On Tuesday the International Brotherhood of Teamsters swore in a new General President, Sean M. O’Brien, who decisively defeated the candidate backed by outgoing General President James P. Hoffa, shattering the Hoffa dynasty’s control of the union. Mr. O’Brien, the president of a powerful Boston local for sixteen years, cast himself as a reform candidate, espousing a militant approach to organizing and bargaining which secured him the support of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. His stewardship of the legendary union could upend the national economy. He has committed to aggressively organizing Amazon, and his administration could unleash a highly disruptive strike against UPS — the country’s largest unionized employer — when the master contract between the parties expires next year. As CNN concluded, the new GP may be “poised to shake up the US economy in a way no one else has in recent memory.”

Oxfam America released a report this week examining “the crisis of low wages in the United States.” It finds that more than 50 million workers in the U.S. economy — astonishingly, nearly a third of the workforce — earn less than $15 per hour. Contrary to the assumptions of neoliberal economic theory, the overwhelming majority of these workers are not teenagers. The report observes that, perversely, these people provide perhaps the most essential services to our communities, “caring for our loved ones, transporting and harvesting our food, stocking our shelves, and delivering our packages.” While millions of these workers “live in poverty and anxiety,” the report concludes, our society would swiftly “grind to a halt” without their labor.

Lastly, the latest development in the “Starbucks unionization wildfire” blazing across the nation is that last week, a unit at a store in Seattle, the coffee giant’s hometown, unanimously voted to join Starbucks Workers United. It is the seventh Starbucks locations in the county, and first in the west coast, to unionize.