Suzi talks to longtime labor reporter and author Steven Greenhouse about the exciting new moment for labor in the US. Steven says the unionizing victories at Amazon and now 81 Starbucks stores—as well as the spread of union drives to many other workplaces in retail, higher education, the media, and healthcare—signify a moment so promising for labor that we’d have to go back to the organizing in the 1930s to see anything comparable.

Suzi and Ilya Matveev, of Openleft.ru and the Russian research group Public Sociology Laboratory, discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine twelve weeks in. We get Ilya’s analysis of the domestic situation at home, politically and economically, for the regime and for the population. While polls show widespread support for Putin’s “military operation,” reports note that support for the war is tepid, not enthusiastic. Most analysts say the country is evenly divided between support and dissent regarding the war, though propaganda and penalties for speaking out influence that figure, as Putin has taken an increasingly hard line against dissent. Ilya Matveev unpacks what the polling does or doesn’t show, and we get details of the impact of economic sanctions on the population, the state of industry and the economy, the divisions in the population and among the elite – and what losing the war might mean for Putin’s hold on power.

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