Dear John,

Hope this finds you safe and healthy amidst the big storms of snow, illness, and caregiving hitting us this season!

We’re filled with warmth as we look forward to celebrating our People’s Celebration honorees next week. Read about the Labor Movement Champions and grassroots Democracy Protectors, and get your tickets. 

It’s another week of remarkable labor organizing in the U.S. and worldwide. Before you join the People’s Celebration next Thursday night, we hope to see you as we rise up with Amazon workers during the day. Join us!

Here's what we're reading, watching, and listening to this week:

1. Minnesota Nurses strike vote

The Minnesota Nurses Association and hospital administration have been in negotiations for nine months. As our healthcare system is flooded with RSV, COVID-19, and the flu, hospital executives have still failed to agree to a contract that addresses dangerously low staffing levels. Nurses at more than a dozen hospitals in the metro and Twin Ports voted overwhelmingly to strike beginning December 11 to ensure patients have the care they need.

2. Rail worker strike debate

Sick days for rail workers have been in the spotlight as Congress debated an agreement that would have included the rail workers’ demand for seven sick days instead of one. And as CNN reports, railroad workers are far from the only U.S. workers with few or no paid sick days.

3. UCLA strike

“That rent is too high and pay is too low is the biggest unifying concern for the forty-eight thousand on strike,” writes Jay Caspian-Kang in the New Yorker, after spending time with UCLA grad workers on their historic picket line.

4. Gay marriage

Senator Tammy Baldwin is organizing her colleagues to pass gay marriage protections.

5. Young Georgians for Warnock

“Young voters are facing less options and more obstacles,” Georgia youth organizer Alex Ames explains in Teen Vogue. “Politicians will not save us,” she says with a sigh. “Voting will not save us. It is medicine. It is one step you take.”

6. Protests in China

People are standing up in uncommon and risky protest against China’s censorship and arbitrary and intense “zero COVID” restrictions. Watch this video about people in China rising up.

7. Amazon ordered to cease and desist

This is big. The Guardian reports, “Amazon will be forced to read out a public notice this week to all employees at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, where workers won the first Amazon union election, stating it will ‘cease and desist’ from retaliating against people involved in union organizing.” Read about the ongoing fight against Amazon.

8. #WeAreBG

As WNBA star Brittney Griner’s prison conditions have worsened, calls for solidarity against authoritarianism erupted this week.

9. Soccer workers for migrant workers

Hear from the Australian Socceroos themselves in solidarity with migrant workers and LGBTQ+ people in Qatar.

10. Endings and beginnings

Author and thought leader adrienne maree brown writes about being accountable in endings and new beginnings, in this essay for Yes Magazine.

And that’s a wrap!

Send us what you’re reading, watching, and listening to.

Until next time,

Katie Blanchard (she/her)
Basebuilding Director

Jessica Zimmerman (she/her)
Development Director