Starting today, as many as 48,000 University of California academic workers — including teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars and graduate student researchers — are set to strike at all 10 UC campuses, a move that could cause some classes, grading and lab work to grind to a halt just weeks ahead of final exams.

A customer at a Mountain View Starbucks and an employee at a Cupertino T-Mobile store were attacked last week in separate hate crime incidents.

If the Staten Island union organizing efforts prove contagious, Amazon would start looking more like Starbucks, where more locations are voting to unionize every week. Amazon’s fight with its new union promises to be nothing less than a bitter, messy, drawn-out battle that could help determine the future of American work.

San Jose may weaken an ordinance that guarantees a living wage to anyone working for a private tenant of a city-owned property. The 16-year-old living wage policy requires commercial and other private tenants on city leases to pay above the minimum wage, at least $15.78 an hour with benefits or $17.03 without. Other items on Tuesday’s City Council agenda include changes to the city’s cardroom ordinance, an audit of employee travel expenses and a six-figure contract for new art and light displays.

San Jose will consider skirting its living wage policy to appease a massive corporation and some developers. The City Council on Tuesday will discuss an appeal from Starbucks and other vendors to be exempt from the rule—they’re interested in leasing space at City Hall and the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

San Jose police will commit more security this weekend to the funeral of a Hells Angels member who was shot dead two weeks prior in the same cemetery he is set to be buried. Reports now suggest that the slew of violence that has left two Hells Angels members dead and one evading the law stems from a violent squabble in January 2010 between the Vagos motorcycle club and Hells Angels at a downtown Santa Cruz Starbucks.