Last week, Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) traveled from Detroit to Washington, DC, to meet with Sean O’Brien, who won in an upset over James P. Hoffa’s chosen successor to take the helm of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The same week, the Teamsters announced that they had organized a union of Amazon delivery drivers in California and negotiated the first tentative union contract of Amazon workers in the United States (though what followed is complicated), and workers voted to unionize their 1,100-person workplace at logistics giant DHL.

Also last week: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) went to federal court seeking an injunction to reinstate fired Starbucks worker Jaysin Saxton, and the board wants a nationwide cease and desist order against Starbucks for firing union supporters. Workers at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble filed an NLRB petition for a union election; they are not the first location to do so. Some 5,700 graduate students at Stanford University also filed with the NLRB, the largest union election petition of the year thus far; University of Minnesota graduate students won a union by a landslide, with 2,487 votes in favor of unionizing and a mere 70 against; and University of Michigan graduate students continued to strike even in the face of police harassment and arrests.

That’s a far from comprehensive look at the US labor movement activity last week, but it is a revealing snapshot of contemporary working-class organization on May Day 2023. The reform movements in both the UAW and the Teamsters, while each distinct in their character, have the wind at their backs. And while union leaders tend to use fiery rhetoric no matter what their actual plans may be, all signs suggest that the two unions, representing a powerful set of manufacturing and logistics workers, are starting to change the way they operate.