I'm Amanda Litman and this is Battleground, a podcast from The Recount.

I guess this week is Lubei Lupin, a writer you might better know as NYC's Southpot on Twitter.

More recently, I've been reading his paw prints newsletter on Substack, which you

should definitely check out. He's also working on a book to come out about a year and a half

from now, so keep an eye from him. I wanted to have Lubei on the show because I think

he's a really important part of the conversation on the intersections of Twitter to news and

back to Twitter. And also just a really smart guy who's able to very eloquently explain

what's going on in Congress and some of the legal issues that as a not-lure, I really,

really appreciate it. But before we get to my conversation with Lubei, I wanted to spend

some time talking about strike tober. If you are not familiar with strike tober, it's

because the news hasn't been paying too much attention to this, or at least not in

a concerted way. But there are hundreds of thousands of people currently striking or

preparing to strike from their jobs. And I want to give you a little bit of a sense

of the sort of scope of this. 10,000 John Deere workers, 2,000 hospital workers in Buffalo,

1,400 in Kellogg's factories across four states, 450 steel workers in West Virginia,

a one-day walk-off of 2,000 telecoms workers in California, 1,000 coal miners in Alabama,

700 nurses in Massachusetts, 400 whiskey makers in Kentucky, 200 bus drivers in Reno,

and 60,000 Hollywood workers just barely averaged a strike goal that we'll see if they're

able to ratify their deal when the union votes on the new contract, and 31,000 Kaiser

employees authorized walkouts as well. So while this isn't as big of a strike wave as

we had in the 1940s when one in 10 US workers went on strike over the course of the year,

it's also not the basically zero strikes we had in the private sector in the 2010s.

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