Last week, beginning with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, a strike wave spread across professional sports as athletes chose not to play in order to express solidarity with victims of racist violence. The strikes may have been short-lived, but they made a huge impact, disrupting the pretense of normalcy that sports entertainment normally helps viewers create. We talk to sports reporter and author Dave Zirin about why the athletic strikes were so important, and why the media can’t seem to understand them as strikes.

We also look in on the latest around New York City teachers’ strike threat with Ronnie Almonte of the MORE Caucus (and partner of Dissent‘s publishing director Flynn Murray), what farmworkers are facing under COVID-19 with Mily Trevino-Saucedo and María De Luna of  Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, the university workers that often get forgotten, and ask Dania Rajendra why Amazon is hiring spies. For Argh, we consider the police union and whether it is in fact a union, and question whether organizing without organizing is actually possible.

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News

New York City Delays Start of School to Ready for In-Person Classes (New York Times)

Workers, Small Farmers and Communities of Color Especially Vulnerable Unless Congress Acts (Ms.)

Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labour Organising Threats’ (Vice)

UNC housekeepers speak out: ‘They don’t give a damn about us’ (Prism)

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Conversation

Dave Zirin

Dave: The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice (The Nation)

Dave: Professional Athletes Are Showing America Just How Powerful Labor Really Is (The Nation)

Dave: The Sports Strikes Against Racism Have Not Been Coopted (The Nation)

Sterling Brown: Your Money Can’t Silence Me (The Players’ Tribune)

Sarah: Don’t Call It a Boycott: NBA Players Are Inspiring a Strike Wave (The Progressive)

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Argh, I wish I’d written that!

Sarah: Eve Ewing, Blue Bloods: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers (Vanity Fair)

Michelle: Marianne Garneau and Lexi Owens, Between Scylla and Charybdis (Organizing Work)