What Happened Today: April 21, 2022
The myth and might of American unions; Macron’s nonchalance; A new American education
The Big Story
Workers at an Atlanta Apple store could become the first union within the tech giant’s sprawling retail arm after employees there filed a petition yesterday for a union election. Some 70% of the store’s eligible employees signed on to support the effort, just as employees at the New York City Grand Central Terminal Apple store were reported to have begun their own union drive this past weekend, joining what has become a popular narrative—in the media, at least—about a resurgence of American union power. Economic stability provided by federal subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic (stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and the Child Tax Credit) as well as an increasingly competitive labor market have helped workers find their footing to demand workplace improvements, as they claimed union victories at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, a Manhattan REI store, and 25 Starbucks locations. Last winter, a closely watched strike at a John Deere factory resulted in an 8% wage increase across the board.
Certainly, these widely covered victories have spurred additional union organizing—at least 175 Starbucks stores across 25 states have filed their petitions for union votes, and Amazon warehouses at 50 locations have sought guidance from the newly formed Amazon Labor Union. Yet, there’s significant daylight between a union election victory and a successfully bargained union contract, just as there is an unacknowledged gap in this favored narrative about union popularity and the current strength of union power. Today the overall rate of American workers in unions is about half what it was in the early 1980s. And up until the beginning of the ’80s, each year on average a million union workers participated in major work stoppages. Compare that to 2021, when a collective total of 80,700 union workers participated in major work stoppages—which is about one-fifth the total number of workers involved in stoppages in both 2018 and 2019.
The low union density in the United States notwithstanding, the momentum is real as union organizers take to new industries like big retail and e-commerce logistics. If union efforts in these sectors succeed on a large scale, and they themselves organize into a cohesive labor movement, their natural opposition would be the hegemonic corporate elite that has maintained a tight grip on American politics for the past two generations.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/business/economy/apple-store-union-atlanta.html
In The Back Pages: Alana Newhouse on A New Kind of American Education
The Rest
→ Russian President Vladimir Putin said his military had successfully taken over the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, a victory for the Russians after a series of setbacks in recent weeks, though a sprawling steel plant in the city was still being defended by Ukrainian armed forces. In a video address, the commander of the Ukrainian military brigade, Major Serhiy Volynsky, said the 1,000 or so soldiers and civilians who’d taken up shelter in the plant were on the brink of falling to the significantly larger Russian forces. Russian military leaders have told the Ukrainians to lay down their arms and give up the plant, and while the conflict there continues, it appears unlikely the Ukrainians will be able to sustain their position much longer. Once the plant is taken, Russian forces will be able to expand their reach across the south of Ukraine, where they’ve been making progress in a new ground offensive.
→ Did Emmanuel Macron sink his own ship last night by patronizing his opponent, Marine Le Pen, during the sole debate before Sunday’s runoff presidential election? Over the course of three hours, Le Pen maintained a cool composure that stood in stark contrast to her notorious 2017 debate performance that she later described as the “biggest failure” of her career. Macron, meanwhile, demonstrated a command of the details on energy and the economy but flexed a little too much policy muscle and was at times condescending to his challenger, joking at one point that she was “much better behaved than last time.” Back on the campaign trail today, Le Pen played up Macron’s comportment, saying no one should have been surprised when Macron showed “his true colors—very contemptuous, very arrogant.” Unknown as of yet is what will happen to the 22% of voters who’d backed the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon during the first round of voting. If they don’t stay home and come out in support of Macron, they could help him seal the election. A recent Politico poll found Macron was up 10% over Le Pen, a significantly smaller gap than the 66% of the vote Macron accumulated against Le Pen’s 34% in the 2017 election.
→ Speaking of unions, a new study in the journal Health Affairs found that when comparing nursing homes across the United States, the COVID-19 mortality rate for residents was almost 11% lower at homes staffed by unions compared to those without. The union nursing homes, which often have lower turnover and can negotiate for improved workplace safety conditions, also saw a 6.8% reduction in staff infected with the virus.
Read more: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01687
→ The New York Times announced its new executive editor, Joe Kahn, a veteran reporter and editor at the paper who was most recently the No. 2-ranking editor on the masthead. As New York magazine wrote in a profile of Kahn, a Harvard-educated son of the Boston businessman who co-founded Staples, his reputation is that he comes from the “old-school” newspaper mold, and it would appear from this and other coverage of the changing of the guard that the Sulzberger family wanted a steady hand at the wheel, someone “much less willing to indulge the complaining and the constant cries of activism,” per an anonymous source in the profile. While that’s possibly true, the analysis from Ashley Rindsberg in UnHerd seems closer to the mark: Kahn is a longtime China correspondent, and he takes over the paper of record just as it launches a Chinese edition complete with a slick lifestyle magazine to appeal to the country’s massive middle-class audience. “The paper sees its future in China—or, more specifically, in its 1.4 billion news consumers,” Rindsberg writes. “And it will pursue this goal no matter what the cost, including by toeing the line on issues sensitive to the CCP. With the hiring of Kahn, the former China correspondent, the pull here is obvious.”
→ Wimbledon is facing intense backlash for its decision yesterday to bar Russian and Belarusian players from entering its Grand Slam tournament in June, including strong rebukes in statements from both the men’s and women’s tour organizations: The Association of Tennis Professionals argued that Wimbledon’s decision has “the potential to set a damaging precedent for the game,” and the Women’s Tennis Association, for its part, noted that “discrimination, and the decision to focus such discrimination against athletes competing on their own as individuals, is neither fair nor justified.” The ban would keep out the reigning U.S. Open men’s champ, Daniil Medvedev, and four other Russian men in the top 30, as well as five top 40 women’s players, including Aryna Sabalenka, the semifinalist at last year’s Wimbledon. The ban has been widely criticized by current and former pro tennis players, though a small contingent of Ukrainian players have led a vocal campaign in support of the decision, including Alexandr Dolgopolov, who wrote on Twitter that “Russians are accountable for actions of their country, army, and the leaders they choose for 20 years.” The Ukrainian contingent aside, Wimbledon officials were reportedly under intense pressure to take a hard-line stance from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who does not find himself in good company. In 2009, the United Arab Emirates barred Israel’s Shahar Pe’er from competing in the Dubai Championships because of ongoing tension between the UAE and Israel, a move that prompted the WTA to fine the state-backed tournament organizers a record $300,000, and defending men’s champion Andy Roddick to withdraw in protest.
→ Programming note: The Scroll will be delivered in an abbreviated form today and off tomorrow for the Passover holiday. Chag sameach to those who celebrate.
Alana Newhouse on A New Kind of American Education
Last year, when I wrote this piece arguing that all of the United States’ core institutions are irreparably broken, most readers seemed to agree—with one major caveat: “Fine,” many begrudgingly admitted, “we get that our healthcare system is messed up; journalism seems beyond saving; we’re ready to give up on decayed cultural and communal spaces. But we have kids. We can’t just go ahead and build all new schools, right?”
Wrong.
Synthesis, now a company, started as a class at Ad Astra, the lab school that Joshua Dahn built with Elon Musk on the campus of SpaceX, in Los Angeles. It gave kids the chance to learn concepts and skills by tackling lifelike problems. The thinking tools we learn in school, Musk has noted, make little sense when kids never get the chance to use them. So, Musk hired Dahn to create problem-focused educational experiences.
At first, classes were limited to the Musk children and the kids of SpaceX engineers, but in the fall of 2020, Dahn partnered with Chrisman Frank, the founding engineer at ed-tech giant ClassDojo. The two of them decided to turn their program into its own company, arguing that you didn’t have to be the son or daughter of the world’s richest person to have access to stellar education.
If this strikes you as a bit of Silicon Valley hype, consider the following simple truths. First, every educational system since the dawn of man has been tethered to the socioeconomic system it was created to serve. Back when most of us made a living working the land, we needed the sort of education that taught us the basics of agriculture. Then, with the industrial revolution, we created schools that prepared us for the sort of hierarchical, homogenized environment we were likely to meet in a job in a factory or at a firm. The economy, thankfully, has moved on—we’re in the Information Age now—but education, sadly, has not. So instead of forcing children into standardized settings that suppress the very qualities the new economy values—creativity, problem-solving, team work, audacity—Dahn and Frank bet on something different.
The two saw the COVID-19 pandemic as the opportunity of a lifetime: Perhaps for the first time, parents, watching their children educated over Zoom, realized the poor quality of education their kids were receiving at school. If Dahn and Frank could recreate the Synthesis experience online, they ventured, they had a chance to move the dial on human ingenuity. Parents would sign their kids up for Synthesis to supplement the lackluster results they received from schools over Zoom. The kids would enjoy solving meaningful problems together, maybe for the first time. And society would benefit from having more young people trained to solve hard problems that mirror the real challenges humanity faces in the world.
It’s much less about coming up with the right answer, that staple of our current educational system, and much more about struggling to understand context and complications and working out some pattern to govern chaos.
A year and a half later, Synthesis—for which I’m proud to be an advisor—now has more than 5,500 active students, with thousands and thousands more on a waitlist to join. These kids learn complex problem-solving by competing in teams to win simulations of real-world challenges, like colonizing space, managing wildfires, sustainably fishing the oceans, curating art, running movie studios, and more. In essence, Synthesis lets kids practice the same skills that adults use every day. It throws them into chaotic and competitive situations, challenging them to test their assumptions, make sense of ambiguity, find their voice, and draw out the best in their teammates. It’s much less about coming up with the right answer, that staple of our current educational system, and much more about struggling to understand context and complications and working out some pattern to govern chaos.
Which, if we’re being honest, is as different from modern education as one could imagine. In a typical school, administrators will give lip service to ideas like individual student voice, flexible thinking, and creativity, but the system of education they perpetuate is dedicated to the exact opposite. All you have to do is spend a few moments observing a contemporary classroom to realize the system encourages students to follow strict directions, parrot their teachers’ pet ideologies, and please their fellow classmates enough to gain social status. Kids learn to play a game. They’re taught to try their best to look smart and responsible to adults—and cool and desirable to their peers.
At Synthesis, these values won’t get you far. Kids are faced with real challenges with real stakes. Your team will lose unless it solves hard problems quickly. This reframing of education clears the deck and helps kids cut through the status games that are so distracting in school.
It’s an approach that could easily be applied to any subject, from reading to history and physics to math, and the Synthesis team is looking forward to replacing all of our traditional K-12 education with it. Is this the entirety of a perfect education? No. Faith is a good example of something missing. But this is a foundation on which much else can be built. Exciting? Yes. Ambitious? Absolutely. Unrealistic? Not even a little.
Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine.
The NYT has a long and dirty history of marketing itself in tyrannical regimes by ignoring the worst kind of human rights violations by totalitarian engines
John Dewey reborn? Teamwork, problem solving, getting ahead on the job. Basic literacy and numeracy skills? Some deference to civic education, history, literature?