Greetings, Meteor readers! I wish I had something quippy and hilarious to share at this moment, but as I mentioned last Saturday, I am fasting for Ramadan, and the brain fog has fully set in. On the bright side, I’ve had so much extra time—time I normally spend preparing and reheating one cup of coffee—I finally finished knitting a top for Spring (if she ever decides to show up).

Today we have a cautiously optimistic look at the recent history and future of the labor movement in the U.S. from author Nona Willis Aronowitz. She predicts the aftermath of last week’s big wins at Starbucks and Amazon and what that could mean for workers’ rights across the board. Talk about your David versus Goliath matchups. Who was it that won in the end again?

But before we load our slingshots, let’s take a look at the news.

—Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Bodies on the ground:  Last weekend, satellite images of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, showed dead bodies lying in the streets; the Russian Defense Ministry claimed they were a “hoax,” placed there after Russian troops had left the area. But a New York Times report reveals that those civilians had been there for over three weeks, coinciding with the Russian military’s occupation of the town.

• Abortion pills in the crosshairs: Currently, 19 states have made it illegal to send, receive, or prescribe abortion pills, and nine more are looking to do the same in an effort to remove medical abortion as a legal option for abortion seekers if Roe v. Wade is shot down later this spring. According to the Times, many of the new bills taking aim at abortion “layer criminal penalties on top of the existing prohibitions, on the assumption that women will procure the pills illegally.” But for now, abortion pills are still available and a safe option for abortion (in consultation with a doctor, of course). You can get a virtual consultation and request pills by mail here.

• When you’re wrong, you’re wrong: And Donald Trump sort of admitted he was wrong, telling a Zoom room full of political historians, “I didn’t win the election.”  No shit! The scene is laid out in full by historian Julian E. Zelizer who was in the Zoom where it happened. Trump also managed to pepper in some more conspiracy theories for good measure, claiming that the election was rigged and countries like South Korea, Iran, and China were the “happiest” that Biden was elected president. Sure, Jan.

• Mista’arvim: Undercover agents known as Mista’arvim have been infiltrating Palestinian protest groups for years, but now they’re becoming more violent, arresting and even beating protestors on the spot, one witness told The Guardian this week. Palestinian activists are turning to social media to identify these agents, who have been passing as Arab sympathizers, warning protestors to avoid them entirely or, in some cases, to confront them head-on.

AND:

• Mason. Jar. Abortions.

• Michelle Materre died this week after a battle with oral cancer. Materre was a leading figure in Black independent cinema and a driving force behind Daughters of the Dust, the first widely released feature film directed by a Black woman (Julie Dash).

• The police officer involved in the shooting of Amir Locke will not be facing criminal charges.

• What is Berghain, and why is it upsetting Elon Musk so much that he retail-therapied himself into a 9 percent ownership of Twitter?

• After about 100 years of being a hotbed of mistreatment, the NFL is getting one final warning from various state attorneys general about addressing the mounting workplace allegations from women and racial minorities at the company. I’m certain Goodell is quaking in his Louboutin sneakers right about now.

• What ever happened to the promise of an economic boom for Black communities in California after the legalization of marijuana?

• President Biden keeps flirting with the idea of canceling student loan debt by extending the payment pause, and I need him to just commit to this idea all the way. Say it with your chest, Joe!

—SM

JOURNALIST’S NOTEBOOK

Labor’s Vibe Shift

How a decade of organizing led to this week’s wins at Amazon and Starbucks

BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ

PRO UNION PROTESTS OUTSIDE OF AN AMAZON HEADQUARTERS IN ALABAMA (PHOTO BY AL SEIB VIA GETTY IMAGES)

It’s been a major week for the labor movement in America. After workers at more than 100 Starbucks locations nationwide petitioned for union recognition, the coffee chain’s flagship store in New York voted to unionize 46-36. At Condé Nast, a smaller but highly influential company, workers announced that they’re organizing 500 employees with the NewsGuild—a major milestone for the ever growing number of media companies forming unions. And in a move that shocked even the most optimistic labor activists, two young men of color who worked in Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse managed to organize the site’s 8,000 workers.

It’s a heartening, electric moment for anyone invested in holding powerful corporations accountable for the well-being of workers. The Amazon vote in particular, which was meticulously tracked on Twitter and accompanied by videos of employees joyously celebrating, feels like an exciting but unexpected vibe shift. But as a journalist who has long covered labor and the lived economy, I was reminded that these wins build slowly over time.

Allow me to bring you back to 2012; when organizing Amazon was unthinkable, Gawker’s union contract (which started a wave of media organizing) was years away, and the only group trying to organize Starbucks was a radical, grassroots labor union called the Wobblies. America’s labor movement was the weakest it’d been in many decades, the media declaring it all but dead; private-sector union membership was the lowest it’d been in decades, hovering at just over 10 percent, down from 13.5% in the early 2000s.

At the same time, though, there was a national class consciousness brewing: The devastation of the Great Recession was still palpable. Occupy Wall Street made such a splash that President Obama expressed tentative support for the movement, and major unions jumped on the bandwagon. Mitt Romney, a vivid symbol of capitalist greed, lost the election after he was caught on tape disparaging the 47 percent of Americans who are “dependent upon government” for handouts.

I realized then that setbacks at Jimmy John’s and elsewhere weren’t signs of doom—we just weren’t there yet.

Still, it was hard for me at the time to get my hopes up about the labor movement truly coming back to life. In stories I wrote at the time, I took pains to point out that most workers still felt too vulnerable to join the nascent Fight For $15 movement to raise the minimum wage happening at retail stores like Walmart and fast-food restaurants like Burger King. I covered a failed union campaign at a handful of Minnesota Jimmy John’s, reporting that high turnover, emotional exhaustion, and extreme precarity might have doomed the effort from the start. Workers with kids, chronic health problems, and elderly parents mostly sat out the Jimmy John’s fight, which was spearheaded by white college students. And the idea of being in a media union myself hadn’t even occurred to me; it was only years later, after Gawker unionized, when it started to seem feasible.

But then, while I was moderating a panel in 2013 at the liberal economic think tank Roosevelt Institute, organizer and scholar Dorian Warren said something I’ll never forget: If this new class-conscious era is our civil rights movement, we’re only at the Montgomery bus boycott—almost a full decade before the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I realized then that setbacks at Jimmy John’s and elsewhere weren’t signs of doom—we just weren’t there yet.

Flagrant and unapologetic union-busting is still the go-to move for powerful companies.

It feels like today we might be at a tipping point, closer to 1964 than we are to 1955. This cluster of wins for the labor movement makes clear the increased attention being paid to workers’ rights which have shifted during a demoralizing pandemic, where both essential and white-collar workers have been pushed to the point of burnout. Chris Smalls, the Amazon employee who kicked off the successful union effort, is now in his early thirties, which means he was in his formative years back in 2012 when his generation became painfully aware of class inequality. Now, Chris Smalls’ generation makes up the largest group in the workforce.

We have a long way to go for a true sea change: Even though 50 warehouses have reached out to the Amazon Labor Union, their victory won’t be easily replicated, and contract negotiations will be a challenge. Flagrant and unapologetic union-busting is still the go-to move for powerful companies. There’s also work to be done in terms of integrating the labor movement into other social justice efforts. Many of the workers spearheading these efforts are women; women are more likely to work in retail and Amazon warehouses, and women have been more likely to quit their jobs during the pandemic. Yet worker’s rights often take a backseat in mainstream feminist conversations.

And these particular victories may very well feel short-lived—so we should prepare ourselves for setbacks. I clearly remember the acute depression many people felt when Occupy fizzled out or when other Amazon votes came up short. But these ebbs and flows are a natural part of building any movement. It’ll behoove us to remember that this week’s successes did not happen overnight—and neither will future wins. But against the backdrop of a culture ripe for change, they will come.

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