On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a $1.5 million funding program aimed at ensuring that women workers are enabled to exercise their rights at work. The initiative, administered by the Department’s Women’s Bureau, aspires to help women “understand and exercise their rights and benefits in the workplace” by “develop[ing] partnerships with community-based organizations and other non-profits to conduct outreach to women workers.” According to the Women’s Bureau Director, the initiative was precipitated by the gender inequities exposed by the pandemic. Indeed, the economic dislocation associated with COVID-19 has affected women with special force, given that they remain disproportionately represented in low-wage industries, continue to face a high incidence of workplace discrimination, and earn substantially less than their male counterparts.

The New York Times published an article yesterday seeking to expose “the human cost of Amazon’s employment machine.” The report, based on interviews with nearly 200 current and former Amazon warehouse employees, details the firm’s obsession with productivity and efficiency, and its dystopian reliance on robotic, metric, and algorithmic systems to monitor and track nearly every aspect of employees’ workdays. The firm contends that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos views a stable workforce as a threat and thus specifically designed a business model aimed at dissuading employees from remaining with the firm for long. In recent years, for example, Amazon has been hiring hundreds of thousands of new employees, but many of them have abandoned the firm’s grueling warehouses nearly as fast as their replacements are being hired. In fact, Amazon drains labor markets with such intensity that some of its executives are reportedly harboring anxieties that there won’t be enough workers in some regions of the country to sustain the firm’s sprawling operations.

In more uplifting news, workers in disparate industries across the country continue their post-pandemic efforts to organize and join labor unions. Hundreds of staffers at Oxford University Press’ NYC office revealed this morning that they have joined the NewsGuild. Additionally, workers at software firm Mapbox disclosed yesterday that nearly two-thirds of the company’s U.S. employees have signed cards to join the CWA. Lastly, staff at the country’s first Black-owned distillery, situated in Minneapolis, formed a union on Monday, which management voluntarily recognized.