After months of impasse on economic issues, nearly 1,500 employees of the Kellogg Company — the maker of Cheez-Its, Pringles, Pop-Tarts, Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Eggo, and other processed breakfast items — ignited a strike on Tuesday, shuttering production at all the company’s U.S. factories. The president of the union, BCTGM, explains that the company has attempted to leverage offshoring threats to coerce employees into accepting “outrageous proposals” that strip protections they have enjoyed “for decades.”

Coming in the wake of BCTGM’s successful weekslong strike against Nabisco last month, the high profile Kellogg action signals that labor militance is continuing to intensify in the post-pandemic era. Indeed, as the pandemic recedes, it appears that the heightened sensitivity to class injustice and deepened commitment to collective action it stoked among many U.S. workers continues to smolder. Should the trend persist, the pandemic may prove a watershed moment, helping to drastically reshape the balance of power in the U.S. economy.

A report released Tuesday by AFSCME Cultural Workers United exposes that several leading cultural institutions accepted billions in pandemic aid as part of a federal program designed to preserve payrolls yet, despite the surge of taxpayer dollars, still discharged thousands of employees.

To highlight a pair of egregious examples, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles received $3.3m in pandemic loans to shore up its finances yet it laid off nearly 100 workers. And the Philadelphia Museum of Art discharged over 100 employees after receiving a $5.1m federal loan — and forking over thousands to a unionbusting law firm in an effort to quell employees’ successful organizing activities.

Importantly, the report discloses that organized employees in the arts and cultural sector experienced significantly fewer job losses than their nonunion counterparts. It thus underscores the degree to which unions protected their members during the pandemic, something I highlighted earlier this year.

In a dramatic scene late Tuesday night, FBI agents raided the office of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, a union representing thousands of NYC police officers. While the FBI has offered limited information about the nature and scope of the operation, the SBA executive board — which has faced allegations of sexism, homophobia, and racism — insists the investigation is confined to the union’s president, who resigned after the raid.

On Tuesday, nearly a dozen staffers at the Appeal — a digital outlet dedicated to reforming the criminal legal system — announced that they had assumed ownership of the publication’s intellectual property and transitioned it into a worker-led nonprofit.

The development concludes, at least momentarily, an astonishing episode that started in May, when the staff’s public declaration that they had unionized prompted immediate terminations. The staffers successfully ousted the management team after they tried to shutter the outlet entirely, committing to relaunching it as a “worker-led nonprofit news outlet.” They appeared to have done so on Tuesday. Click here to check out an interesting piece the Appeal published last year, which, exploring the threads intertwining the emancipation of working people and criminals, urged the labor movement to expel police unions.

In legal news, panel of the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, Cal., is set to hear oral arguments today in Hooks v. Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc., a case involving Nexstar’s efforts to withdraw support from the CWA local representing several thousands of its employees. In the case, a § 10(j) proceeding, the appellate panel will consider the propriety of the district judge’s preliminary injunction directing the company to reinstate recognition and bargain with the union.

The district court granted the GC’s request for § 10(j) relief after finding that Nexstar, the country’s largest owner of local television stations, had likely violated the Act by withdrawing recognition without objective evidence the union had lost majority support. The decision rested on an interpretation that Ninth Circuit precedent effectively requires that in § 8(a)(5) cases a finding of likely success on the merits automatically triggers an inference of a likelihood of irreparable harm, an interpretation the Ninth Circuit will review.

The case presents a preview of the reception General Counsel Abruzzo’s policy of “aggressively seek[ing]” § 10(j) relief — which she has described as “one of the most important tools available to effectively enforce the Act” — is likely to receive in the courts. Indeed, the district court’s injunction was one of several Abruzzo spotlighted in the August memo in which she pledged to aggressively invoke § 10(j), writing that “Sec. 10(j) initiatives have led to extremely positive results.” Upholding the injunction would boost the Board’s efforts to more energetically pursue preliminary relief — and thus potentially enable an era of considerably more effective enforcement of the nation’s labor laws.

In other legal news, the Supreme Court declined to review a trucking company’s claim that application of California’s employee classification scheme to motor carriers is preempted by the Federal Aviation and Administration Authorization Act, as a state court held after the city of Los Angeles sued the firm for misclassifying its drivers. The Ninth Circuit recently concluded the same in a separate case.