Labor unions have broadly embraced the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd and catalyzed a national movement for racial justice. In expressing support for the conviction, unions underscored the ties between racial and economic justice. This display of sensitivity to threads connecting systems of racial and class subordination is encouraging. Intersectional solidarity propels all movements for social justice.

In political news, Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has, somewhat reluctantly, signed on as the latest cosponsor of the PRO Act. His support was reportedly spurred by a flood of calls his office received from working people across his state expressing support for the bill, a campaign choreographed by a coalition of labor groups. King is the second centrist lawmaker to lend his support to the measure in recent days; Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) agreed to back the bill last week. The bill now has 49 Senate cosponsors, who collectively represent a wide majority of the US population. Impressive, yet insufficient to overcome the antidemocratic instrument known as the filibuster, which enables a minority to block legislation and has been used for decades to stymie labor law reform.

A recent Gallup report surveying the economic fallout of the pandemic underscores not only the devastation and dislocation it unleashed but how it disproportionately ravaged the most marginalized. The study finds that furloughs and income loss were overwhelmingly concentrated among the poor and, strikingly, that nearly half of all furloughed employees struggled to secure food, fuel, or shelter.

Moments of social upheaval, while destructive and disorienting, can serve as vehicles for transformative change. Let’s hope this collective trauma — and the precarity, inequality, and atomization it deepened — motivates policymakers to reshape our economic order in a more equitable direction.