Americans’ shopping habits have made us reliant on delivery workers—and helped UPS’s business boom. Now UPS workers are threatening to strike to get a piece of that success.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

When will the Southwest become unlivable? Learn a foreign language before it’s too late. The Republican lab-leak circus makes one important point.

Five of the most beautiful words to see in my inbox are Your package is coming today, courtesy of UPS. The missive means that something I ordered online—recently: three tie-dyed shirts in different colors, 100 personalized matchbooks for a party—is on its way, and that a classic brown truck will be rolling down my street soon. Like many Americans, I depend on the United Parcel Service and its reliable service, and I welcome digital updates about the status of my stuff.

Lately, I have been thinking more about the human dimension of package delivery, too, and about the hundreds of thousands of workers who make up UPS. Amazon has conditioned many of us to expect speedy, free delivery, and as a result, all package companies are facing intense competitive pressures. As the only union-represented major players among private companies in the delivery game, UPS workers are fighting to make strides for their cohort.

Come August, hundreds of thousands of UPS workers could walk off the job: 97 percent of UPS’s Teamsters have voted to authorize a strike if the union can’t come to an agreement with management by the time their current contract expires, on July 31. The two sides can still align on a contract in the next few weeks. But the possibility of a strike is real—and it would have major repercussions for the workers, the company, and the economy writ large. “UPS is one of the largest players in the delivery business. The nature of a strike would be to shut it down entirely,” Alex Colvin, the dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me.

Even as Amazon, FedEx, and DHL have competed with UPS for curb space and market share in recent years, UPS’s business has boomed. Americans’ online-shopping habits have helped the company’s revenue skyrocket: In 2022, according to company earnings, UPS took in more than $100 billion for the first time. The company’s more than 300,000 union workers, represented by the Teamsters through the largest private-sector union agreement in the country, want a slice of that success. And they are ready to walk out to try to get it. “UPS is so clutch for so many other businesses,” Suresh Naidu, an economics professor at Columbia, told me, so any disruptions could have “a multiplier effect.”

The Teamsters have said that 95 percent of the issues in their negotiations are "out of the way." A major sticking point now regards the fate of part-time workers, who represent much of the unit. The union is working to get better pay for them. Unlike full-time drivers, who can make about $40 an hour, the part-timers—many of whom are package handlers—make an average of $20 an hour, a company spokesperson told me. Asked about the unresolved issues at the negotiating table, the spokesperson for UPS said, “We’re focused on economic issues, especially pay for part-time workers.” He also noted that part-time workers are eligible to receive a pension and health insurance with no premium.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, negotiations broke down. Now each side is blaming the other. A spokesperson for the Teamsters told me that two days ago, there were no more bargaining sessions scheduled.

UPS has had a productive relationship with the Teamsters for nearly 100 years, and as the company grew, so did its unionized workforce. The company’s workers have gone on strike before, most recently in 1997, in what was then the largest American labor action in decades. At the time, 185,000 workers picketed for 15 days and ultimately declared victory. A lot has changed since then—including what customers expect. Colvin said that while the last UPS strike was certainly disruptive, “I would expect [a strike] to have a bigger impact today across the country.”

This strong union history makes UPS both an outlier in the current delivery landscape and a leader when it comes to pay and benefits. Seventy percent of UPS’s workers in the U.S. are represented by unions (that includes the Teamsters, as well as other unions for employees such as machinists and pilots). Amazon, which started delivering its own packages after shipping delays in the 2013 holiday season, is largely not unionized—though its structure may make it vulnerable to labor action at key locations. Gig workers, who are largely independent contractors, are playing a greater role in package delivery, too.

Saying that workers are ready to go on strike can help the Teamsters gain leverage at the bargaining table. But it’s not the only tool the union has at its disposal. Colvin told me that because the union is negotiating a master contract for workers across the country, it has more bargaining leverage than it would in a series of smaller local contracts: UPS’s integrated, national delivery system is part of what makes it a great company, he said, but also means that it’s reliant on its wide network of workers. The tight labor market gives these workers further leverage, because UPS may struggle to find replacement workers during a strike, Naidu told me.

The outcome of these negotiations could have an effect on other workers in the industry, too, especially those  at other companies, like Amazon, who might be looking to unionize with the Teamsters. Colvin told me that a positive outcome for the UPS workers would “send a strong message to workers organizing at places like Amazon about union representation.”

American workers have lost a lot of ground in recent decades. As the country’s workforce has ballooned, its number of union workers has not kept pace. But workers, including many young people, are excited about unions right now. It’s hard to measure that energy beyond anecdotes, and it may take years for union density to rebuild. But public perception of unions is as positive as it’s been since the 1960s, Colvin told me, and the outcome of UPS’s negotiations may shape that further. Strikes have been happening and looming across industries, including in Hollywood and at Starbucks.

Americans’ reliance on fast shipping can be tough for workers: Many have to complete their delivery routes in extreme heat (at UPS last month, the union and the company came to a tentative agreement on new heat-safety measures that included adding air-conditioning to new trucks and fans to existing ones).. But our dependence on shipping may also give workers leverage at UPS. We need them. That’s great for the company, for the most part, and it could turn out to be great for the workers, too.

Related:

Surprise! You work for Amazon. If 15-minute-delivery apps sound too good to be true, that’s because they are. Today’s News The Secret Service wrapped its investigation into a small bag of cocaine found at the White House. The agency was unable to identify a suspect. Ukraine was not able to secure a timeline for membership to NATO, but received long-term assistance pledges from the United States and other G-7 countries. Multiple suspected tornadoes touched down in the Chicago area. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up a second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.

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Evening Read

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

By Jonathan Haidt

What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? … Let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Four ways to make grief more bearable The “Israel model” won’t work for Ukraine. 18 ideas, arguments, and practical tips to help you navigate the heat Culture Break

Watch. Joy Ride (out in theaters now) is part of a new crop of films reviving R-rated raunch at the theaters and upending tropes about women in filthy romps.

Listen. The AI doomers are trying to scare us. In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel about what should really concern us.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I recently learned some new information that led me to feel that a mea culpa is in order: To my surprise, apparently Taylor Swift did sign a sponsorship agreement with FTX! A couple of weeks ago in the Daily, I included in my P.S. the nugget that Taylor Swift had reportedly turned down the opportunity to partner with FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange. This anecdote was widely reported after the lawyer Adam Moskowitz said as much on a podcast.

But last week, The New York Times reported a new twist: The tale turned out to be apocryphal. Moskowitz told the Times that he actually had no inside information about the talks. In reality, Swift’s team did sign an FTX agreement, and it was Sam Bankman-Fried’s team that pulled out. I maintain that Swift ended up dodging a decentralized bullet—just not for the reasons I thought.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Earlier this year, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million active users in what seemed like an astonishingly brisk two months. Now, just six months later, that record has been usurped: Threads got there in less than a week. According to data from Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm, Meta’s Twitter clone had the best launch day of any app in the past decade.

The internet is moving faster than ever before. Twitter and Facebook each took more than four years to reach the 100-million-users milestone; Instagram took just over two. TikTok did it in nine months. Now the record has been broken twice in 2023 alone. The apps themselves have evolved—product managers have spent zillions of hours optimizing sign-up “flows” to get people through registration and actually using the things as quickly as possible, and Threads, with its connection to Instagram, benefits from these efforts more than most. But it is also the case that the web is in a new FOMO era. The job of testing the next big thing was once assigned to just the very online; now we all feel like we’re primed to sign up right away or risk being left behind. We all have the fear of missing out.

Of course, one can’t talk about Threads’ record-setting growth without adding a giant asterisk to the data. The app is built on the back of the defining social-media empire of our time. Threads is an Instagram product, and Instagram is owned by Meta—the company formerly known as Facebook. It leverages the social connections accumulated over almost two decades of Meta products. The term FOMO itself gained popularity alongside the rise of the social web. Facebook arguably helped invent it altogether by initially launching at exclusive colleges, then at high schools. It advanced the phenomenon as people learned to post photos of their friends, parties, and vacations on their profile, along with in-jokey status updates.

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

Threads has leveraged every bit of that power. When I logged in to a dormant Instagram account for my dog, Rooster, a notification told me that a couple of his “friends” had posted on Threads for the first time. A Threads promo told Rooster to “claim your username” and “connect with the 15 people wanting to follow you.” If you decide to join, the app adds a little number to your Instagram profile, assigned in the order you arrived, creating a kind of social pressure to register as soon as possible. I’m in the first 50,000 sign-ups because I joined the exact minute it went live (for work, I promise). Now my badge makes me look like some kind of Threads hipster. Meta also made it easy to share Threads Instagram Stories with a bespoke design, the better to lure in Instagram users idly tapping through the day’s content. When you sign in to the app, Threads asks if you want to follow everyone you know from Instagram. Threads doesn’t display how many people you’re following on the front page of your profile, so you can grow your network without seeming embarrassingly overeager. (If this concern means nothing to you, congratulations on living a healthy and normal life.) Zuckerberg’s live-posting of Threads sign-ups—2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 30 million, 70 million, then 100—generated even more buzz.

Remember that F in FOMO: Many users may not be excited to be on Threads, exactly—it’s more that they’re afraid not to be. Early users get the best usernames and a shot at going viral while the platform is still growing. Followers in this new universe are up for grabs. But Threads’ quick growth doesn’t guarantee staying power. Size is a bit of a vanity metric; just because people sign up doesn’t mean they’ll come back. Engagement—how many times a person visited the site or app, how long they stayed for, and so on—arguably matters more for long-term success. Abraham Yousef and Seema Shah, analysts for Sensor Tower, told me that Threads engagement peaked on its first full day, July 6, and then dropped off. According to their data, both average time spent and the number of sessions per user were down nearly 60 percent on July 10. Yousef explained that although Threads usage data have been “volatile”—it is early days, after all—“even at its peak, [time spent on Threads] was still like 60 percent of time spent on Twitter and 85 percent of Instagram.”

Success on the social web can be ephemeral. The title of “social network to hit 100 million active users fastest” once belonged to a website that no longer exists: Google+ (which took one year and two months to reach it). Google+’s early story is not all that different from Threads’: a powerful tech company tried to launch in an adjacent market at a moment when a lot of people were fed up with an established power. Around launch time, the New York Times gadget blog described Google+ as “an all-out, brazen competitor to Facebook” with features explicitly made to address “frequent complaints” about Facebook. Google+ parceled out invites selectively, which made it seem cool. Because Google was powerful and had built popular products like Gmail, people rushed to claim their spot on it. But the product itself wasn’t impressive, and it didn’t go anywhere despite its scale.

Indulging in your FOMO doesn’t always pay off. It might persuade you to get out of bed and go to the party, but it doesn’t guarantee that the party’s going to be fun. A colleague likened waking up the morning after joining Threads to waking up with a hangover: Threads didn’t magically fix all the problems with Twitter overnight, and by joining it, 100 million people had impulsively supported Meta despite the company’s questionable history on things such as user privacy and misinformation. They might end up regretting going to that party after all.

For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins. Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab. “Accidental escape is in fact highly likely—it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote in a Slack message to a colleague on February 2, 2020. When he laid out the same concern to Anthony Fauci in late January, that some features of the viral genome looked like they might be engineered, Fauci told him to consider going to the FBI.

But days later, Andersen, Garry, and the other scientists were starting to coalesce around a different point of view: Those features were more likely to have developed via natural evolution. The scientists wrote up this revised assessment in an influential paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020, called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The virus is clearly “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper said; in fact, the experts now “did not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and that the pandemic almost certainly started with a “zoonotic event”—which is to say, the spillover of an animal virus into human populations. That analysis would be cited repeatedly by scientists and media outlets in the months that followed, in support of the idea that the lab-leak theory had been thoroughly debunked.

The researchers’ rapid and consequential change of heart, as revealed through emails, witness interviews, and Slack exchanges, is now a wellspring for Republicans’ suspicions. “All of a sudden, you did a 180,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said yesterday morning. “What happened?”

Based on the available facts, the answer seems clear enough: Andersen, Garry, and the others looked more closely at the data, and decided that their fears about a lab leak had been unwarranted; the viral features were simply not as weird as they’d first thought. The political conversation around this episode is not so easily summarized, however. Yesterday’s hearing was less preoccupied with the small, persistent possibility that the coronavirus really did leak out from a lab than with the notion of a conspiracy—a cover-up—that, according to Republicans, involved Fauci and others in the U.S. government swaying Andersen and Garry to leave behind their scientific judgment and endorse “pro-China talking points” instead. (Fauci has denied that he tried to disprove the lab-leak theory.)

[Read: If the lab-leak theory is right, what next?]

Barbed accusations of this kind have only added headaches to the question of how the pandemic really started. For all of its distractions, though, the House investigation still serves a useful purpose: It sheds light on how discussions of the lab-leak theory went so very, very wrong, and turned into an endless, stultifying spectacle. In that way, the hearing—and the story that it tells about the “Proximal Origin” paper—gestures not toward the true origin of COVID, but toward the origin of the origins debate.

From the start, the problem has been that a “lab leak” could mean many things. The term may refer to the release of a manufactured bioweapon, or to an accident involving basic-science research; it could involve a germ with genes deliberately inserted, or one that was rapidly evolved inside a cage or in a dish, or even a virus from the wild, brought into a lab and released by accident (in unaltered form) in a city like Wuhan. Yet all these categories blurred together in the early days of the pandemic. The confusion was made plain when Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a hard-core China hawk, aired a proto-lab-leak theory in a February 16, 2020 interview with Fox News. “This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market,” he told the network. He later continued, “just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety-level-4 super-laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.”

Cotton did not specifically suggest that the Chinese “super-laboratory” was weaponizing viruses, nor did he say that any laboratory accident would necessarily have involved a genetically engineered virus, as opposed to one that had been cultured or collected from a bat cave. Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the senator had repeated a “fringe theory” about the coronavirus that was going around in right-wing circles at the time, that it had been manufactured by the Chinese government as a bioweapon. It was hard for reporters to imagine that Cotton could have been suggesting anything but that: The idea that Chinese scientists might have been collecting wild viruses, and doing research just to understand them, was not yet thinkable in that chaotic, early moment of pandemic spread. “Lab leak” was simply understood to mean “the virus is a bioweapon.”

Scientists knew better. On the same day that Cotton gave his interview, one of Andersen and Garry’s colleagues posted the “Proximal Origin” paper on the web as an unpublished manuscript. (“Important to get this out,” Garry wrote in an email sent to the group the following morning. He included a link to the Washington Post article about Cotton described above.) In this version, the researchers were quite precise about what, exactly, they were aiming to debunk: The authors said, specifically, that their analysis clearly showed the virus had not been genetically engineered. It might well have been produced through cell-culture experiments in a lab, they wrote, though the case for this was “questionable.” And as for the other lab-leak possibilities—that a Wuhan researcher was infected by the virus while collecting samples from a cave, or that someone brought a sample back and then accidentally released it—the paper took no position whatsoever. “We did not consider any of these scenarios,” Andersen explained in his written testimony for this week’s hearing. If a researcher had indeed been infected in the field, he continued, then he would not have counted it as a “lab leak” to begin with—because that would mean the virus jumped to humans somewhere other than a lab.

[Read: There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate]

Rather than settling the matter, however, all this careful parsing only led to more confusion. In the early days of the pandemic, and in the context of the Cotton interview and its detractors, too much specificity was deemed a fatal flaw. On February 20, Nature decided to reject the manuscript, at least partly on account of its being too soft in its debunking. A month later, when their paper finally did appear in Nature Medicine, a new sentence had been added near the end: the one discounting “any type of laboratory-based scenario.” At this crucial moment in the pandemic-origins debate, the researchers’ original, narrow claim—that SARS-CoV-2 had not been purposefully assembled—was broadened to include a blanket statement that could be read to mean the lab-leak theory was wrong in all its forms.

Over time, this aggressive phrasing would cause problems of its own. At first, its elision of several different possible scenarios served the mainstream narrative: We know the virus wasn’t engineered; ergo, it must have started in the market. More recently, the same confusion has served the interests of the lab-leak theorists. Consider a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on pandemic origins, declassified last month. American intelligence agencies have determined that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, it explains, and they are near-unanimous in saying that it was not genetically engineered. (This confirms what Andersen and colleagues said in the first version of their paper, way back in February 2020.) “Most” agencies, the report says, further judge that the virus was not created through cell-culture experiments. Yet the fact that two of the nine agencies nonetheless believe that “a laboratory-associated incident” of any kind is the most likely cause of the first human infection has been taken as a sign that all lab-leak scenarios are still on the table. Thus Republicans in Congress can rail against Facebook for removing posts about the “lab-leak theory,” while ignoring the fact that the platform’s rules only ever prohibited one particular and largely discredited idea, that SARS-CoV-2 was “man-made or manufactured.” (In any case, that prohibition was reversed some three months later.)

Where does this leave us? The committee’s work does not reveal a cover-up of COVID’s source. At the same time, it does show that the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper were aware of how their work might shape the public narrative. (In a Slack conversation, one of them referred to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release.”) At first they strived to phrase their findings as clearly as they could, and to separate the strong evidence against genetic engineering of the virus—and what Garry called “the bio weapon scenario”—from the lingering possibility that laboratory science might have been involved in some other way. In the final version of their paper, though, they added in language that was rather less precise. This may have helped to muffle the debate in early 2020, but the haze it left behind was noxious and long-lasting.