| | | | | | | Presented By Facebook | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen ·Apr 06, 2022 | | Happy Wednesday! Today's Smart Brevity™ count: 1,182 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Zachary Basu. 🚨 Watch for new Western sanctions on Russia to be announced today. 💡 Two masters: Jonathan Swan interviews Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell onstage tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. ET. Register here to attend in-person (D.C.) or virtually. | | | | | | 1 big thing: New labor power |  | | | Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios | | | | Amazon workers' historic win last week in New York City may wind up spurring union growth around the country after decades of decline, Axios Markets co-author Emily Peck writes. - Why it matters: Labor's new juice comes as a tight labor market empowers workers in ways that seemed impossible.
A remarkable confluence of factors — including a pro-labor White House, once-in-a-century pandemic and a super tight labor market — helped Amazon workers on Staten Island achieve a David and Goliath union victory, with almost no backing from traditional institutional labor. - "It has electrified all of our members and organizing leaders," said Mary Kay Henry, president of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
- Staten Island organizers claim they've been contacted by employees at 50 other Amazon buildings in the U.S.
Between the lines: The victory is a rebuke to traditional labor unions, which have failed in efforts to unionize Amazon locations. 🔮 What's next: Other large employers are on edge about what this means for them. - Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said at an employee town hall that companies are "being assaulted, in many ways, by the threat of unionization."
Amazon said in a statement about the Staten Island vote: "[W]e believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. We're evaluating our options, including filing objections." |     | | | | | | 2. ⚖️ Ukraine prosecutors build war crimes cases | An apartment building in Borodyanka, a commuter town near Kyiv. The acting mayor told the N.Y. Times: "We think over 200 people died" in the bombing of four apartment buildings. Photo: Vadim Ghirda/AP The Ukraine prosecutor general's office says 50,000 investigators from five law-enforcement agencies are investigating war crimes, The Washington Post reports: - "They are conducting interviews across the country and meticulously documenting evidence that they hope to use in war crimes prosecutions ... addressing small groups of mostly female and elderly displaced people in churches, classrooms and auditoriums."
- "They explain that one day, there may be compensation for ... lost loved ones, personal injuries and property losses, and that Russia can be held accountable only if its victims tell their stories in painstaking detail."
The prosecutor general's office told The Post it has "registered" 4,204 war crimes, including the deaths of 161 children. President Zelensky walks in Bucha, Ukraine, on Monday. Photo: Ronaldo Schemdit/AFP via Getty Images Zelensky wants new Nuremberg: President Volodymyr Zelensky told the U.N. Security Council yesterday that those responsible for gruesome atrocities in Ukraine should be brought up on war crimes charges by a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II. - Zelensky, speaking via video, said that civilians had been shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars. —AP
| | | | | | | | 3. Slack CEO: Work world has just begun to change | | Photo: Joy Asico for Axios Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Axios chief tech correspondent Ina Fried at our debut What's Next Summit, held in D.C. yesterday, that home designs are going to have to change along with offices: - If so many people were "going to work from home, we wouldn't have built or designed our houses the same way," Butterfield says.
- He predicts a "reconfiguration of the home, and the canonical set of rooms that people imagine there."
Why it matters: The pandemic turned messaging tool Slack into a pillar of office communication inside many companies coping with a sudden shift to remote work two years ago, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes. 🔮 What's next: Slack's continuing evolution, Butterfield says, will bring more "asynchronous" tools that allow workers to leave messages that can be absorbed later, as well as "a kind of sociological support or guidance for organizations to become more effective at this way of communicating." - Butterfield argues that, in a hypothetical 10,000-employee company that spends $1 billion on payroll, 50-60% of the average employee's time is spent on communication of some sort.
"So you're spending $600 million — and how much investment do you put into training them to be more effective communicators and have better meetings?" the Slack CEO said. - "I feel like we have 10% of the tools we need."
Share this story. | | | | | | | | A message from Facebook | | Facebook has invested $16 billion to keep you safe on our platform | | |  | | | | Facebook invested $16B in safety and security over 6 years. The impact? - Quadrupled safety and security teams.
- Developed industry-leading AI that detects harmful content and reacts as it evolves.
- Addressed millions of harmful posts and removed 1.7B fake accounts in the last few months.
Learn what's next. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Vice President Harris, President Biden and former President Obama arrive yesterday at an East Room event marking the 12th anniversary of passage of the Affordable Care Act. - It was Obama's first return to his former home since leaving office 5+ years ago.
"I confess I heard some changes have been made [laughter] by the current president, since I was last here," Obama said as he warmed up. - "Apparently, Secret Service agents have to wear aviator glasses now. [Laughter.] The Navy Mess has been replaced by a Baskin-Robbins."
Obama added: "I have to wear a tie, which I very rarely do these days." | | | | | | | | 5. 🌉 Bay Area bright spot |  Data: Heartland Forward "Most Dynamic Metros" report. Map: Baidi Wang/Axios We've covered people fleeing the Bay Area in this work-from-home world. But a new report reminds us why so many titans and workers stay. The most economically dynamic metros have diverse industries, a mix of young and legacy companies, and fun things to do, Worth Sparkman of Axios Northwest Arkansas writes from a report by Heartland Forward. - The index is based on "recent employment growth, wage growth, and GDP growth, as well as two entrepreneurship metrics (the density of young business activity ... and density of well-educated workers) ... and the average income," the report says.
The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area was No. 1: "It is on a peninsula but doesn't have the population density of large cities such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago," Heartland Forward writes. - No. 2: The Villages in Florida "has seen rapid population growth due to retirees flocking there."
Read the report. | | | | | | | | 6. First look: World after war |  | | | Cover: Foreign Affairs | | | | "The Cold War never ended," Princeton professor and Hoover Institution fellow Stephen Kotkin argues in the May/June cover package of Foreign Affairs, published early to keep up with the war: A gangster regime in the Kremlin has declared that its security is threatened by a much smaller neighbor — which, the regime claims, is not a truly sovereign country but just a plaything of far more powerful Western states. To make itself more secure, the Kremlin insists, it needs to bite off some of its neighbor's territory. Negotiations between the two sides break down; Moscow invades. The year was 1939. The regime in the Kremlin was led by Joseph Stalin, and the neighboring country was Finland. The big picture: "These recurring episodes of Russian aggression, for all their differences, reflect the same geopolitical trap, one that Russian rulers have set for themselves again and again," Kotkin writes. | | | | | | | | 7. ⚾ Even America's pastime splits us |  Data: Axios-Ipsos poll. Chart: Kavya Beheraj/Axios Look at those party splits on COVID policies for baseball fans and players. | | | | | | | | 8. ⛳ Parting shot: The Masters as you've never seen it | | Photo: Charles Laberge/Augusta National via Getty Images Patrons at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia — who were watching practice rounds for The Masters, which begins tomorrow — evacuate after play was suspended due to a weather warning. Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters | | | | | | | | A message from Facebook | | Choose end-to-end encrypted messages on Messenger | | |  | | | | Your personal conversations should be as private as you want them to be. That's why you can add a layer of protection to your chats in Messenger, and even voice and video calls, with end-to-end encryption. So you can connect in a more private, secure way. See how else we're keeping you safe online. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up here to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 200 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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