Sidney’s Picks:

• Pandemic crashes the Dollar Store business model. (NYT)
   
• Drivers could earn less than $5/hr under Massachusetts’ proposed gig worker law. (Yahoo)
   
• Tens of thousands of U.S. workers could be on strike within weeks. (Guardian) 
   
• Climate change will cost insurers trillions, why are they still investing in fossil fuels? (Prospect)
   
• It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Ed Vargas. Ed joined the ILGWU as a worker in a shop in Local 99. From there he spent 55 years in various positions with the union and touched everyone who knew him. Most recently he worked as a Labor Liaison in the Governor’s office for the State of New York. Ed has been instrumental in keeping alive the legacy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and is largely responsible for the annual commemoration and the permanent memorial in-progress. We will miss him tremendously.

The Sidney Hillman Foundations welcomes our newest judge, Jamelle Bouie.

Bouie is a columnist at the New York Times. Prior to the Times, Bouie was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. Before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine. He attended the University of Virginia, where he graduated with a degree in political and social thought, and government. 

In 2021, Bouie’s New York Times columns garnered him a Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analyis journalism. Bouie stood out for his historically informed and elegantly argued columns exploring racial, political, and economic equality and the story of American democracy. Bouie’s journalistic achievements and humane values make him a natural choice to join the Hillman judges panel. 

Bouie joins a distinguished group of judges adjudicating the Hillman Prizes and the Sidney Awards: Ta-Nehisi Coates, bestselling author and former national correspondent, The Atlantic; Jelani Cobb, staff writer, The New Yorker; Alix Freedman, Global Editor, Ethics and Standards, Reuters; Hendrik Hertzberg, staff writer, The New Yorker;  Harold Meyerson, editor at large, The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation.

The Best of the Week’s News:

• The Louisiana State Police hid a pattern of brutal racialized violence. (AP)
   
• The crisis facing rural schools. (NYT)
   
• The Justice Department files complaint against Texas in a bid to stop its new bounty hunter abortion ban. (Nation)
   
• The national Nabisco strike intensifies as the company makes legal threatsand workers outflank scabs. ( Mundo Obrero, WWeek)
   
• Two new Buffalo Starbucks join effort to start a union and spooked execsstream in from Seattle. (Buffalo News, Vice) 

The Best of the Week’s News:

• “We want our pension back”: Nabisco strike goes national, and strikers call for Oreo boycott. (NYT, WBUR)
   
• Starbucks workers in Buffalo to form the chain’s first union, and Collectivo becomes the largest unionized chain of coffee shops in the country. (Eater, ITT) 
   
• Vaccination as Solidarity: Building trades union imposes a vaccination mandate on itself. (Prospect)
   
• Meet the right wing grifters behind the phony Covid cure that has humans overdosing on horse dewormer and sheep dip. (NBC)