Most of the claims this year—703—were filed after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, with an average of 25 being filed per day since Feb. 13, according to a release.

Among those laid off in recent weeks include dozens of staff connected to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site as well as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and hundreds with the Bonneville Power Administration. 

Two Rivers Terminal LLC has been cited for 96 serious and 43 general violations in the past three years, including employee deaths in 2024 and 2012 and three who were hospitalized.

Hundreds of federal employees throughout the state have filed for unemployment benefits since Jan. 20, with more than 150 doing so between Feb. 13-18 alone. 

Benton-Franklin Trends’ Patrick Jones crunches the data on the bicounty’s per adult capita value of investment income and offers several reasons why investment income is relatively low here.

Proposed legislation in Olympia aims to ease the burden of child care costs for Washington families by allowing businesses to help their employees pay for it. If put into law, businesses could reduce the amount they spend on business and occupation taxes by the amount they pay for child care assistance to workers.

The state added nearly 12,000 jobs in the final month of 2024, putting the unemployment rate at its lowest point for the year. It is still up slightly from December 2023 and still above the current national unemployment rate of 3.8%. 

As the Tri-Cities works to position itself as a clean energy hub, a new college program aims to help fill the workforce pipeline that’s necessary to turn this vision into a reality.

Many federal employees who currently work remotely could lose some of their pay if a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Washington, passes Congress. 

Despite the worst of the health crisis having passed, one of its enduring legacies is the sharp rise in labor costs.