Following two days on strike, its first in nearly five decades, the Columbus Education Association is set to return to the bargaining table with Columbus City Schools this afternoon. Even with the assistance of federal mediators, last week’s marathon negotiating sessions ended absent agreement, and nearly 95 percent of the union’s 4,500 members—including teachers, librarians, nurses, counselors, psychologists, and other educational professionals—rejected the School Board’s final offer on Sunday. The union has demanded better heating and cooling systems, smaller class sizes, more planning time, and an eight percent raise.

In the latest Starbucks news, the firm plans to close two stores at which employees have engaged in protected activity. One is located in Kansas City, where union election results remain pending, and the other in Seattle, which unionized in April. They will become the seventh and eighth Starbucks locations to close following unionization or the filing of a petition with the NLRB. Although the company ostensibly predicated the closures on safety concerns, Starbucks Workers United (SWU) claims that they were impermissibly retaliatory. In other Starbucks updates, employees at a store in Wilmington, North Carolina voted to join SWU yesterday, becoming the company’s 223rd location in the nation to do so.

Amazon will reportedly install new air conditioning equipment in the New Jersey warehouse in which an employee perished during last summer’s Prime Day scramble. The company insists the death was not heat-related, but facility’s internal temperatures reached sweltering highs that day, exceeding ninety degrees. The death tragically underscores that the working conditions existing in Amazon’s warehouses are often highly dangerous, which is to a large extent attributable to the intense productivity quotas to which the company subjects the “industrial athletes” who toil in its facilities.

In the latest organizing news, nearly 200 employees at a GE plant in Auburn, Alabama filed a representation petition with the NLRB on Monday, seeking to join IUE-CWA. Though the road to certification, not to mention securing a collective bargaining agreement, surely remains a long one, the petition signals the possibility that the nationwide organizing momentum may penetrate the historically anti-union southeast.