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(NEW YORK) — Months before OpenAI board member Ilya Sutskever would gain notoriety for his key role in the ouster of CEO Sam Altman, Sutskever co-authored a little-noticed but apocalyptic warning about the threat posed by artificial intelligence.

Superintelligent AI, Sutskever co-wrote on a company blog, could lead to “the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction,” since engineers are unable to prevent AI from “going rogue.” The message echoed OpenAI’s charter, which calls for avoiding AI uses if they “harm humanity.”

The cry for caution from Sutskever, however, arrived at a period of breakneck growth for OpenAI. A $10 billion investment from Microsoft at the outset of this year helped fuel the development of GPT-4, a viral conversation bot that the company says now boasts 100 million weekly users.

The forced exit of Altman arose in part from frustration between him and Sutskever over a tension at the heart of the company: heightened awareness of the risks posed by AI, on the one hand, and explosive growth in the release and commercialization of new products on the other, The New York Times reported.

To be sure, details remain scant about the reason for Altman’s departure. The move came after a review undertaken by the company’s board of directors, OpenAI said on Friday.

“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in a statement.

Altman was hired by Microsoft days after his exit, eliciting a letter on Monday signed by nearly all of the employees at OpenAI that called for the resignation of the company’s board and the return of Altman, according to a copy of the letter obtained by ABC News.

The OpenAI board, the letter said, “informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission’ of the company.

Stuart Russell, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who co-authored a study on societal-scale dangers of the technology, said OpenAI faces a tension centered on its mission of developing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a form of AI that could mimic human intelligence and potentially surpass it.

“If you’re funding a company with multiple billions of dollars to pursue AGI, that just seems like a built-in conflict with the goal of ensuring that AI systems are safe,” Russell told ABC News, emphasizing that it remains unclear why exactly Altman left the company.

The divide over the existential threat posed by AI looms industry-wide as the technology sweeps across institutions from manufacturing to mass entertainment, prompting disagreement about the pace of development and the focus of possible regulation.

An open letter written in May by the Center for AI Safety warned that AI poses a “risk of extinction” akin to pandemics or nuclear war, featuring signatures from hundreds of researchers and industry leaders like Altman and ​​Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s AI division.

For his part, Altman has said rapid deployment of AI allows for stress-testing of products and offers the best way to avert considerable harm.

Other AI luminaries, however, have balked at the purported risk. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, told the MIT Technology Review that fear of an AI takeover is “preposterously ridiculous.”

Warnings from industry titans about the risks of AI have arisen alongside an increasingly competitive industry in which the speedy development of products requires massive investment, which in turn places pressure on firms to pursue commercial uses for the technology, Anjana Susarla, a professor of at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business who studies the responsible deployment of AI, told ABC News.

“The very large investments needed to build these kinds of technologies means the companies have a tradeoff between the profits they would generate from these investments and thinking about some abstract benefit from artificial intelligence,” Susarla said.

The multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft earlier this year deepened a longstanding relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, which began with a $1 billion investment from the tech giant four years ago.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015. As of last month, the company was set to bring in more than $1 billion in revenue over a year-long period through the sale of its artificial intelligence products, The Information reported.

In addition to uniting OpenAI employees behind Altman, his recent ouster appears to have resolved some of the tension with Sutskever.

“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” Sutskever, a longtime AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI, posted on X on Monday. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”

The choice of Altman’s replacement, meanwhile, could offer a hint of the company’s future approach to safety.

OpenAI appointed interim CEO Emmett Shear, the former chief executive at video game streaming platform Twitch.

In a podcast interview on “The Logan Bartlett Show,” in July, Shear described AI as “pretty inherently dangerous,” and placed the odds of a massive AI-related disaster in a range between 5% and 50% — an estimate that he called the “probability of doom.”

In September, Shear said on X that he favors “slowing down” the development of AI.

“If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0,” Shear wrote. “I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead.

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(NEW YORK) — OpenAI was thrown into upheaval in recent days after the sudden departure of CEO Sam Altman, who just three days later landed at Microsoft. The ouster elicited a letter from about 600 employees at OpenAI, all of whom threatened to resign unless Altman returns.

As the worker protest unfolded, OpenAI – maker of the popular conversation bot ChatGPT – appointed a replacement for Altman: Interim CEO Emmett Shear, the former chief executive at video game streaming platform Twitch. Shear revealed the news Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying he’d received a call from the company offering him the position only hours earlier.

“It’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust,” said Shear.

“I took this job because I believe that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in existence,” he added. “When the board shared the situation and asked me to take the role, I did not make the decision lightly. Ultimately I felt that I had a duty to help if I could.”

Here’s what to know about Shear, his attitude toward AI, and his plans for the company.

Who is Open AI interim CEO Emmett Shear?

Shear, who earned an undergraduate degree in computer programming from Yale University, is best known for his role as the founder and CEO of Twitch.

Launched in 2011, Twitch set out to become the preeminent online platform for livestream video content. Within two years, the site boasted 45 million unique visitors in a single month, Forbes reported. Amazon acquired Twitch for nearly $1 billion in 2014.

Shear stepped down as CEO of Twitch last year, comparing the 16-year-old company to a teenager. “Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone,” Shear said.

Before Twitch, Shear co-founded a series of startups. One of the first, in 2005, was an early attempt at an integrated online calendar, called Kiko Calendar.

“Kiko Calendar was a story in repeated mistakes and failure,” Shear said at a 2014 event with startup accelerator Y Combinator, with which he has been affiliated on and off for nearly two decades. Kiko Calendar was later sold on eBay for $250,000, Shear said at the event.

What are Shear’s plans for OpenAI?

In his announcement on X accepting the role as interim CEO, Shear laid out his initial plans for the company over the coming weeks.

He vowed to hire an independent investigator to examine Altman’s ouster, to speak with an array of company stakeholders, and to reform the company’s management team as needed.

“Depending on the results everything we learn from these, I will drive changes in the organization – up to and including pushing strongly for significant governance changes if necessary,” Shear said.

Shear is among a large number of prominent tech industry figures who believe that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. In a podcast interview on “The Logan Bartlett Show,” in July, Shear described AI as “pretty inherently dangerous,” and placed the odds of a massive AI-related disaster in a range between 5% and 50% — an estimate that he called the “probability of doom.”

As recently as Wednesday, Shear “unironically” wondered aloud whether AI could largely replace one of corporate America’s most prominent job titles: the CEO.

“Most of the CEO job (and the majority of most executive jobs) are very automatable,” Shear declared on X.

He added, however, that “There are of course the occasional key decisions you can’t replace.”

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(NEW YORK) — Less than a year out from the next presidential election, former President Donald Trump and some Republican allies continue to falsely deny the results of the previous one.

Three in 10 adults believe that President Joe Biden only won the 2020 contest because of election fraud, a Monmouth poll in June found. More than two-thirds of Republicans espouse the debunked claim, the survey showed.

Despite the persistence of such falsehoods, political advertisements featuring incorrect assertions about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 contest will be permitted on Instagram and Facebook, a Meta content policy shows.

Meta, the parent company that controls the platforms, made a policy change allowing political advertisers to say past elections were fraudulently conducted but prohibiting ads that question the validity of future or ongoing elections, the policy says. The Wall Street Journal first reported the policy change.

The move raises concerns about the spread of false election-denial ads on Instagram and Facebook that could erode the public’s trust in U.S. democracy, some researchers who examine misinformation and disinformation told ABC News, noting that election-denial ads could also help fuel violent extremism like that on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I’m really worried that this is one crucial trigger that will make our election even more divisive, causing more conspiracy and disinformation activity,” Hazel Kwon, a professor at Arizona State University who leads its Media, Information, Data and Society Lab, told ABC News.

“The big concern is that this directly affects trust in democratic institutions,” Kwon added.

The researchers cautioned, however, that studies indicate limited influence of online political advertisements on voter sentiment, suggesting that the policy change could impact the electorate less than the immense user base of the platforms may lead some to think.

Some of the experts noted that the circulation of election-denial ads on social media could help shape the wider public conversation even if they do not change the minds of a large share of individual voters.

“I’m confident that there will be malefactors attempting to game the election,” Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who studies tech platforms, told ABC News. “It’s less clear how well this misinformation will work.”

The policy at Meta focuses on upcoming or ongoing elections that can still be impacted by political ads, rather than previous elections that have already become a matter of historical record, the company said in a statement.

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the company pointed to a blog post in August 2022 detailing the Meta’s approach to that year’s midterm elections.

“We will reject ads encouraging people not to vote or calling into question the legitimacy of the upcoming election,” wrote Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta.

The reported move by Meta coincides with the loosening of election-related content restrictions at other major tech platforms. Google-owned YouTube announced in June that it would halt the removal of content claiming widespread voter fraud in 2020 and other past elections.

A civic integrity policy updated in August by X, formerly known as Twitter, does not address claims of voter fraud.

A potential rise in election-denial content on social media during a hotly contested 2024 election cycle could increase the likelihood of extremist violence, Edward Perez, Twitter’s former product director for civic integrity, which includes its election policies, told ABC News. Perez is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to election security and integrity.

“There’s a very troubling area where we have people who take extremist behavior because they’ve been radicalized by what they’ve read on social media,” Perez said, pointing to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as well as David DePape, a far-right conspiracy theorist who was convicted on Thursday for attempted kidnapping and assault of the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The change in policy toward election-denial ads could also contribute to a political environment in which a wider swathe of people adopt the debunked claim of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, some experts said.

Some research has linked news consumption on tech platforms and belief in misinformation. A study by researchers at Northwestern University, released in September 2020, found that individuals who received their news from social media were more likely to believe in misinformation about coronavirus conspiracies and risk factors.

Still, some experts downplayed the influence of political advertising online, pointing to studies that show little effect on voter sentiment or election outcomes.

“Political ads don’t have large observable effects, just in general,” Zeve Sanderson, the executive director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, told ABC News. Direct posts from prominent people are more likely to sway users than ads, Sanderson added.

A study led by a researcher at Yale University, published last year, found that a nearly $9 million, eight-month ad campaign on social media across five swing states ahead of the 2020 election found “no evidence” that the program increased or decreased average voter turnout.

A separate study examining results from dozens of different political advertisements tested across nearly 60 groups of voters during the 2016 presidential election found small average effects on candidate favorability and voter choices.

While social media ads may hold little direct effect on voters, Kwon said, the election-denial messages could still elevate the false claims within the wider national conversation ahead of the 2024 election.

“If we just consider political ads on Facebook, it may not have a significant effect,” Kwon said. “However, the problem is that once it’s shared, the message can be picked up and propagated by others.”

“It gives more reason for extreme thinkers to talk about and share their opinions,” she added. “It’s a disturbing idea that this could influence public trust in the election process.”

 

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(NEW YORK) — Sam Altman is stepping down from his role as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.

The departure follows a review process undertaken by the company’s board of directors, OpenAI said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — Members of the United Auto Workers voted to ratify a contract with General Motors, making it the first of the Big 3 U.S. carmakers to formally conclude a weekslong labor dispute that brought tens of thousands of autoworkers to picket lines and risked major economic disruption, balloting results posted online by the union showed.

Employees at General Motors voted to ratify the labor contract by a relatively narrow margin of about 55% to 45%, affirming a deal that top union officials touted as historic but a sizable minority of workers rejected, returns showed.

Soon afterward, Stellantis employees represented by the UAW voted to approve their agreement. A tentative agreement at Ford appears headed for ratification. The votes at Stellantis and Ford appear to have approved their respective agreements by a larger margin than the contract with General Motors, according to vote tallies posted online by the UAW on Friday.

The tentative deals reached with the Big 3 included a record 25% raise over four years, as well as significant improvements for pensions and the right to protest the closure of plants.

But the agreements fell short of some ambitious demands made by UAW President Shawn Fain at the outset of the strike in September. Initially, the union called for 40% wage increases over the four-year duration of the contract as well as a four-day workweek at full-time pay.

If union members had voted down the agreement, more than 50,000 employees at General Motors represented by the UAW would have potentially relaunched their strike against the company.

Ultimately, the deal with General Motors received majority support from union members at dozens of workplaces spanning from Michigan to Texas to Pennsylvania. However, the agreement appeared to elicit disapproval from many longtime workers, returns indicated.

A major GM plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, which employs more than 2,000 workers building the company’s Cadillac and Acadia vehicles, voted down the contract by a margin of 56% to 44%, the results showed.

A thousand-employee transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, which experienced a layoff of about 200 workers amid the strike, voted against the contract by a nearly identical margin, according to the results.

After reaching tentative agreements with each of the Big 3 automakers late last month, Fain touted the set of contracts as a victory not only for autoworkers but also for the broader working class.

President Joe Biden also praised the deals. Addressing UAW members at a car plant in Illinois last week, Biden described tentative contracts reached at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis as model agreements that he hoped would fuel a wave of unionization across the auto industry.

“I’m a little selfish,” Biden said. “I want this type of agreement for all auto workers.”

 

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(NEW YORK) — When Harry and Jen Appel lost their home in Big Pine Key, Florida, to Hurricane Irma in 2017, they thought their insurance policies would cover the cost to repair and they’d rebuild in the same location.

The couple showed ABC News’ meteorologist Rob Marciano the spot where their home used to be, now an empty lot covered in sea lavender and some shards of their former life.

“If we would have got paid by insurance the right amount of money, it would have been a you would have been standing in a new house,” Harry Appel said. “Insurance was tough — that was worse than a storm.”

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma barrelled across the Atlantic with winds reaching 185 miles per hour — the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Category 4 storm ravaged the Appel’s dream home, along with much of the region, leaving those hit hardest by the storm to contend with an insurance market already struggling to cover its claims.

Since moving into their home in Big Pine Key in 2015, the Appels paid into premium homeowner insurance policies — the National Flood Insurance Program provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“A week afterward, the guy came up from Texas — the underwriter for flood insurance for FEMA — and he came up and he looked at the house and for him to write a check on the spot for this entire policy, which was amazing. And at that point, I really felt better,” Harry Appel said.

Harry Appel told ABC News that FEMA paid out the $110,000 flood policy, but when the private insurance company responsible for the Appels’ wind coverage came to assess the damage, they claimed the damage had only been done by flooding, so the company wasn’t liable.

“We were entitled to this money,” Jen Appel said. “This was a contractual obligation that they did not live up to and it should have been paid.”

Home insurance isn’t mandatory by law, but banks often require homeowners to get insurance as a condition of a mortgage.

“The insurer’s goal is to collect more in premiums than they pay out in claims,” said Ben Keys, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business professor of real estate and finance. “We’re seeing higher costs of materials, higher costs of labor, and those are growing faster than inflation.”

In recent decades, the intensity of some hurricanes has exploded, fueled by the warming seas, according to experts.

“We’re having more disasters, we’re having more costly disasters, and importantly, more people live in harm’s way,” Keys said. “So any individual disaster now leads to more payouts coming from the insurers — and they’re recognizing that these costs are rising quickly, not just because of inflation, and they’re reacting accordingly.”

2023 marked the most “billion dollar disasters” on record for the United States, with 25 climate-related disasters, according to NOAA.

As these events have gotten more costly, some of the largest private insurance companies, like Farmers, have left states like Florida entirely.

Still, other companies have gone insolvent due to the increasing cost of claims, leaving a market with fewer options for residents to choose from.

Three-fourths of Florida’s 21.5 million residents live in coastal counties, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and it was Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that first exposed the vulnerabilities of the private insurance market in the state.

In the aftermath of Andrew, Florida created a last-resort state-run program called Citizens Property Insurance Corporation with the mission of insuring homeowners who can’t otherwise find coverage.

“We’ve seen a number of large insurers go belly up, and in response, we’ve seen a lot of homeowners who are now dependent on the state’s public insurance plan. So Citizens Property Insurance is now the largest homeowner’s insurer in the state,” Keys said. “And what that points to is a private insurance market that’s simply not working.”

Florida is just one of 32 states and the District of Columbia that offers a state-run FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) plan. Another of the 32, Louisiana, is struggling with some of the same issues.

Keys explained that sea level rise and more severe flooding after storms, “have continued to drive up costs for homeowners in that state.”

Tammy and Charles Guillory and their daughter Caylee lived inside the cramped quarters of an RV parked in their driveway for two years during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after their home was hit by Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.

“Some days I didn’t know how we was gonna make it, but we made it,” Tammy Guillory said. “It was hard.”

After the one-two punch of the hurricanes, just six weeks apart, the Guillorys turned to their insurance companies to pay out their policies.

“We did what we were supposed to do on our end of the bargain,” Tammy Guillory said. “Now it’s time for them to do what they are supposed to do.”

To have their policy paid, the Guillorys had to take their unmet claim to the courts.

They won their case, but the insurer appealed, so the family had to wait even longer.

“I was a client of this company for over 20 years with no missed payments — nothing,” Charles Guillory said. “But when it’s time for us to be able to receive, we have to go through this, and I don’t think it’s right.”

Attorney Michael Cox represented the Guillorys, along with hundreds of similar cases in the area.

“When you have this massive catastrophe, I think the insurance companies came in and they know statistically that most people will just walk away with the mistreatment — and they did,” Cox said. “Most people won’t fight like Charles and Tammy fought. They stood up for themselves and they were willing to go all the way to bat with this company.”

While the Guillorys eventually won their case, the story across the state doesn’t always have a happy ending.

Louisiana still has the third highest insurance premiums in the country, according to III. The market has been deteriorating since the state was hit by record hurricane activity in 2020, causing upwards of $23 billion in damage.

In the aftermath of the disasters, 12 insurers were declared insolvent because of their losses during that time and another 12 voluntarily withdrew from the state.

Over the last two years, Louisiana’s state-run insurance plan — Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. — more than tripled the number of policies it carries, from 35,000 to 128,000, according to the Louisiana Department of Insurance.

“The drama in Louisiana was that the state insurance regulator increased premiums by 65% earlier this year for the state-run plan,” Keys said. “And that was a recognition that they simply didn’t have enough capital on hand to weather an even moderate storm.”

The state government approved a $45 million fund in February of this year to help stabilize the market.

Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon says it’s a first step to court companies to come back to the state.

“That’s a balance between the obligation we have to make insurance available, to attract companies and the obligation we have to make them responsive and fair with their policyholders,” Donelon said.

Reinsurance often creates another kink in the chain.

“Reinsurance is most easily thought of as insurance for insurance companies,” Keys explained. “So insurance companies are going to take on risky policies from homeowners all over the country, and they’re going to have a portfolio of risk, and they’d like to protect themselves from the worst case scenarios.”

As natural disasters become more costly around the country, the cost to stay for reinsurers is also increasing.

“They have a lot of influence in the decisions that insurers make,” Keys said. “They have invested heavily in climate modeling and they have some of the best data and the best models out there. And because this is the only business that they do, they have a lot of money at stake.”

As insurance issues continue across the Gulf Coast, some have looked to fortifying their homes to withstand these powerful storms as a possible solution.

At the University of Miami, researchers are testing how to fortify homes with their hurricane simulator, showing us that the way homes are built could be one key to reversing the insurance market retreat.

“Insurance companies, as well as reinsurance, rely heavily on numerical models,” UMiami assistant scientist Milan Curcic said. “How likely is it that certain areas will experience wind of this threshold, flooding of this level, and so on.”

While some can afford to fortify their homes and choose to self-insure, Keys said those who can’t should “shop around” for policies.

As for the Appels, they settled for a fraction of their policy payout after two years of litigation and being forced into escrow with their bank.

They now live in their bed and breakfast and have given up on rebuilding their home.

“When we don’t have a mortgage here, there will be no insurance here,” Jen Appel said. “So I’m joining the ranks with self-insuring, really self-insuring — don’t just say you’re going to self-insure. You better have a bankroll.”

While Harry is ready to move away, Jen says she doesn’t want to go.

“The only reason we’re still here is because I don’t want to go,” Jen Appel said. “But I didn’t go through all that to get to this point where I haven’t enjoyed any of it.”

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(NEW YORK) — Thousands of Starbucks employees nationwide are set to walk off the job on Thursday in the largest work stoppage in the five-decade history of the company, the union representing the workers said in a statement to ABC News.

Employees at hundreds of unionized stores will call on Starbucks to bargain labor contracts that would set conditions at those workplaces, such as pay, benefits and staffing levels, Starbucks Workers United said.

Since 2021, the union has organized more than 360 stores employing roughly 9,000 workers. But the union and Starbucks have yet to reach an agreement on a labor contract at any of the stores.

The strike will coincide with “Red Cup Day,” an annual promotion that brings many customers to the company’s stores for a free holiday-themed reusable cup.

Workers at stores in 30 cities, including New York and Philadelphia, walked off the job a day early on Wednesday and will remain on strike through Thursday, the union said.

Moe Mills, a Starbucks employee who works at a store in St. Louis, told ABC News that they plan to participate in the strike because the company has refused to bargain with the union over staffing decisions tied to the sales uptick associated with promotional events like “Red Cup Day.”

The store where Mills works typically brings in about $8,000 in sales each day but promotional events add at least an additional $3,000 in revenue, which amounts to a nearly 40% increase in business, Mills said.

Starbucks, however, leaves staffing levels unchanged on promotional days, leading to overworked employees and unsatisfied customers, Mills added.

“It’s degrading and embarrassing to work in stores that are so short staffed on promotional days that we give customers poor service,” Mills said. “When customers spend $10 or $12 on a drink, they shouldn’t have to wait 45 minutes or get a lukewarm drink when it should be hot.”

Mills said their store unionized in August 2022 but Starbucks representatives have only attended one bargaining session, which they walked out of after 15 minutes.

“Starbucks is promoting that it’s bargaining in good faith but that’s not what we’re experiencing,” Mills said.

In a statement to ABC News, a Starbucks spokesperson faulted the union for a failure to make progress in contract negotiations, noting that the walkout would involve a fraction of the company’s overall workforce.

“We are aware that Workers United has publicized a day of action at a small subset of our U.S. stores this week. We remain committed to working with all partners, side-by-side, to elevate the everyday, and we hope that Workers United’s priorities will shift to include the shared success of our partners and working to negotiate union contracts for those they represent,” the company spokesperson said.

“Despite escalating rhetoric and recurring rallies demanding contracts, Workers United hasn’t agreed to meet to progress contract bargaining in more than four months,” the spokesperson added.

The company pointed to two union contracts reached with United Steelworkers this summer and progress on a draft contract with the Teamsters as proof of its commitment to settling union agreements.

The single-day strike will draw attention to the labor campaign and direct public pressure at Starbucks, Art Wheaton, a labor professor at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, told ABC News.

Federal labor law requires Starbucks to bargain in good faith with the unionized workers but does not mandate that the company agree to a contract, Wheaton added.

“Starbucks has to continue to bargain but it never has to say, ‘yes,'” Wheaton said. “The workers have 350 stores that they’ve unionized and exactly zero labor agreements.”

“The strike can raise awareness and help boost union morale,” he said. “To get a contract you need solidarity events that get the membership engaged and the community engaged.”

The walkout is set to arrive less than two weeks after Starbucks announced that it would raise the hourly pay of U.S. retail employees by 3% at the outset of next year.

The minimum pay raise falls short of the annual pace of inflation, which stands at 3.2%.

In addition to the pay increase, Starbucks will reduce the minimum number of days an employee must work in order to qualify for paid vacation benefits, the company said.

Alex Yeager, a worker at a Starbucks store in Albany, New York, who belongs to the union, previously told ABC News in a statement that he expects the company to provide the raises to nonunion stores only.

“Once again, Starbucks is responding to our bargaining demands, but they’re implementing them in nonunion stores and denying these new benefits to workers in stores that are unionizing or already voted to join the union,” Yeager said.

A labor board judge ruled in September that Starbucks had illegally provided previous pay increases and benefits to nonunion employees without offering them to unionized workers. Bloomberg Law first reported on the ruling.

In a statement to ABC News, Starbucks rebuked the union’s allegation that the raises would only be provided to workers at non-union stores.

“All union-represented stores will receive annual wage increases consistent with our practice of providing yearly wage increases,” Starbucks said. “Wherever we can quickly and broadly improve partner benefits and perks we have and always will.”

“Starbucks has adhered to long-standing legal obligations, which require the company to differentiate between unionized or organizing partners and partners in all other stores,” the company added.

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(NEW YORK) — Delivering on long-awaited improvements, the Department of Education will soon release a streamlined version of its widely used college financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, to less than 20 questions that could take some people just 10 minutes to fill out, officials told ABC News.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was reviewed exclusively by ABC News ahead of its launch date, will go live by Dec. 31, according to the Department of Education.

The current application includes over 100 questions and hasn’t been significantly updated since the Reagan administration, but it has been under review for the last two years after Congress passed bipartisan legislation calling for it to be improved.

Education Department officials said the overhaul is an attempt to make the form more approachable so that more low-income and middle-income families can apply for and receive the college financial aid they qualify for — which the complicated, burdensome questions on the current FAFSA can be a barrier to.

“The new FAFSA is going to be streamlined, simplified, faster, and it’s going to be easier than ever for students to get the help that they need to pay for college,” Department of Education Undersecretary James Kvaal said in an interview.

“The FAFSA is the first step in that journey for most students, and the form is going to be easier to fill out,” he said.

The new application has been pared down to the fewest number of questions possible, officials who worked on the redesign said, and it pulls from information the government already has through the IRS to automatically input family income details.

The form will range from 18 questions, which could take about 10 minutes, to around 50 questions for more complicated financial situations, which could take around an hour, the Education Department officials estimated.

Those improvements to the form’s accessibility, as well as changes to the formulas to allow more students to qualify for financial aid, will ultimately result in 610,000 new Pell grants being awarded to students from low-income households, the Department of Education predicted.

Pell grants are given to low-income students that do not need to be repaid, unlike a loan.

“A lot of students who are eligible for Pell grants never fill out the FAFSA, or they fill it out and are asked for supporting documentation like a tax return and fall out of the process,” Kvaal said.

“So we think by simplifying the form, we are actually going to make it a lot easier for students to get those Pell grants and pay for college,” he said.

More than one million students are enrolled in college and eligible for a Pell grant but haven’t applied for one, Department of Education surveys have found.

The bureaucratic barriers that can be created by FAFSA have long been a thorn in the side of advocates attempting to get more aid to the students who need it, said Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a nonprofit that serves financial aid employees at schools around the country.

“We know the No. 1 barrier that students and families cite for not attending college is affordability — that it’s too unaffordable,” Draeger said.

“The entryway to all of that is the FAFSA, and so we want to make this form accessible to as many students and families as we can,” he said.

Draeger and other advocacy groups were hoping to see the Department of Education roll out the new form earlier in the academic year, in line with the October launch date for the FAFSA in recent years, giving families a chance to take advantage of the promised improvements in the college application process for the 2024-2025 school year.

“Generally speaking, the earlier we can get financial aid information to students and families, the earlier they can start to plan for how they’re gonna pay for college,” Draeger said.

Students who already applied to schools under early decision processes, for example, might not now be able to use the new form to apply for their financial aid packages.

But for young people applying for colleges with later deadlines, including in January, the new form will still be available to them in time, Draeger said.

The downside to submitting aid forms later, however, is that it can mean there’s less money available from the institutions and that families have less time to plan their finances.

“Our advice would be to do your FAFSA as soon as possible,” Draeger said.

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(NEW YORK) — Chris Josephs wakes up each morning, opens his laptop, and combs through last night’s stock trades.

Josephs, who lives in Santa Monica, California, is not keeping an eye on his own portfolio. Instead, the 20-something tech entrepreneur has spent years intensely following the stocks that are bought and sold by people on the other side of the country — members of the United States Congress.

“It all started off as infuriating,” he said. “You’re like, ‘what the, wait, how are they allowed to do it when other Americans can’t?’”

As long as a trade is reported within 45 days, there’s no law preventing members of the House or Senate from trading stocks, even if the bills they pass or committees they sit on could influence a company’s stock price.

Outraged at first, Josephs says he decided to get in on the action. He moved out West and with a handful of friends launched the app Autopilot.

Autopilot allows users to follow a politician’s trades and then copy them, automatically buying or selling that same stock a lawmaker does at whatever dollar amount they’d like. After less than a year, the company says it has users dedicating tens of millions of dollars to copy the trades certain politicians make.

“The reason why we initially set out with the politicians is because they were killing it,” Josephs told ABC News. “They were making a lot of money.”

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the STOCK Act, banning members of Congress from trading with nonpublic information, meaning details they glean in their work that are not available to the general public.

But members can still trade. For example, a hypothetical lawmaker could vote for an infrastructure bill and then buy stock in a concrete company. Or they could sit on the Armed Services Committee and legally trade in the stock of defense contractors that receive sizable government contracts.

Josephs is part of a growing online community that’s begun posting on social media the trades members of Congress make, in an effort to show the American people what winners and losers lawmakers pick.

The most well-known name in that movement is the account Unusual Whales. The person behind the account spoke with ABC News [but asked that his name not be used], disguising his face and voice out of fear of blowback from the politicians whose trades he dissects and then publishes on his website and social media accounts that have gained millions of followers.

“One thing people always say is that members are very good at picking stocks, that’s often assumed…but to be quite frank, members were also quite good at avoiding losses,” he told ABC News in his first television interview.

He pointed ABC News to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the regional banking crisis. He tracked trades showing several members of Congress, who sit on the House and Senate committees that regulate the financial industry, who sold SVB and other bank stocks before they experienced their sharpest decline.

“I can’t know the intent, if that was what they were aiming to do,” he told ABC News. “But many of the members who were trading banking stocks during that time performed very, very well.”

Annual reviews of the trades of 535 members of the House and Senate, compiled by the Unusual Whales account, have found lawmakers’ stock portfolios consistently beat the S&P 500.

Several members of Congress who actively trade stocks and spoke with ABC News, but declined to be identified, said they never trade with nonpublic information. Some said their trades are made through financial advisers and often without their knowledge. Others said that trading stocks shouldn’t be banned because doing so would cut off a financial source that some politicians use to supplement their income.

ABC News found one trade, made by Victoria Kelly, the wife of Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., which has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for more than two years.

A report by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) alleges, in 2020, Victoria Kelly purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in Pennsylvania steel producer Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. She did that, the OCE alleges, after her husband, the congressman, learned the Trump Commerce Department had agreed to open a probe into foreign competitors of the company, which would have impacted the company’s stock price.

But according to investigators, Victoria Kelly bought the stock before that move was made public. The report alleges there is “substantial reason to believe” that stock was purchased with “confidential information.”

Lawyers for the congressman say there’s no evidence the congressman had “any involvement whatsoever in Mrs. Kelly’s decision” to buy the stock and the congressman’s office has said the purchase was Victoria Kelly’s attempt to “show her support” for the struggling company.

The ethics committee opened an investigation into the trade in October 2021. It is ongoing.

When asked by ABC News about the allegations, Rep. Kelly said he was “not going to comment,” citing the pending investigation.

ABC News also found other members of Congress whose trades are under scrutiny, like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has reported millions of dollars in trades over the years, many made by her husband, a financier.

Chris Josephs estimates roughly $10 million in user money on his app Autopilot is specifically dedicated to copying the trades Pelosi discloses on official congressional forms.

In a statement, Pelosi’s office told ABC News she has “no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions made by her husband” and was “fully supportive” of Democrat-led efforts last year to ban congressional stock trading.

But those efforts failed. And now there are renewed calls to ban members of Congress from trading stocks altogether.

Earlier this month, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., who has long championed a bill to ban her colleagues from trading stocks, called on Speaker Mike Johnson to take action on the issue.

There is also a similar bill backed by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a hardline House conservative, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a fervent progressive.

“We have access to sensitive information,” Ocasio-Cortez told ABC News. “And to think that a [member of Congress] could then purchase individual stock and make bets and trades and personally benefit from that is, I think, in direct conflict with the spirit of public service that we’re here to do.”

Then, there’s the bipartisan duo from Colorado of Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican, and Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat, who, with 19 other Republicans and Democrats, signed a letter in May pushing congressional leaders to do something about stock trading.

“[Congressional stock trading] appears to be unethical, and it is wrong fundamentally and American people know it’s wrong,” Buck told ABC News in a rare joint interview, alongside Neguse.

“The American people expect members of Congress to be serving the American people. And the American public. And not their stock portfolios,” Neguse added.

But, despite public pressure, all the proposed bills to ban congressional stock trading have stalled in various House and Senate committees.

“Welcome to Congress,” Buck replied when asked by ABC News about the lack of progress.

“It has taken longer than we certainly would have liked, but we’re going to continue to push forward,” Neguse added, saying he remains optimistic. “More and more members have joined in this effort than perhaps ever before.”

Chris Josephs is less optimistic.

“I don’t think they’ll ban it. I think it’s all a smokescreen. I genuinely don’t think they’ll do it, because it doesn’t benefit them,” he said before turning to his laptop to watch the trades come through.

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(WASHINGTON) — Consumer prices rose 3.2% in October compared to a year ago, cooling significantly from the previous month and exceeding economist expectations. The data indicates progress in the Federal Reserve’s fight to reduce inflation.

The results mark a half-percentage-point decline from the annual inflation increase shown in September, according to data released Tuesday by the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Inflation has fallen significantly from a peak of about 9% last summer. But progress in the fight against rapid price increases had stalled in recent months.

Economists expected a decline in inflation last month largely due to a fall in gas prices as the busy summer travel season gave way to an autumn slowdown.

Over a four-week period beginning at the start of October, gas prices fell nearly 8%, according to AAA data reviewed by ABC News.

Progress shown in the price-hike data, however, lagged for a separate key metric: core inflation, which omits volatile food and energy prices.

Core inflation rose 4.0% in October compared to a year ago, falling slightly from the rate demonstrated over the previous month.

The latest data arrived roughly two weeks after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged. The central bank left open the possibility of an additional rate hike this year but opted to first assess the economy as previous rate increases take greater hold.

“Inflation has been coming down but it’s still running well above our 2% target,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a Nov. 1 press conference in Washington, D.C. “Given how far we have come, along with the uncertainties and risks we face, the committee is proceeding carefully.”

Once bemoaned as a source of recession worries, the U.S. economy has become a wellspring of good news, with blistering growth, robust hiring, and consumers more readily opening their wallets for everything from concert tickets to bar tabs.

The strong performance, however, complicates the fight to dial back inflation, posing a quandary for the Fed.

Since last year, the Fed has raised its benchmark interest rate at the fastest pace in more than two decades, seeking to slash price hikes by slowing the economy and reducing consumer demand. In theory, the economy should eventually falter as it becomes more expensive for businesses and consumers to borrow. But the economy has so far resisted a cooldown.

Gross domestic product data released late last month showed that the U.S. economy expanded at a 4.9% annualized rate over three months ending in September. That breakneck pace more than doubled growth over the previous quarter and reinforced other recent indicators of sturdy performance.

The U.S. economy’s resilience, and consumer spending over the past year amid a decline of inflation, suggest that rapid price increases had resulted from the insufficient supply of goods and the disruption of the Russia-Ukraine war, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said Sunday on X.

“As these supply shocks fade, so does inflation, without a recession,” Zandi said.

However, a rapid rise in U.S. government bond yields over recent weeks has elevated long-term borrowing costs for consumers seeking mortgage loans, and for corporations pursuing funds to expand their businesses.

Those added borrowing expenses could slow the economy, Powell said at the press conference earlier this month.

“Higher treasury yields are showing through to higher borrowing costs for households and businesses, and those higher costs are going to weigh on economic activity,” Powell said.

Meanwhile, credit card debt climbed to a record high in the third quarter of 2023, surging nearly 5% from the previous quarter and suggesting that some of the economic growth may have been driven by consumer debt, economists previously told ABC News.

The mixed economic picture creates significant uncertainty but the status of the Fed’s inflation fight remains clear, Powell said, noting that the task will require a further slowdown in price increases.

“The process of getting inflation sustainably down to 2% has a long way to go,” Powell said. “We remain strongly committed.”

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