012, fuelled notably by violence from groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) group, as well as local criminal gangs.

In June, Goita was granted an additional five years in power, despite the military government’s earlier promises of a return to civilian rule by March 2024. The move followed the military’s dissolution of political parties in May.

By midmorning in the Central Valley, the light turns hard and white, bleaching the sky and flattening every shadow. The rows of melons stretch to the horizon, vines twisted low in cracked soil. Pickers move in the rhythm the crop demands — bend, twist, lift, drop — their long sleeves damp with sweat, caps pulled low, bandanas hiding heat-burned cheeks. Spanish drifts along the rows, a joke here, a warning there, carried in the heavy air.

These are the cruelest days of harvest, when the sun turns fields into slow ovens and the heat climbs before breakfast, holding on until the stars are out. By nightfall, the damage is done: another collapse in the dirt, another family handed a death certificate instead of a paycheck.

It’s an all-too-familiar old problem in California. Nearly 20 years ago, in the shadow of four farmworker funerals — Arvin, Fresno County, Kern, Imperial Valley — California enacted the nation’s first heat rules for basic worker safety: water, shade, rest. Mercies you’d think needed no law. My fellow lawmakers and I who wrote those rules, along with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who signed them into law, believed they were enough. But two decades on, the grim reaper still walks the rows: 110 degrees, no tree, no tarp, a single water jug growing warm, its handle slick from dust and hands. Breaks denied, not from cruelty alone, but from the unrelenting clock of the harvest.

This is not a failure of the law itself, but of enforcement. Some treated the bill’s signing as the finish line instead of the starting gun. Inspectors are too few. Penalties too light. Investigations too slow. The state auditor’s latest report read like an obituary for Cal/OSHA’s credibility: outdated rules, missed chances, offices too empty to answer the phone.

Meanwhile the climate has turned meaner. Nights that once cooled now hold the day’s heat like a grudge. And the danger in the fields isn’t just the sun. Immigration raids now sweep through the Valley like dust storms — sudden, unannounced, merciless. For more than half of California’s 350,000 farmworkers, the greater threat isn’t heat stroke but a knock on the door before dawn or a traffic stop that ends with a vehicle full of workers detained and trucked to some distant site. The food that feeds the nation is pulled from the earth by people who work under triple-digit skies yet live in the shadows, where one complaint can cost them their job, their home, their freedom.

Twenty harvest seasons later, I’m calling for action — not another bill signing on the Capitol steps, but dollars, real and committed, and the regulations to match. With that will and funding, four simple fixes can turn promise into protection.

First, bring 21st century tools to the fields. In 2005, the “high-tech” solution was a plastic water jug in the shade and a flapping pop-up canopy. Today, for $50 — the price of two boxes of gloves — employers can deploy a wearable sensor clipped to a worker’s arm to track core temperature and heart rate, sending a warning before the body crosses the edge into heatstroke. That’s not Silicon Valley moonshot money. It’s pocket change for agribusiness, and for workers it could mean the difference between walking out of the rows or being carried out.

Second, enforce in real time. If a worker drops to one knee in the heat, the state shouldn’t hear about it days later in a report. Imagine a network linking growers, regulators and emergency crews to the same pulse of information — turning a slow, reactive system that documents tragedies into one that can act quickly and prevent many of them.

Third, train before the first row is picked. Ten minutes — no more — for workers to stand upright and learn, in their own language, the signs: dizziness, nausea, the creeping fog in the mind that means it’s time to stop. Not a photocopied handout in English tucked into an envelope behind a paycheck, not a rushed talk in Spanish at the field’s edge, but a verified safety course — certified by labor contractors and farmers alike. Knowledge here is as life-saving as water and shade.

Lastly, match the urgency we see in other arenas. While Cal/OSHA limps along, starved of staff and mired in red tape, Immigration and Customs Enforcement charges in the opposite direction — spurred by $170 billion in new funding, an immigration-enforcement and border-security blitz hiring thousands, dangling $50,000 signing bonuses, paying off student loans, waiving age limits, even pulling retirees back for double-dip salaries. That’s what happens when a government decides the wrong mission matters most. We pour urgency into chasing farmworkers from the fields, yet can’t muster the will to protect them in the heat. Until Cal/OSHA gets that same drive — inspectors recruited in every corner of the state, incentives to bring in a new generation, hurdles stripped away — the laws we wrote will remain a promise without a witness.

Some will say it’s too much, that the industry can’t bear the cost. But I’ve walked behind the hearses through Valley dust, stood in the gravel lots of farm town funeral homes, watched wives clutch work shirts as if they still held his warmth, seen children in Sunday clothes staring at the dirt. No budget line can measure that loss.

The Valley will keep feeding the nation. The question is whether we will keep feeding the graveyards too.

Once, by enacting heat safety rules, California declared that a life was worth more than a box of produce. If we let that promise wither in the heat, all we wrote back then was a press release. Government systems can fast-track billion-dollar projects, but until this much more affordable priority gets that kind of attention, the rules are just ink on paper, and the roll call of the dead just grows longer.

Dean Florez is a former California Senate majority leader, representing portions of the Central Valley.

One of California’s largest agricultural employers plans to close a Central Valley grape nursery by the end of the year after laying off hundreds of employees, including many supportive of a United Farm Workers effort to unionize the workforce.

Wonderful Co., owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, plans to shut down the majority of the nursery in Wasco, northwest of Bakersfield, and donate the farm to UC Davis, representatives for the company and the university confirmed this week.

The move comes as Wonderful Nurseries remains locked in a battle with the UFW after the union last year petitioned to represent workers growing grapevines, using a new state “card check” law that made it easier for organizers to sign up workers. Company officials said their decision was unrelated to that.

“The decision to wind down Wonderful Nurseries was purely a business decision and in no way, shape or form related to our ongoing litigation with the UFW or the fraud so many farm workers reported by the union,” Wonderful Co. spokesman Seth Oster said.

In February, Wonderful Nurseries President Rob C. Yraceburu said in an email to employees that the state’s agricultural industry has seen tens of thousands of orchard and vineyard acres abandoned or removed. The table and wine grape industry is in a major downturn, meaning nurseries such as theirs have seen “significantly decreased sales and record losses, with no expectation of a turnaround anytime soon.”

Yet some labor experts and Wonderful employees are questioning the timing of the layoffs, which started just five months after the UFW won a key legal victory in its effort to organize the workforce.

Victor Narro, a labor studies professor at UCLA, said the closure and donation to UC Davis should be scrutinized.

“The question is, what’s the reason they’re doing it?” he said. “Is it really, in the end, to avoid unionization of the workforce? Or is it really that they’re making a sound financial decision?”

The UFW has not directly accused the Resnicks of retaliating against workers supportive of the union by closing the farm. But it has raised questions about the timing of both the layoffs and this week’s confirmation the nursery would be closed.

The entrance to Wonderful Nurseries on March 25, 2024, in Wasco, Calif.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

At its seasonal peak, the 1,400-acre nursery employs about 600 workers who would have been part of the bargaining unit, but now only 20 still work at the facility, said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for the union. Overall, about 100 employees now work there, according to the company.

Yraceburu told employees there will be a phasedown in shutting the grape nursery. Workers, including those employed by farm labor contractors, will have an opportunity to apply for other Wonderful worksites, he said. A company spokesman said no other Wonderful farm is facing a similar reduction in workforce.

The nursery has been operating at a significant loss for several years, Oster said, but he did not say for how long or just how much it has lost.

It was not immediately clear whether UC Davis will recognize the farmworkers union once the university takes control of the nursery.

In a statement, UC Davis spokesperson Bill Kisliuk said the university is grateful for the gift, which includes the Wasco facility combined with a $5-million startup donation. The university will form an implementation committee to plan the use of the facility, Kisliuk said.

Although the university has a long history of respecting labor agreements, he said, the academic use of the site will be significantly different from the current commercial operation.

“This gift expands and builds upon one of the world’s leading agricultural research programs and will catalyze discovery and innovation,” he said. “We look forward to working with the Wonderful Company to successfully transfer the Wasco facilities and property to the University later this year.”

The Resnicks are big donors to state politicians and charities, but their philanthropy has been the target of recent union organizing efforts. In late July, UFW and other labor organizers gathered outside the Hammer Museum, the recipient of more than $30 million in donations from the Resnicks, who have a building named after them. The gathering came after the union released a video that appeared to show a Wonderful employee paying other workers to participate in an anti-union protest.

In the video, the worker, who has been a forefront anti-union advocate and has organized protests, is seen handing out $100 bills from the trunk of a car and encouraging workers to sign a sheet. In a separate video, she can be heard saying that she was directed to first feed everyone, hand out $100 and then they would receive an additional $50.

The unedited versions of the videos were shown during a hearing before an administrative law judge for the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, where Wonderful Co. has challenged the UFW’s petition to represent the nursery employees. The board oversees collective bargaining for farmworkers in the state and also investigates charges of unfair labor practices.

Wonderful Nurseries in Wasco.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Now that Wonderful is closing its Wasco grape nursery, it is unclear what will happen in the proceedings, because there will soon be no workers to unionize. But the board could issue a ruling that would affect future disputes.

The UFW and Wonderful Co. have traded accusations over the last year: The company accused the union of using $600 in COVID-19 federal relief funds to trick farmworkers into signing the authorization cards. The company submitted nearly 150 signed declarations from nursery workers saying they had not understood that by signing the cards they were voting to unionize.

The UFW has rejected those accusations and, with the video, is suggesting that workers were paid to protest against the unionization effort at the height of the back-and-forth a year ago.

Rosa M. Silva, a Wonderful Nurseries worker for the last six years, said tensions have long been running high at the nursery, with some co-workers saying they don’t have a right to ask for raises or benefits. She said she believes that the company would rather shut down the nursery to avoid negotiating with them, a claim that Wonderful has forcefully rejected.

In July, Silva took a day off work and rallied outside the Hammer Museum. Protesters handed out fliers that read: “Tell Wonderful Company’s billionaire owners: Respect the farm workers. Stop spending money fighting the United Farm Workers.”

“This is my message to the Resnicks: if you can give millions to this art museum, which a majority of your workers will never visit, why can’t you also pay your workers something fair?” she said at the protest. “If you care so much about being respected by artists and lovers of art, why can’t you respect the people who plant, grow and harvest the products you sell?”

The UFW filed its petition with the labor board in February last year, asserting that a majority of the 600-plus farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries in Wasco had signed the authorization cards and asking that the UFW be certified as their union representative.

At the time, it appeared to be the UFW’s third victorious unionization drive in a matter of months — following diminishing membership rates over the last several years.

Under the law, a union can organize farmworkers by inviting them to sign authorization cards at off-site meetings without notifying their employer. Under the old rules, farmworkers voted on union representation by secret ballot at a polling site designated by the state labor board, typically on employer property. The state law has since revitalized the union’s organizing efforts, and it has gone on to organize other farms.

Wonderful has sued the state to stop the card-check law. A ruling by a Kern County Superior Court judge that found the certification process under the card-check law as “likely unconstitutional” was superseded in October by an appellate court, which is still reviewing the case.

Ana Padilla, executive director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, said the Central Valley has been blanketed with anti-union messaging ever since the passage of the card-check law.

She also questioned the timing of shutting down the Wasco nursery. “Layoffs, store closures and offloading organized worksites are all part of the anti-unionism playbook,” she said.

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

A POLICE worker stalked and blackmailed a teenage boy for seven years after meeting him through an online game.

Ryann Moroney, 28, convinced the lad when he was 15 that he was being blackmailed by several Snapchat accounts.

Moroney, who worked on the London Met’s cyber crime unit, asked the boy to send naked selfies to appease his fictitious blackmailers.

He was arrested when his victim went to the police, who found 83 indecent images of him on Moroney’s phone.

Moroney admitted stalking and making indecent images of the most serious kind at Inner London crown court.

Judge Nathaniel Rudolf KC told him he had taken “complete and utter advantage” of his victim in a “sophisticated campaign designed to maximise his fear”.

He jailed Moroney for four years, four months.

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