After months of negotiations have stalled, the collective bargaining agreement between the MLBPA and MLB team owners is set to expire at 11:59 p.m. ET tonight. The dispute largely centers on economic issues — players seek to overhaul the league’s complex salary structure, revenue sharing arrangement, and free agency rules.

The impasse is likely to prompt owners to institute a lockout, the first in American sports in years. While symbolically significant, the move would not dramatically escalate the stakes, as most observers do not forecast that negotiations are likely to stretch into spring training or disrupt the regular season.

In Amazon news, a new report by a coalition of unions reveals that at least 20k Amazon employees tested positive for Covid last year, even though the e-commerce conglomerate disclosed barely two dozen of the cases — far less than one percent — to federal regulators.

The report adds to a torrent of protests, studies, complaints, and lawsuits exposing that Amazon has failed to adequately protect its vast workforce against the ravages of the pandemic, persistently prioritizing productivity and profit over the safety and wellbeing of its employees.

In international news, hundreds of staffers, lecturers, and administrators at dozens of universities across the United Kingdom walked off  the job today, a significant escalation in the increasingly bitter dispute between the country’s higher education institutions and faculty unions. Fueled by disaffection over plummeting pay, mounting workloads, and deep pension cuts, the work stoppage is likely to derail campus activities for more than a million students in the coming days.

But despite the disruption, polls reveal that nearly 75 percent of the country’s college students support the action — and unions report many students have displayed solidarity with the striking workers, even surging into picket lines in “huge numbers.”