Republicans Scheme to Start the Steal

And a big labor scoop

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

I’ve got a big news roundup for you tonight, as well as a nice scoop from a very prominent labor union. Amid what has been a lot of gloom and doom, I’ll be back on Sunday with a newsletter filled with positive (or at least promising) political and policy news, because good things really are happening.

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Prime threat: This morning, I broke the news that unionized Amazon workers in Staten Island have voted to strike if the company doesn’t come to the table to negotiate a contract by the Sunday evening deadline set by the union weeks ago.

The online retail monolith has refused to acknowledge the Amazon Labor Union since it shocked the world with a historic election victory back in April 2022, deciding instead to sue to have the result overturned, appeal adverse decisions, and try to have the NLRB ruled unconstitutional by far-right judges. Needless to say, they’re decidedly unlikely to rush to the table now, a month away from a Republican takeover of the NLRB.

The strike would become the ALU’s first major authorized work stoppage since the union merger, and perhaps the biggest since the initial walkouts in 2020 that led to workers deciding to formally organize.

In July, the ALU voted to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who put out a press release later today confirming my scoop. The IBT also promised concurrent strikes by thousands of Amazon delivery drivers from several large depots across the nation. Those workers are technically employed by a third party, but the NLRB recently ruled that because Amazon controls nearly every aspect of their jobs, the e-commerce giant should be considered a joint employer liable for their treatment.

It’s another new precedent that Trump’s NLRB is likely to overturn, no matter how much Teamsters president Sean O’Brien cozies up to him. That won’t impact the warehouse-based ALU, but the partnership between the two unions is nonetheless an awkward one, having been quietly arranged by ALU co-founder Christian Smalls, who has since departed.

Connor Spence, another co-founder, is now the President of the ALU after disagreements over strategy, finances, and Smalls’s world travel led to a painful schism and a court-brokered election. Spence (who is in the video above) and the reconstituted board have jettisoned the failed hot shop strategy, in which Smalls tried to use his celebrity and the union’s momentum to organize any warehouse where anybody expressed interest.

It’s a valid approach in some campaigns, but almost impossible to pull off in warehouses with so many workers and such high turnover. Winning those shops can take years, not months.

Instead, the ALU has focused on rebuilding at the JFK8 warehouse where it all started to reconsolidate support. The strike, should it happen, will be the first big sign of how much progress they’ve made. Whether the rest of the striking Teamsters are considered Amazon workers by the next NLRB will be an important indicator of whether O’Brien’s gambit with Trump will work out for his members.

Absolute clowns: This time, Moms for Liberty has gone too far — and made it personal.

Back in 2019, one of my closest friends published a gorgeous graphic novel about her experiences growing up with her Filipino mom in California and Egyptian father in Cairo. I Was Their American Dream explores in — awkward, hilarious, and heart-rending detail — the inner-world of a self-conscious young girl who feels like an outsider everywhere she goes. Malaka’s book has won awards all over the world and is taught in schools all over the country, but this week in Iowa, it was among the books that the right-wing parents group tried to have banned from school libraries.

There’s nothing objectionable about the book — Malaka frequently describes her desire to be a regular American teen! — but it’s about a Muslim girl and a multicultural immigrant family, which may have been enough to trigger the racist snowflakes in the rural Dallas Center-Grimes Community School District.

An outpouring of support for Malaka’s book seems to have scared off the bigots, at least for now, but the incident is a reminder that these freaks never stop working to impose their twisted sense of morality on us.

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Republicans Start the Steal

Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and now Republicans across the country are doing their best to overturn state and local elections, too.

Through lawsuits, power-grab legislation, and collaborations with business lobbyists, the GOP has sought to disregard the will of voters and set up future stolen elections. In many cases, the schemes have escaped the national radar, making all the more dangerous. Here’s what you need to know about those cases.

➡️ In Maine, a coalition of far-right organizations filed suit today over a groundbreaking ballot initiative to severely limit donations to Super PACs, which was approved by voters last month. It is the first limit placed on dark money since the Citizens United decision in 2010 opened the floodgates to corporate and billionaire cash.