On Tuesday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) swore in a new General President: Sean M. O’Brien. O’Brien, who had served as the head of an IBT local in Boston for sixteen years, cast himself as a reform candidate, espousing a militant, adversarial, and grassroots approach to labor organizing and collective bargaining that secured him the endorsement of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He decisively defeated the candidate backed by outgoing GP James P. Hoffa, shattering the Hoffa dynasty’s nearly four-decade reign over the IBT. O’Brien professes that he seeks to inaugurate “a new day for the Teamsters Union,” one in which the IBT becomes “bigger, faster, [and] stronger.” In the words of CNN Business, the new GP “is poised to shake up the US economy in a way no one else has in recent memory.” Indeed, he has recently committed to organizing Amazon employees, and many commentators predict that his administration is likely to institute a massive strike against UPS—the nation’s largest unionized employer—when the Teamsters’ contract with the firm expires next year.

Oxfam America published a new report this week exploring “the crisis of low wages in the United States.” It uncovered that more than fifty million workers in the U.S. economy—nearly a third of the labor force—earn less than $15 per hour. Moreover, in a finding that undermines much of the discourse around the issue, the vast majority of such workers—ninety percent, in fact­­—are not teenagers. The report underscores the essential services that the low-wage workforce provides to our communities: “These are the workers who care for our loved ones, transport and harvest our food, stock our shelves, and deliver our packages,” it explains. Without them, “our economy grinds to a halt, as does the functioning of our society.” The report concludes with the observation that millions of working people in the United States are “living in poverty and anxiety”—to redress these issues, the report beseeches Congress to, as an initial measure, increase the federal minimum wage.

In the latest update on the “Starbucks unionization wildfire,” the NLRB disclosed yesterday that employees in the coffee firm’s hometown, Seattle, unanimously voted to join Workers United last week. Thus, the location became the seventh Starbucks store in the nation to unionize—and the first on the West Coast to do so.