A rolling strike of Starbucks baristas has grown since kicking off Friday to include about 300 of the coffee giant’s shops across the U.S., according to the union organizing the work stoppage.

The strike, set to end after Christmas Eve, seeks to pressure Starbucks during the busy holiday season to offer a better wage proposal over what would be a first contract for its workers. Employees also aim to push Starbucks to resolve outstanding unfair labor practice charges filed by workers in recent years.

Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents about 10,000 workers at a few hundred of the ubiquitous chain’s nearly 16,500 U.S. locations, said that baristas in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland and Tucson walked off the job Monday as part of a plan to grow the number of striking employees over the course of the five-day action. They joined baristas in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle who launched the strike and were followed by others in Denver, New York, St. Louis and other cities.

“My co-workers and I made the difficult decision to launch unfair labor practice strikes in hundreds of stores across the country because we know that investing in baristas is the only way to turn things around. These strikes are an initial show of strength, and we’re just getting started,” said Lauren Hollingsworth a barista from Ashland, Ore., in a news release from the union.

The union said the strike is the largest in Starbucks history. The final days before Christmas are traditionally some of Starbucks’ busiest customer traffic times.

Starbucks downplayed the significance of the strike, saying it would make little impact on its overall operations. “The vast majority of our stores (97-99%) will continue to operate and serve customers, and we expect a very limited impact to our overall operations,” said Sara Kelly, executive vice president and chief partner officer, in recently published blog post on Starbucks’ website about the strike.

On Monday, more than 60 store locations were forced to close amid the ongoing strike, the union said. And on Tuesday, Starbucks said 170 of its more than 10,000 company-operated stores in the United States did not open as planned.

The company has criticized the union, saying it “prematurely” ended bargaining sessions last week.

“It is disappointing they didn’t return to the table given the progress we’ve made to date,” the company said in a statement.

Initially, five stores in Southern California were involved in the strike including in Van Nuys, Santa Clarita, Highland Park and Anaheim, said Evelyn Zepeda, organizing director in California for Workers United. That number has expanded to include locations in downtown and elsewhere.

The work stoppages mark a major turning point for Starbucks Workers United, which formed in 2021 and steadily has made headway in its campaign to persuade baristas at Starbucks around the U.S. to join. Hopes that the two sides would be able to hammer out a deal had been high since February, when the company pledged publicly to work with the union and take a more neutral approach toward the drive to organize workers.

The conciliatory stance was an about-face for a company that previously had intensely resisted the campaign to organize its workers. Federal regulators found Starbucks repeatedly violated labor laws by disciplining and firing workers involved in unionizing activity, shutting down stores and stalling contract negotiations.

The National Labor Relations Board has conducted a total of 647 union elections at Starbucks stores, with 109 of them falling short, several others with challenged ballots and 528 currently with certified bargaining units, according to NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado. In California, 66 stores have held union elections and 44 of them have had their bargaining units recognized by the labor board.

Blado said workers have filed more than 700 unfair labor charges against Starbucks, its subsidiary Siren Retail Corp., or its law firm Littler Mendelson, alleging a range of violations. The union has not filed any new charges against Starbucks since late February.

The “silly season” of news coverage used to refer to the dog days of summer, when there was so little of importance happening that newspapers and cable channels filled the vacuum with fluff.

Not this year.

Starting in October and gaining intensity through the season, Americans have found themselves awash in panicky health and safety warnings about previously unappreciated threats.

It started with warnings about your black plastic spatulas and other such implements. Spurred by a study and press release issued Oct. 1 by the Seattle nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, news organizations from coast to coast — including The Times — posted articles advising consumers to ditch their black food utensils and children’s toys with black plastic pieces.

The black spatula panic was soon outrun by the drone panic, which has Americans scanning the skies for menacing aircraft.

As is typically the case, both of these panics springs from a nugget of truth. It’s true, for example, that chemicals that could theoretically harm people’s health at high exposure levels can be found in some household products — chiefly chemical flame retardants in black plastic electronic devices that have been banned from new uses but have been getting recycled into the consumer stream.

It’s also true that drones, ranging in size from the lightweight models deployed by hobbyists to large commercial models, are becoming a pain in the neck, with the largest craft posing a real danger to commercial aircraft.

But the distance between those nuggets of reality and the level of public hysteria is so great that the latter can be explained mostly by two factors: the desire for clicks on news sites and to fill newspaper columns, and the impulse of preening politicians to show they’re attentive to constituents’ concerns, no matter how dubious.

Let’s take these panics in order, starting with the black utensils. For a time, press advisories that people ditch their black spatulas were impossible to ignore. The most alarmist was probably an offering from The Atlantic, which was headlined: “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula/It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil.”

The piece ran under an illustration of a black spatula dripping sinister goblets of melting plastic, against a background of bilious green. It gave prominent space to the Toxic-Free Future study, as well as to research papers by the British scientist Andrew Turner, who has been studying the contamination of household goods by those electronic flame retardants for years.

A few points about the Toxic-Free Future paper, which spurred all that news coverage. First, it’s based in part on a massive mathematical error. The paper calculates that users of “contaminated kitchen utensils” would have a median intake of BDE-209, one of the common flame retardants, of 34,700 nanograms per day. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.)

The paper states that this daily exposure “would approach” the reference dose set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, which the the paper says pencils out at 42,000 nanograms per day for a 60-kilogram adult. Pretty good ground for concern, since the EPA uses the reference dose to measure the level of health risk from exposure to a toxin.

Except: 7,000 times 60 isn’t 42,000; it’s 420,000. The median intake for a 60-kilogram adult, in other words, isn’t anywhere close to the EPA’s reference dose.

Toxic-Free Future has issued a correction to its paper, acknowledging that the daily intake it calculated doesn’t “approach” the EPA reference dose but is one-tenth of the reference dose. (The Times has followed up with an article about the correction; several other publications that went to town on the black utensil threat have also done so.) But it also says “the calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper.”

Megan Liu, the paper’s lead author, told me that it wasn’t really designed as a risk assessment, but chiefly as a study of how much of these contaminants has entered the consumer economy through kitchen utensils, children’s toys and other products. “Flame retardants shouldn’t even be in these products at all,” she says, which is true.

Yet the issue for the average consumer is how dangerous are these products, really? The answer is, not very.

In a study cited by Liu’s paper, researchers found that some chemicals leached from a black spatula into cooking oil.

The Atlantic’s take on this was that the paper “found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil.” Not so readily, however: The researchers cut a black spatula into small pieces and basted them in 320-degree cooking oil for 15 minutes. Who does that? As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz points out, “most people don’t leave their spatulas in the fryer and walk away for a quarter of an hour.”

More issues are related to this paper. One is that 60 kilograms, or about 132 pounds, isn’t the average weight of American adults. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventgion places the average weight for an adult male at about 200 pounds, and for a female about 171.

Using those weights would have shown that the potential for health effects is even more remote than the overheated news coverage of the paper suggests. In any case, the evidence for long-term human health effects from the normal exposure to these chemicals is scanty. It comes almost entirely from experiments on lab mice and rats subjected to doses unlikely to occur in the real world, and to an experiment on human cells also in the laboratory.

Of course, if you’re inclined to eliminate all artifacts of modern commerce from your life, no one is stopping you. Liu and her colleagues observe that kitchen implements made from wood or stainless steel are widely available. They’ve also properly noted that among the real problems with the recycling of plastics in consumer goods is that we don’t know anything about how much goes into which products and where they’ve come from.

Some legislatures have moved toward requiring more disclosure, which is to the good. But if you spent the last few weeks or months doing a hard target search for black implements in your house, you probably didn’t have to.

Now on to the drones. When I first heard of New Jersey residents expressing panic over mysterious lights overhead, I flashed on the Firesign Theatre line, “Big light in sky slated to appear in East.” Except that the Firesign Theatre was a satire troupe of the 1960s and ‘70s, the line originated in their parody of a post-apocalyptic news broadcast, and the game was given away by the title of their best album, “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.” The current panic appears to be for real.

All the worrying got me thinking about the interview I conducted in September with Sean M. Kirkpatrick, who had recently retired as the Pentagon’s chief investigator of UFO reports. As he had written in a Scientific American op-ed, he and his team had been overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,” producing “a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.”

Sound familiar?

The claims of an invasion of the Eastern seaboard by swarms of drones has every marker of a groundless social media frenzy. This started with some truly baroque partisan speculation; on Dec. 11, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) cadged himself some airtime on Fox News by claiming that his home state was under attack from Iran.

“I’m going to tell you the real deal,” he said. “Iran launched a mother ship that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”

Three days later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, declared “this has gone too far,” grousing that mystery drones had closed down a metropolitan New York airport. The bare-bones reporting on this event might have made people think that JFK or LaGuardia had been attacked by mystery drones. In fact, the airport was Stewart Airport, which is 60 miles from Manhattan, is served mostly by the ultra-low-cost Allegiant Airlines with routes to Florida, and was closed for one hour.

My favorite performance was that of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, who reported via X that on Dec. 12 he “personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence … (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes.”

It didn’t take long for Hogan to be inundated with responses from astronomers and meteorologists that what he had videotaped weren’t drones flying over his house, but the constellation Orion, which as meteorologist Matthew Cappucci informed him crisply, is “made up of stars between 244 and 1,344 light years away.”

Since then, neighborhood groups in New Jersey have organized “sky watches” to track the invading swarms and traded reports via their Ring doorbells. Donald Trump advised people to shoot the drones down, which is a good way to make things worse.

Some people conjecture that the drone hysteria is the product of the public’s mistrust of government. That doesn’t explain much, since a large share of the hysteria has been promoted by elected officials themselves. Politicians are naturally averse to calling their constituents idiots, so they have been responding by demanding more transparency from government officials at the Pentagon and other agencies. It’s always safe for politicians to assure voters that they’ll hold bureaucrats’ feet to the fire.

The problem here is that government agencies have been very clear about what’s happening overhead. The “drone” sightings, they say, are of commercial or U.S. military aircraft, helicopters, and perhaps drone flights by hobbyists wanting to get in on the fun. Most of it is surely the product of ignorance. How much more do we need federal agencies to explain?

“Most people don’t look at the sky,” notes Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist. “They don’t know what airplanes look like up there, particularly at night, and they don’t know what the stars and planets look like. They can’t estimate distance — which is tricky in the sky — and they aren’t aware of how things can seem to move. They aren’t aware of how to check if those objects in fact are moving.”

There may be one other explanation for why there are so many purported drone sightings in New Jersey. As the blogger Kevin Drum writes, there are a lot of drones in New Jersey, in part because a state law “indemnifies drone fliers against lawsuits from New Jersey landowners for use of their property for drone overflights.”

So, sure. New Jersey loves drones, which nobody noticed until a local congressman decided to blame Iran.

That should cover the hysterias of the moment. Black spatulas won’t kill you, and the lights in the sky aren’t alien spaceships or Iranian bombers. Any questions?

Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America are being sued by the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over alleged unchecked fraud on the Zelle payment app — setting up a legal showdown that the incoming Trump administration could quash as soon as next month.

The three financial institutions, which co-own the app along with four other large banks, were accused in a lawsuit filed Friday of rushing to launch the service in 2017 without putting in place proper consumer safeguards in order to compete with popular payment apps such as Venmo. The result, according to the lawsuit, were fraud-related losses of more than $870 million over the last seven years.

“Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra.

The 91-page federal lawsuit claimed that hundreds of thousands of consumers at the three banks made complaints about being defrauded but were “were largely denied relief, and some were even told to try getting their money back by contacting the person who had defrauded them.” The CFPB said the three banks accounted for 73% of Zelle activity last year.

The lawsuit was immediately attacked by Early Warning Services, which operates the app on behalf of the banks, as “legally and factually flawed” and claimed the lawsuit could be counterproductive by “incentivizing” criminals to make bogus fraud claims that institutions would have to pay — raising the app’s costs and driving away credit unions and community and minority-owned banks offering Zelle. Some 2,200 financial institutions use the service.

“Zelle is relied upon by 143 million enrolled American consumers and small businesses, and we are fully prepared to defend this meritless lawsuit to ensure their service does not suffer,” said Jane Khodos, a spokesperson for Early Warning, which was also named as a defendant.

Bank of America, in its own statement, said that “more than 99.95 percent of transactions across the Zelle network go through without incident. When a client has an issue, we work directly with them.”

JP Morgan Chase also denied the allegations and alluded to political overtones raised by Early Warning, saying the CFPB’s action was a “last ditch effort in pursuit of their political agenda.” Wells Fargo did not return messages for comment.

The CFPB, established in 2011 in the aftermath of the financial crisis, has long been criticized by Republicans as a “runaway” agency whose actions are heavy handed and stifle economic growth.

The first Trump administration sought to rein in the bureau and redrafted proposed rules aimed at tightening regulations on payday lenders. Consumer advocates considered the final regulations watered down. The new Trump administration could terminate the Zelle lawsuit when it takes power next month.

Some critics want to abolish the agency altogether. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading an effort to streamline the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, criticized the agency in a November post on X that said, “ Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court turned down an effort by a payday lending trade group to declare the bureau’s structure unconstitutional because it is funded by bank fees instead of congressional appropriations.

The bureau, which boasts it has gotten consumers more than $21 billion in relief, has stepped up its enforcement actions recently ahead of the change in administrations.

On Monday, it filed separate lawsuits against Walmart and Rocket Mortgage over alleged financial wrongdoing. And earlier this month issued landmark rules that could lower the costs of bank overdrafts to as little as $5.

Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, led by outgoing chair Lina Khan, sued Los Angeles cash app Dave Inc. last month, accusing it of misleading its financially vulnerable customers about fees it charges and the amount of money it gives out. The company denies the allegations.

The CFPB in its lawsuit claimed that without adequate safeguards Zelle allows fraudsters to create multiple email addresses and mobile phone numbers in signing up for the service that it can link to the same or different bank accounts, leaving consumers unaware of who they are sending their money to.

It claimed the banks allowed repeat offenders to hop between banks, with the banks not sharing information about fraudsters and acting too slowly to restrict or track criminals. It also claimed that it did not act on the hundreds of thousands of complaints they received to prevent further fraud.

In response, Early Warning claimed it has “highly effective multi-layered fraund and scam prevention measures” that in 2023 resulted in reports of frauds and scams decreasing by nearly 50% despite a 27% increase in transaction volume.

The company said it had made “every effort to engage and cooperate” with the bureau before the lawsuit was filed, which it said is part of the agency’s “pattern and practice of regulatory overreach.”

The bureau’s lawsuit was applauded by the National Consumer Law Center, which said, “The CFPB is standing up for people who weren’t able to get the big banks to take their claims of fraud seriously and return their hard-earned money. The CFPB helps ordinary people who’ve been hurt by big banks.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who spearheaded the creation of the agency, came to its defense last week and called on Trump to work with the agency to help American families by temporarily capping credit card interest rates at 10% — a pledge he made on the campaign trail.

“That would be a real boost for millions of families across this country,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “If he’s true to his word here, and I think we ought to take them at his word, then the CFPB can help him do that.”