You may have to get your coffee somewhere else for a while, as a major union representing Starbucks’ employees has announced its members are prepared to walk off the job if they do not reach a new contract. The union represents only a fraction of Starbucks stores, but the labor movement has been described as the company’s biggest yet, and it could have a significant impact on Starbucks as the holiday season approaches.

Why are employees preparing to strike?
The employees are looking to “secure a contract after years of sporadic and unsuccessful talks,” said Bloomberg. Without one, employees are set to strike in more than 25 cities across the U.S. starting Nov. 13. The walkout is being coordinated by Starbucks Workers United, which represents employees at “about 550 of the chain’s roughly 10,000 company-run U.S. stores.” Thousands of baristas voted to authorize the strike, with “92% voting in favor.”

The pro-strike vote “comes after six months of Starbucks refusing to offer new proposals to address workers’ demands for better staffing, higher pay, and a resolution of hundreds of unfair labor practice charges,” said Starbucks Workers United in a press release. Unionized employees are “ready and willing to go on the biggest strike we have ever been on,” said Silvia Baldwin, a Philadelphia barista representing the union in negotiations, to Bloomberg. If Starbucks “wants to avoid that, they can settle with us.”

What comes next?
The strike’s start date is the company’s “upcoming Red Cup Day, a major holiday promotional event” and typically one of the company’s busiest days, said The Seattle Times. This event has previously been a “target of the union’s strikes. Last year, a strike took place across five days and shuttered around 60 stores.” 

The unionized employees have made pay demands a major sticking point, but Starbucks has denied that their wages are too low. The company offers a payment package “worth an average $30 per hour for hourly partners,” Starbucks said in a press release, though the union has disputed this. “We already give them the best job in retail. We have the lowest turnover in the industry,” said Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol to CBS News. 

But union members disagree. A “fair union contract” is “essential to the company’s turnaround,” said Jasmine Leli, a barista in Buffalo, New York, to CBS.

Young people are often accused of spending too much time on their phones, but what if they are not the biggest offenders? Half of those between the ages of 61 and 79 spend more than three hours a day on their phone, according to a survey of 2,000 American baby boomers by AddictionResource.net. And 20% regularly clock more than five hours. 

No guardrails 
“Moral panic” is rife in many countries over the impact of digital technology on teenagers, said The Economist. But a “less-noticed explosion in screen time” is occurring among 60-somethings. As older people enter retirement, the time they spend on smart devices goes “shooting up.” And with none of the social guardrails that teachers and parents often impose on teens’ screen time, boomers may disappear down internet rabbit holes, potentially exposing them to scams, hoaxes and misinformation. 

That’s not to say older people are inherently more susceptible to fake news. Older Americans are “no worse, if not better, at discerning between false and accurate news” than their younger peers, according to a U.S. study published in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly last year. However, “calcified partisanship” — long-entrenched political beliefs or party allegiances — makes older people more likely to engage with it and so become “more vulnerable to hyperpartisan news,” said the researchers. 

‘Connective power’ 
Over-50s who regularly use digital devices have lower rates of cognitive decline than those who don’t, according to a meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour. It’s unclear if the technology “staves off mental decline” or if people with better cognitive skills “simply use them more,” but the findings call into question the assumption that increased screen time drives “digital dementia,” said The Guardian. 

Older people may even have “more to gain from smart devices” than the rest of us, said The Economist. From Zoom church services and book clubs to online doctors’ appointments and e-commerce, the “connective power of the internet is especially valuable to those who struggle to get out.”

Trump stands behind his desk at the Oval Office as attendees help a man, reportedly Novo Nordisk executive Gordon Findlay, after he collapsed during an event today. The president announced deals with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to lower the prices of some weight-loss drugs.
Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

The arrival of director Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated nuclear war thriller “A House of Dynamite” (in theaters now and on Netflix Oct. 24) heralds the return of a long-forgotten genre: the cautionary tale about atomic armageddon. Filmmakers over the years have explored nuclear war from the perspective of both the decision-makers and the survivors who may wish they had been blast casualties.

‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964)
Stanley Kubrick’s ruthless satire of Cold War tensions stands the test of time as an indictment of the madness at the center of nuclear war. A “goonish-ghoulish portrait of diplomatic insanity that’s zippy, ruthless and cartoonish,” Kubrick’s masterpiece argues that “humanity has already passive-aggressively done itself in,” said Slant. (Prime)

‘Testament’ (1983)
Director Lynne Littman’s wrenching drama focuses on one San Francisco-area family after a nuclear blast obliterates life as they know it. The movie is “steeped in mourning, in the reality of incomprehensible loss, but it’s also unforgivingly rigorous in its depiction of life having to move on,” said Vanity Fair. (Prime)

‘By Dawn’s Early Light’ (1990)
Late Cold War Russian hardliners fire a nuclear missile at Donetsk in then-Soviet Ukraine, making it look like a NATO strike in this tense drama. Director Jack Sholder wrestles seriously with concepts like “limited nuclear war” that were hotly debated at the time. A “splendid cast” highlights this “‘Dr. Strangelove’ nightmare revisited, except this isn’t satire,” said the Los Angeles Times. (Prime)