As autoworkers at General Motors plants around the country vote this week on whether to accept a new contract, workers elsewhere see an opportunity to demand their own chance in the driver’s seat.

The U.S. is enjoying a record-long economic boom, but workers’ slice of the pie has barely increased. After decades of relative silence, newly emboldened workers are increasingly vocal in demanding higher pay and better working conditions.

“We have given enough. It’s time to get something back,” declared Stacy Davis-Gates, vice president of the 25,000-member Chicago Teachers Union, which has been on strike since last Thursday.

Over the last two years, hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses and factory workers have walked off the job. Last year, more workers went on strike than at any time since 1986.

“Working people have taken it on the chin for four decades,” said Lawrence Mishel, a labor economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The workforce has been a tinderbox waiting to be lit. And if people see a way that they can solve their problems for themselves and their communities, they’re going to take it.”

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, it was routine to see hundreds of big strikes every year, idling a million workers or more. But in recent decades, work stoppages like the one at GM have been much less common. A turning point came in 1981, when President Reagan fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers.

Although Reagan was careful to distinguish the illegal controllers’ strike from lawful walkouts by private-sector workers, many private employers followed his example, firing strikers in the years that followed. With unemployment topping 10% in the early 1980s, replacement workers were not hard to come by.

Since then, the share of workers who are unionized has been cut by half, to just over 10% last year. Union membership in the private sector is less than 7%.

“Strikes bottomed out because the employers were using an unbelievably strong weapon and because the labor market allowed them to find people who were willing to cross a union picket line to take the job of a union worker who was out on strike,” said John Beck, a labor relations expert at Michigan State University.

Today, with unemployment near a 50-year low, there’s less danger that striking workers can be quickly replaced. Employees at GM and elsewhere are asking themselves, “If not now, when?”

“You’ve got really an economy that says to many workers, ‘This is the time for us to grab what we can,’ ” Beck said.

Teachers have been leading the charge, walking out of classrooms from Arizona to Oklahoma and West Virginia to protest wages that have lost ground to inflation.

Nurses have also been active on the picket lines. Like teachers, their jobs are not easily shipped overseas.

“We can’t continue to work off the clock, work without breaks, work without a lunch,” said Deborah Burger, a president of National Nurses United, which led one-day walkouts last month at hospitals in several states. “We’re trying to raise the awareness of the community. They understand that, and they support us.”

Public approval of organized labor is near its highest level in 50 years, a recent Gallup poll found. A separate survey found nearly half of all non-union workers would join a union if they could.

Still, any big rebound in union membership is unlikely, given the legal and cultural roadblocks.

“It’s very difficult to organize new members,” said Arthur Wheaton of the Industrial and Labor Relations school at Cornell University. “A lot of companies are hiring what they call ‘union avoidance’ law firms. And winning an election and getting the first contract negotiated is extremely difficult.”

Twenty-seven states — including union strongholds like Michigan — now have “right to work” laws, which make union membership and dues-paying optional. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that government workers who choose not to join a union can’t be forced to pay a collective bargaining fee.

Some unions are now devoting more attention to improving pay and benefits for workers who aren’t union members, campaigning, for example, for a higher minimum wage.

If the UAW strike results in better pay for autoworkers, employees in other industries may be encouraged to test their own bargaining power.

“People don’t revolt when things are at their worst,” Beck said. “They revolt when things are getting better but not fast enough.”

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Mark Zuckerberg says it’s Facebook’s way — or China’s way.

Facebook’s founder and CEO will tell Congress that the social network’s controversial digital currency project, Libra, is essential to projecting American leadership around the world.

He will warn that any delay risks losing that leadership to China, according to prepared remarks released ahead of a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

“While we debate these issues, the rest of the world isn’t waiting. China is moving quickly to launch similar ideas in the coming months,” Zuckerberg will say.

“I believe [Libra] will extend America’s financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. If America doesn’t innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed.”

Zuckerberg frequently invokes China as a rival to American technology supremacy, and American values.

Last week in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, he warned that calls for Facebook to exercise more limits on what people can and can’t say on its platform endangered its commitment to free speech — and America’s global influence.

“Until recently, the Internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out,” he said.

Zuckerberg is back in the Capitol Hill hot seat as Facebook faces immense pressure over how much influence it has over the lives of its more than 2 billion users.

Members of Congress will seize the opportunity to grill him about a whole host of topics.

Here are five questions he could face in the hearing room.

Is Facebook really going to launch a currency?

Facebook says Libra would let users around the world — especially those without traditional bank accounts — send money as easily as sending a text message. And while the project was originally Facebook’s idea, it is meant to come to life with the help of 27 founding partners, including financial services companies.

But Libra hit hurdles as soon as it was announced. Regulators around the world have taken a dim view of the project, sounding fears that it could pose a threat to financial stability and be used to fund terrorism and other illegal activities.

In recent weeks, several of the initial partners backed away — including the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard and the digital payment firms PayPal and Stripe. People close to some of the companies that have dropped out told NPR they were concerned about angering regulators, given that they already operate in highly regulated industries.

Their departures have left some analysts doubting that the project can go forward.

“Libra sounds dead on arrival,” said Michael Pachter, an equities analyst at Wedbush Securities. “I don’t think Facebook can pull it off without the support of all the different banking and credit card processors and payment processors. I just don’t think that they have the wherewithal to actually do it themselves.”

In his prepared remarks, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook is “not the ideal messenger right now. We’ve faced a lot of issues over the past few years, and I’m sure people wish it was anyone but Facebook putting this idea forward.”

And he said Libra will not be launched “anywhere in the world unless all US regulators approve it.”

Has Facebook done enough to stop discrimination in advertising?

Housing is the other headline subject of Wednesday’s hearing. Facebook has been hit with a federal lawsuit by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for allegedly enabling housing discrimination.

The allegations stem from Facebook’s ad targeting tools. The company lets advertisers select who can and cannot see ads, based on a range of different categories.

“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” in violation of the Fair Housing Act, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said when the suit was filed in March.

The company has also been accused of allowing age and gender discrimination in job ads.

Nicol Turner Lee, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation who studies access to technology, said Facebook may not have intended its advertising tools to be used this way.

But she said Internet platforms need to take more care to consider the consequences of the technologies they build.

“We have to ask ourselves, are companies like Facebook clear about the guardrails that are protecting human and civil rights, and the extent to which they’re building products and services that comply with those laws?” she said.

Facebook has stopped letting advertisers target ads for housing, jobs and credit to people based on their ethnic group, gender, age or zip code.

On Tuesday it pledged $1 billion toward affordable housing in California.

In Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks, he said Facebook is taking “a broader view of our responsibility. That includes making sure our services are used for good and preventing harm. People shouldn’t be discriminated against on any of our services.”

Why won’t Facebook stop politicians from lying?

Facebook’s latest firestorm is also about advertising.

Critics are furious about the social network’s policy of allowing politicians to publish misleading or downright untrue posts and ads on its platform. Zuckerberg will likely be pressed about this topic again on Wednesday.

Facebook says its policy flows from its commitment to free speech. It says it does not want to judge whether political speech is true or not, and that users should be free to hear from politicians and make up their own minds.

Zuckerberg strongly defended this position in his Georgetown speech last week, positioning Facebook as a champion of free expression and reiterating that his company should not be the arbiter of truth.

“While I certainly worry about an erosion of truth, I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true,” he said.

But that has not satisfied critics. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts ran her own deliberately false Facebook ad to protest the policy. In it, she incorrectly claimed Facebook and Zuckerberg had endorsed President Trump.

“Once again, we’re seeing Facebook throw its hands up to battling misinformation in the political discourse, because when profit comes up against protecting democracy, Facebook chooses profit,” Warren tweeted in explanation of her ad.

In his Georgetown speech, Zuckerberg said he had considered dropping political advertising altogether — noting that it contributes just a tiny fraction of Facebook’s billions of dollars in annual sales. But he argued that could have the effect of favoring incumbents and candidates favored by the media.

What is Facebook doing to prevent the 2020 election from being a repeat of 2016?

With U.S. intelligence agencies warning that foreign governments may try to influence American politics leading up to next year’s election, lawmakers may want to know how Facebook is defending its platform from manipulation.

Zuckerberg gave an update about Facebook’s election security efforts on Monday. That included a number of new features and updates to existing policies to provide more transparency about who is posting on Facebook.

For example, the site will now labeling content from media outlets it considers to be “state-controlled,” which Facebook defines as “wholly or partially under the editorial control of their government.”

But the scope of the problem Facebook must confront was also highlighted on Monday when the company said it had taken down four more networks of fake accounts. Facebook said it has removed more than 50 such networks, which could attempt to manipulate its users, in the past year.

Three of the newly disabled networks were tied to Iran, while the fourth originated in Russia and showed some links to the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll farm involved in political interference in 2016, Facebook said.

Zuckerberg told reporters on Monday that election security “is one of my top priorities for the company” and that Facebook is no longer “on our back foot” when it comes to identifying fake accounts.

Is Facebook too powerful?

Congress is not the only branch of government asking tough questions about Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and a group of 47 state attorneys general are all investigating Facebook for potential antitrust violations.

The state prosecutors are “concerned that Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, and increased the price of advertising,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said Tuesday.

Some critics are calling for the company to be broken up, or for its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to be unwound. Warren has made the breakup of Facebook — along with Google and Amazon — a key part of her campaign platform.

Some tech veterans agree. Marc Benioff, the CEO of software company Salesforce, told CNN that Facebook is “addictive” and has too much control of users’ data — and therefore should be broken up. “They’re having an undue influence as the largest social media platform on the planet,” he said.

And even a Facebook co-founder has turned on the company. Chris Hughes, who was one of Zuckerberg’s roommates at Harvard, launched a $10 million anti-monopoly fund to support policy, academic research and organizing to take on corporate power in tech and other industries.

Zuckerberg bristles at the idea of breaking up his company. In leaked audio from staff meetings this summer, obtained by the website The Verge, the CEO said Facebook would “fight” any effort to do so and expected to win any legal challenge.

At Georgetown last week, Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of big tech — but deflected the argument.

“I understand the concerns that people have about how tech platforms have centralized power. But I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands,” he said.

Editor’s note: Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters.

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As cars become smarter and safer, some members of Congress want to require them to be built to prevent drunk driving.

Sens. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., introduced legislation last week that would make it mandatory for all new cars and trucks to come loaded with passive, virtually unnoticeable, alcohol detection systems by 2024.

The Reduce Impaired Driving for Everyone Act of 2019, called the RIDE Act, would also allocate $10 million to continue government-funded research into new breath and touch-based sensors designed to monitor a driver’s blood alcohol level in real-time, without having the driver do anything. The measure would set aside another $25 million to install and test the technology in government-owned fleets.

The bill follows a similar effort in the House by Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan.

Udall said he’s been haunted by the pain and havoc drunk driving accidents wreak on families for decades. “When you meet with families, and when you see the devastation that this causes, it’s something that really moves you,” he said in an interview.

During the 1990s, when Udall was New Mexico’s attorney general, he agonized over how to reduce the state’s drunk driving related crashes, which at the time were the highest in the country per capita.

“We kept trying to wonder, how do we get out of this?” he recalled.

The answer, at least in part, was technology. New Mexico became one of the first states to require convicted drunk drivers to use a breathalyzer to start a car.

But in a world where driverless cars are being tested, Udall said he’s become exasperated by the lack of innovation and buy-in from the auto industry. He is urging auto manufacturers to partner and fellow lawmakers to commit to a five-year plan to develop less cumbersome and more consumer friendly devices.

Helen Witty, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, also noted the auto industry’s reluctance to mandated safety improvements.

“I don’t think the industry wanted to put in airbags or seat belts,” Witty said. “Think about how those … were a fight to get through.”

But now, she said, several companies have cameras that warn drivers if they appear impaired or have taken their eyes off the road. Those types of advances have given Witty hope that automakers will be persuaded by consumers, who want more safety features.

But she is impatient for that to happen. In 2000, Witty’s 16-year-old daughter was killed by another teen who’d had too many tequila shots and was driving 65 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone. According to Witty, the young driver, who was drunk and high on marijuana, “lost control of her car and spun off the road onto the bike path” where her daughter was rollerblading.

“And so my daughter, Helen Marie, looked up and saw the car coming toward her and there was nothing she could do at all but die,” Witty said.

It’s a tragic story that Witty has been telling for years to educate the public. She’s hopes the message will help spare other families the pain of her own.

“Not only did her life end, the life that we had as a family ended. … We had to figure out how to live again,” she added.

Drunk driving fatalities have declined significantly since the 1980s. But according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration they still account for about a third of all traffic deaths. In 2017, more than 10,800 people were killed in drunk driving incidents.

Since 2008, the federal government has spent $50 million on a project between NHTSA and an automaker group called Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety to develop the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety.

The endeavor is overseen by Robert Strassburger, who represents the automakers. He expects a breathalyzer-type product to be ready for licensing by next year. While the ultimate goal of the project is aimed at creating something that detects alcohol without the driver doing anything, Strassburger said, they’re not there yet. After more than a decade of work, researchers have managed to develop a more streamlined version of a breathalyzer — a small device built into the driver-side door that the driver blows into.

However, the device is can’t detect a precise blood alcohol level yet. Instead, it can only determine the presence of alcohol, Strassburger said.

So it can’t tell the difference between someone who’s had one glass of wine and someone who’s had four shots of whiskey. Still, Strassburger said, there’s already a market for the device, including trucking companies with a zero-tolerance policy for their drivers or parents with underage children.

Strassburger says there’s plenty of momentum to make vehicles with technology that keeps dangerous drivers off the road.

The question is how that will happen and when.

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President Trump announced that he’s dropping his plan to host next year’s Group of Seven meeting of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies at his Miami-area golf club.

In a series of late-night tweets on Saturday, Trump blamed the reversal on what he described as “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility,” following bipartisan claims that he’s exploiting his presidency for personal profit.

“I announced that I would be willing to do it at NO PROFIT or, if legally permissible, at ZERO COST to the USA. …” the president tweeted. “[B]ased on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020.”

He again touted his resort’s “grand” acreage, ample rooms and its proximity to the Miami International Airport as an ideal venue to host international leaders.

Trump said his administration “will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately.”

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had announced on Thursday that Trump National Doral would be the site of the 2020 summit. The selection revived accusations about Trump’s ability to use his office for financial gain and claims that he’s violated the Constitution by collecting payments from foreign governments going to businesses he owns.

Since the early days of his presidency, Trump has faced multiple ongoing lawsuits alleging he is violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits a sitting president from accepting payments from foreign governments.

Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of the groups suing Trump over the emoluments issue, said Trump’s Saturday announcement was “a bow to reality, but does not change how astonishing it was that a president ever thought this was appropriate, or that it was something he could get away with.”

Democratic House leaders had planned a vote as early as this week to rebuke Trump over the decision. They also planned investigations into the selection process and suggested they would prevent government money from being spent at Trump properties. A number of Republicans in Congress had also voiced concerns with the Doral choice.

An hour before Trump canceled the Doral plan, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden issued a rebuke on Twitter.

“Hosting the G7 at Trump’s hotel? A president should never be able to use the office for personal gain,” the former vice president wrote.

During Thursday’s press briefing, Mulvaney dismissed the possibility of returning to Camp David to hold the gathering, describing it as “too small” and “too remote.”

“I understand the folks who participated in it hated it and thought it was a miserable place to have the G-7,” he said.

NPR’s Brett Neely contributed to this report.

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The CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. told California energy regulators that the state will likely see blackouts for another 10 years like the one imposed last week that left as many as 800,000 customers without power.

The revelation by corporation CEO Bill Johnson came Friday at a California Public Utilities Commission meeting at which he said his company is trying to reduce the chances of wildfires by trimming more trees and using technology to target smaller areas of the grid when fire dangers require power outages.

But Johnson said it could take 10 years before such outages are “really ratcheted down significantly.”

PG&E has come near universal criticism for its lack of planning in shutting off power and its failure to adequately handle customers’ questions while the outages lasted. PUC president Marybel Batjer blasted utility officials saying, “what we saw play out by PG&E last week cannot be repeated.”

During the blackouts, Johnson admitted that his company had not been prepared for the impact of the outages, including the crashing of the utility’s website and call centers being overwhelmed with customers’ concerns.

But Johnson still maintains that the outages, which the company calls Public Safety Power Shutoff events, were necessary to insure safety in the face of seasonally high winds that can damage power lines and lead to wildfires.

“We recognize the hardship that the recent PSPS event caused for millions of people and want to continue working with all key shareholders to lessen this burden going forward,” Johnson wrote in a letter to the PUC prior to the hearing. “At the same time, we ask our customers, their families, and our local and state leaders to keep in mind that statistic that matters most: there were no catastrophic wildfires.”

The utility estimates that each customer household represents about three people, so that the power outages left roughly 2 million people in the dark.

In the hearing, Johnson tried to separate PG&E’s rationale for the power outages from the company’s execution.

“Making the right decision on safety is not the same as executing that decision well,” Johnson said. “PG&E has to be better prepared than it was this time.”

Last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the utility’s management of the outages “was unacceptable.” He called PG&E to issue rebates of $100 for residential customers and $250 credits to small businesses affected by the outages.

Johnson said PG&E is studying the request, but is concerned about setting a precedent.

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Three major U.S. drug distributing companies are negotiating a multibillion-dollar settlement to end numerous lawsuits filed by state and local governments seeking compensation for costs associated with the opioid crisis.

The drug distributors — Amerisource Bergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health — could pay as much as $18 billion over 18 years, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the discussions.

Word of a possible settlement comes as the three companies and three others — drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical, Walgreens and a small distributors called Henry Schein — are set to go to court next week in a landmark trial in Ohio.

With over 2,000 lawsuits filed across the country by governments and tens of billions of dollars at stake, details of a possible settlement are scant. As North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann reported,

“A source tells NPR the drug distributors Amerisource Bergen and McKesson have reached a tentative settlement with at least some state attorneys general, as has the drugmaker Teva. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is reporting McKesson, Amerisource Bergen and Cardinal Health have reached a tentative national settlement. … It remains unclear how these last-minute settlements might affect a federal trial set to begin Monday in Ohio.”

That trial will be presided over by U.S. District Judge Dan Posner who has been urging the parties to settle.

In another legal development, a state judge in Oklahoma, Thad Balkman, is acknowledging a $107 million error in a recent verdict assigning responsibility for that state’s opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 4,000 lives from 2007 to 2017.

In August, Balkman ruled that drugmaker Johnson and Johnson should pay $572 million for contributing to Oklahoma’s opioid crisis after the state sued for $17 billion.

But the judge said his ruling included $107.6 million for addiction costs when he meant to order a penalty of $107,600.

KGOU’s Jackie Fortier reported,

“His announcement could mean the judgment will be cut. But it’s unclear how much Johnson & Johnson will ultimately have to pay Oklahoma — the judge will rule on other legal objections to his verdict at a later date.”

A new study by the Society of Actuaries estimates that the opioid epidemic has cost the U.S. economy about $631 billion over the past four years. The study finds that the unrealized lifetime earnings of those who died prematurely due to drug overdoses and health care costs associated with opioid use were the biggest drivers of the economic drag created by the opioid crisis.

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