At an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, workers this month began voting on whether to join a union. The issue is not wages – starting pay is more than double the state’s minimum wage – but bathrooms. Workers advocating for the union say the company monitors their productivity so closely that any extra breaks can hinder their advancement.

At Google, employees announced forming a union a month after a respected Black artificial-intelligence researcher said Google fired her for her criticism of bias in its artificial-intelligence program.

And at fundraising platform Kickstarter a year ago, it was the response to a comic book – “Always Punch Nazis” – that spurred employees to join the Office and Professional Employees International Union.

High-tech employee activists, who have staged public protests over social issues in recent years, are turning to a traditional form of organization – unions – to further their aims. These moves could represent a toehold for the labor movement, which has long wanted to organize the huge, fast-growing tech industry. Or these high-tech movements could bypass traditional unions altogether by embracing an older type of labor organization that relies on moral suasion rather than formal power to make its demands.

What is clear is that high-tech companies cannot ignore employee activism.

“It’s employees seizing control of organizations that they have dedicated their lives to,” says Mary-Hunter McDonnell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school in Philadelphia. They don’t have a say over most corporate decisions or even their own pay. “Another way to try to influence employees’ outcomes is to fight for a voice in the company’s values, especially in this world where companies have such a central role.”

The movement has the potential to flourish during the pro-labor Biden administration now in place.

Seizing the moment

“In the last four years, the United States has faced unprecedented social unrest over racial, socioeconomic, and political issues and events,” warned Littler Mendelson P.C., a labor law firm representing employers, in a January report. “Activism on these subjects is at an all-time high, and it is manifesting itself in the workplace as never before.”

There’s an irony that some of the best compensated employees, working for some of the most progressive employers, feel the need for a union. The tech industry has some of the most outspoken and in many ways liberal leaders in big business. That hasn’t stopped these highly paid workers from speaking out. It even may have encouraged it, some labor experts say.

Samantha Maldonado/AP/File

Tech workers march to support Facebook's cafeteria workers, who were rallying for a new contract with their company, Flagship, in San Francisco on July 16, 2019. Tech workers have been speaking out increasingly on issues such as immigration, the environment, sexual misconduct, and military contracts.

“Employers will need to build upon engagement and acknowledge and embrace employee activism,” said public relations company Weber Shandwick in a 2014 report. Already back then, a third of companies encouraged workers to use social media to share news about their work or their employer, the report found. Since then, the corporate outlook on employee activism has become more tempered.

“Employee advocacy is here to stay,” says Kate Bullinger, president of United Minds, a consultancy within Weber Shandwick that focuses on organizational transformation and leadership. “It’s a positive in many ways” for companies who use activist employees to promote the company and attract top-notch recruits, she adds. “But we’ve also seen the flip side of that.”

In 2018, thousands of employees petitioned Google to drop a defense contract and, later that year, some 20,000 employees staged a global walkout to protest Google’s handling of sexual harassment claims. That was the same year that the company dropped “Don’t be evil” from its code of corporate conduct. 

And its software engineers don’t seem afraid of losing their jobs, which average $154,000 in total pay, according to Glassdoor. “Tech workers are irreplaceable and they know it,” says Jerry Davis, a professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “If you get fired from Google, you can move down the street to Facebook, to Palantir, or to DoorDash.”

Generational shift

The sector also boasts a young workforce whose outlook represents a generational change. 

During the financial crisis of 2008, these young people saw “their own families lose their homes or their friends’ families losing homes,” says Toby Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They saw all that ripped away and realized that [organizing] was the only way to advance their own interests.”

As tech corporations go, Kickstarter had the bona fides as a progressive voice. It was a public benefit corporation, which meant its charter put positive social outcomes on par with profits. The New York company had come out against the anti-transgender bathroom law in North Carolina. But in 2018, when the right-wing Breitbart news site reported that the company was violating its terms of service with a fundraising campaign for a satirical comic book called “Always Punch Nazis,” Kickstarter decided to take down the campaign. When employees protested, the company reversed its decision. But tensions between some employees and management rose, and a year ago, workers voted to unionize.

At high-tech giant Amazon, the labor struggle is different. Instead of its high-paid engineers, some 5,800 workers who pick, pack, and ship out goods to customers are focused squarely on working conditions. Some workers say they’re tracked so closely that a run to the bathroom can make them miss their quota, which can cut their pay and ultimately hold up advancement. Amazon, which says it gives workers extra time for bathroom runs and two 30-minute breaks per shift, is pushing hard to convince the workers they don’t need a union.

Amazon has unsuccessfully tried to delay the vote and brought in a law firm to fight the union. Workers say they’re called in for frequent information sessions where company officials point out the downsides of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Even in the bathrooms, workers say, there are anti-union flyers.

Many corporations have employed such tactics, with increasing success, to fend off organizing campaigns. In fact, the labor movement’s lack of success in organizing using traditional methods is one reason tech workers are gravitating to the minority union, which is an even older model of signing up workers, says Professor Higbie. All unions start out as minority unions, until they are ratified by a majority of workers. The reason that the newest generation of workers is returning to it stems from the increasing powerlessness of labor law to protect unions from corporate power.

Minority unions can’t engage in collective bargaining for better pay or benefits. And with only about 800 members, the Google union is a long way from organizing Google’s more than 100,000 workers, even with the sponsorship of a major union, the Communications Workers of America. What minority unions can do is become a voice for employees, including on social issues. 

Two days after its Jan. 4 launch, the Alphabet Workers Union (named after Google’s parent company) issued a statement condemning the mob attack on the Capitol and taking on Alphabet-owned YouTube for not shutting down then-President Donald Trump’s account. Five days later, Google suspended Mr. Trump’s YouTube account.

Social media has made organizing cheap and easy and swift. “It has allowed workers to have more time to communicate, to have discussion and debate,” says Steve Zeltzer, a San Francisco-based labor journalist who produces KPOO’s WorkWeek Radio. “That’s a revolution.”

Who will thrive in this new organizing era: the minority union or the traditional one? “We’ll see both,” he says.

The usual response, when Iran’s well-practiced chant leaders bark rhythmic recitations of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” is for the crowd to noisily repeat the chant.

But politics in Iran are poisonously divisive, especially now, just four months before a crucial presidential vote and amid the frisson of a new U.S. president aiming to return America to a nuclear deal his predecessor discarded.

At stake in Iran is which political faction will be able to take credit for any deal that lifts sanctions and delivers a thriving economy, without suffering the humiliations of outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, who has been pilloried for trusting the United States.

Mr. Rouhani had once raised Iranian hopes of openness and prosperity, banking on the 2015 nuclear deal and engagement with the West, only to watch those dissolve into hopelessness as more U.S. sanctions crippled the economy.

So in Isfahan, in a parade last week marking the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, young ideologues on motorcycles vented about those failures. When the chant leader called out from his loudspeakers, “Death to America!” the bikers replied, derisively: “Death to Rouhani!”

Again and again they denounced him, according to a video of the event, an incident that speaks to the political challenge in Iran of resurrecting the landmark nuclear deal.

Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal unilaterally in 2018, instead imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic and diplomatic sanctions in a bid to force Iran to renegotiate.

After waiting a year, hoping in vain that the other power brokers of the deal – the European Union, Russia, and China – might take up the slack with sanctions relief, Iran began to incrementally violate the deal’s limits on uranium enrichment.

Both the U.S. and Iran now say they are ready to return to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but demand that the other move first.

Experts say that creative synchronization of steps can solve the problem, and note that Americans close to President Joe Biden’s team opened discrete channels with influential Iranians – though not at an official level – as early as last November, to smooth the return to the deal.

But inside Iran, conservatives and hard-liners are pushing to slow the process, both to deprive their opponents of bragging rights before the June election and to ensure that any new president from their camp can deliver the benefit. In contrast, the centrist and reformist faction is pushing for a quick reentry to the deal, to boost the legacy of President Rouhani and even of Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is himself tipped by some to be a possible presidential candidate.

At the same time, the conservatives remain deeply distrustful of the U.S., says Adnan Tabatabai, head of the Bonn-based Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO).

“The political costs to be fooled by the U.S. one more time is huge, and nothing short of political suicide,” he says. “Unfortunately, this one year of staying fully compliant, without reaping the benefits of it, has done serious harm to Iranian willingness to give concessions.”

Fruit of engagement

While the U.S. debate over the deal focuses on its nuclear restrictions and how best to prevent an atomic weapons-making capacity, in Iran it is often cast in economic terms, as a fruit of engagement necessary to boost the economy.

Mr. Rouhani, marking the anniversary celebrations Feb. 10, said there was “no other path” than a return to the deal and “engagement between Iran and the world.” Days earlier the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that after all sanctions were verifiably lifted “in practice,” Iran would resume its “full commitment” to the deal.

“The economic approach toward the JCPOA ... should give us some hope that ultimately pragmatism is dictating the policy – as long as the Iranian side doesn’t feel betrayed or belittled,” says Mr. Tabatabai. In that case, he warns, “the ideological side of the argument, which is all about resistance and resilience, will be predominant again.”

Iranian Presidency Office/AP

President Hassan Rouhani addresses the nation in a televised speech in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 10, 2021. Mr. Rouhani said the West has no way except reaching an agreement with Tehran for restoring the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.

Hard-liners in Iran have opposed the nuclear deal from the start, politicizing it as a pointless giveaway of Iran’s technical achievements, and caving in to Western demands – for little in return – all while undermining the anti-American pillar of the 1979 revolution.

Though Mr. Rouhani’s promise of opening to the West was welcomed by voters, he and Mr. Zarif were attacked by hard-liners as anti-revolutionary traitors. As he provided some political cover – even coining the term “heroic flexibility” to justify the talks – Mr. Khamenei warned repeatedly that the U.S. should not be trusted.

When Mr. Trump abandoned the deal, Iran’s supreme leader was among the first to scold Mr. Rouhani in an I-told-you-so moment. Negotiations with arch-enemy America are “poison,” he said.

Trump’s lingering impact

Since Mr. Biden’s victory, the debate in Iran over whether and how to reengage with the U.S. had been public and constant.

As speculation grew about a return to the deal last November, the head of the ideological and political bureau in the supreme leader’s office warned Mr. Rouhani.

“Those who seek new negotiations with America are after factional and electoral gain. ... They want to take advantage of the new situation to return to the political stage,” Rasoul Sanaee-Rad told the hard-line Mehr News. “Whether it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House wouldn’t make much difference, the same way Coke and Pepsi are both American products and both harmful to human health.”

Yet those cautions are mere politicking, political scientist Ahmad Naghibzadeh told the reformist newspaper Arman Melli. “Conservatives are trying to set in their name and under their own signature any agreement toward economic relief.”

Nasser Hadian, a professor of political science at Tehran University, says the lingering impact of Mr. Trump’s withdrawal “has been tremendous. Certainly, it has strengthened the radicals, and discredited those who have supported Europe and the U.S.”

This makes the manner and timing of any return to the nuclear deal of crucial political importance, as factions joust for advantage before the June vote.

“I tend to believe that [Mr. Khamenei] would prefer that this be done by Rouhani and Zarif, because that would give him plausible deniability,” says Mr. Hadian. “Certainly, he is not going to trust [the Americans], but he doesn’t want to be blamed” for missing this opportunity to lift sanctions.

Keep voters unhappy

The conservatives’ strategy, however, would be to hinder, if possible, the return of Iran and America to the JCPOA before the election, he says.

Conservatives “know that, if we resolve the issue with the Americans ... people would think that we are on the right path. The hope is going to be there,” Mr. Hadian says. “So they want to keep things the way they are, with people not optimistic and unsatisfied, so they don’t participate in the election – thus, they have a better chance of winning.”

Already Iran’s parliament, dominated by hard-liners, passed a law to force Mr. Rouhani to boost uranium enrichment levels beyond the 3.67% purity limit prescribed by the deal to 20%. Another provision requires Iran to scale back some cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency if there is no sanctions relief by Feb. 21.

“The JCPOA is dead. The stinking body was irritating our people,” the ultraconservative lawmaker Javad Karimi Ghoddousi said in January. “Thanks to the revolutionary parliament, and its revolutionary legislation, the JCPOA has now been buried.”

Analysts suggest that the law, designed to slow Iran’s return to the nuclear deal, is in fact a tool Mr. Rouhani can use to convince the U.S. to move quickly toward lifting sanctions, wary that a less accommodating president may be elected in June.

“Obviously the trajectory of the JCPOA-related discussions will have a major impact on the discourse and overall mood of the elections,” says Mr. Tabatabai of CARPO.

“If the JCPOA return fails, that would allow far-right factions to build on the disappointment, the momentum, and the political apathy, which might spike even further,” he says. “If the JCPOA goes through and the return is championed, this can obviously help centrist forces, who argue for engagement with the world, to say, ‘Now we are on track to rebuild our economy.’”

Fred Weir

Human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, shown here in his Moscow office on Feb. 4, 2021, is one of five Russians who have been officially declared “foreign agents” by the Kremlin.

Being labeled a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin has historically been a terrible stigma in Russia. But ask Lev Ponomaryov, one of the first Russians to be individually branded as such under a newly amended law, how it affects him, and he simply laughs.

“For me, it’s a badge of honor,” says the Soviet-era democracy activist, former parliamentarian, and staunch critic of the Kremlin. “Those who know me and my work take it humorously, or congratulate me on my new title. But for people who do not know me or are not interested in human rights, it seems that the first thing they ever hear about me is that I’m a foreign agent. I don’t like that.”

Mr. Ponomaryov and people like him might be canaries in the coal mine amid President Vladimir Putin’s changing Russia. Many Western commentators appear convinced that there is no longer any political space for critical opposition to the Kremlin, particularly after what has happened to prominent opposition figure Alexei Navalny, whom Mr. Putin allegedly ordered poisoned last year. Upon Mr. Navalny’s return to Russia last month after recuperating, he was sentenced to a long prison term.

But the situation on the ground looks much more complicated.

Hundreds of civil society activists continue to work in nongovernmental organizations on behalf of causes – such as human rights, environmentalism, election monitoring, prison reform, and legal defense against official abuses – that often bring them into friction with the authorities. Chief among their problems have been increasingly tough laws, enacted over the past eight years, which require any group that engages in activities deemed “political” and receives any amount of funding from abroad to register as a foreign agent. Failure to do so means tough fines and possible closure.

But the law has been applied unevenly over the years and, although scores of organizations remain on the blacklist, not very many have actually been shut down.

Under a new amendment to the law that came into effect in December, media organizations and individuals can now be labeled as foreign agents for the first time. The initial list, published by the Ministry of Justice, names several media outlets, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Five individuals are listed, without explanation, including four journalists and Mr. Ponomaryov.

“The term ‘foreign agent’ had a certain terrifying resonance in the Stalin era,” says Boris Altshuler, a human rights activist in Moscow and contemporary of Mr. Ponomaryov. “But this formula has been applied to many NGOs since 2012, and so far hasn’t entailed anything terrible. Many people just laugh at it, and some compare it metaphorically with a high state award. It’s not clear what the individual designation will mean for Lev Ponomaryov in practice.”

“We are seeing a turn for the worse”

Mr. Ponomaryov already heads three organizations that have long been on the blacklist. His personal designation came as a bit of a surprise to him, and he says it’s too soon to say how much difference it will make. One thing he’s noticed is that any article he publishes, such as his regular blog on the website of opposition-friendly radio station Ekho Moskvy, must contain a subhead at the top, in letters twice the size of the text, warning that the author of the article is fulfilling the functions of a foreign agent.

Denis Sinyakov/Reuters/File

Riot police detain Lev Ponomaryov during an unsanctioned protest in Moscow on May 7, 2012. Mr. Ponomaryov has a long history of standing up for human rights in Russia, which has not always been welcomed by authorities.

A visit to his office in central Moscow in early February found it bustling with activity, with several staffers working computers and telephones, and Mr. Ponomaryov receiving people for regular consultations.

“This law doesn’t affect the number of people who appeal to us for assistance,” he says. “When someone finds themselves in need of human rights representation, there really aren’t very many places they can turn to.”

The National Public Organization for Human Rights, Mr. Ponomaryov’s main group, helps with legal advice, writing letters to relevant officials, and publicizing cases in the media. Its clients include Jehovah’s Witnesses, who’ve been categorized as “extremists” under Russian law and severely persecuted; people associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist political organization that’s been banned in Russia; and a wide range of people suffering from police abuses, especially denizens of Russia’s vast prison system.

“Any public activity, if it attracts attention, will be considered political by our authorities,” Mr. Ponomaryov says. “They start from the premise that anyone must be a foreign agent if they engage in criticism” of the state.

He admits that about two-thirds of his financial support comes from sources outside Russia, but the only one he will name is the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which helps to fund his investigations into abuses in Russian prisons.

“Our work is effective. I have people working with me, and I have to pay them,” he says. “About a third of our money comes from crowdfunding in Russia. But it’s very hard to find donors in the Russian business community who aren’t afraid. So, we have to look elsewhere.”

When his organization was first blacklisted eight years ago, Mr. Ponomaryov says he wrote a letter to Mr. Putin saying it was a shame to live in a country where the leading advocates of human rights were considered to be foreign agents. Mr. Putin responded, the group was taken off the list, and Mr. Ponomaryov received funding from the Presidential Grant Foundation for seven years.

But something has changed in the past few years, and Mr. Ponomaryov no longer receives official funding. He blames the FSB security forces, which he claims are growing in power and trying to build a fascist state in Russia.

“Putin might not be the most orthodox of people, but he did read my letter and arrange presidential grants,” he says. “But things are changing, and there is no longer any money for human rights advocates. We are seeing a turn for the worse.”

A law about information, or about fear?

Andrei Klimov, a member of Russia’s upper house of parliament and chair of the committee that wrote the amendment to the “foreign agent” law, declines to discuss Mr. Ponomaryov’s individual case. But he staunchly defends the law as a reasonable response to what he calls outside interference in Russia’s domestic affairs.

“There are some groups, mainly Russian citizens, who are involved in the real political life of this country and receiving financial support from abroad,” he says. “The people of Russia have a right to know who, and with whom, they are dealing. So, these groups need to prepare special reports, and make sure to mark all their public statements as the work of foreign agents. This doesn’t prevent them from engaging in their activities.”

Mr. Klimov says worse things happen in the U.S., such as declaring the state-funded RT television network as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the arrest and imprisonment of Russian student Maria Butina, who was charged with acting as an “unregistered lobbyist” but was frequently described as a “spy” in U.S. media reports.

He adds that U.S. laws, such as the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, officially mandate U.S. meddling in Russian affairs. “We must protect our sovereignty, block outside interference in our internal political processes,” he says. “It’s just a reaction.”

So far Russia’s “foreign agent” laws have had little impact, but activists worry that they may signal more severe future intentions.

“Our authorities may reference something happening in the U.S., but this law is driven by their own fear of Russian civil society. They see it as the enemy,” says Natalia Taubina, director of the Public Verdict Foundation, a Russian human rights group that has also been cut off from official funding and branded a foreign agent.

“But there is nothing political in our activity. We’re not trying to change the regime, participate in elections, or support any political party. We’re trying to do human rights work. I think the goal our authorities are pursuing is to silence us.”

Mike Chapdelain watched from home as National Rifle Association President Oliver North abruptly resigned at the 2019 convention in Indianapolis. 

Usually a display of unity, the weekend-long event had become ground zero for an internal power struggle between Mr. North and longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Mr. North had lost, but, to Mr. Chapdelain, the NRA had as well.

A 40-year NRA member and maintenance technician in Green Valley, Arizona, Mr. Chapdelain felt internal alarm bells clamor as he watched the feud unfold. He opened his computer and his research “got pretty ugly real quick.”

Mr. Chapdelain found widespread allegations of graft, greed, and impropriety among the NRA’s leadership. But it wasn’t until later reports – detailing how Mr. LaPierre received a lavish pay raise amid the turmoil – that he had finally had enough. A paying NRA member since graduating high school, Mr. Chapdelain canceled his membership. 

“I felt like I was betrayed pretty good,” he says. “I think a lot of members [feel] like that.”

Even amid litigation, investigation, and the threat of dissolution, the NRA’s gravest threat may be estranged members like Mr. Chapdelain. 

From a small shooting sports group to one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying outfits, the association rose to power through its enormous grassroots base. As the politics of gun control changed, the NRA maintained its influence by representing something beyond the Second Amendment. To many, it became a symbol of freedom – a David forever fighting their political Goliaths. 

But then the NRA itself became Goliath. In the past four years, a saga of lawsuits, scandals, and most recently bankruptcy filing, has painted the association as insular and self-interested. Even if it survives, says Adam Winkler, a gun rights expert at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, it has lost the faith of many in the gun rights community, who feel abandoned by their once saving grace. It is a parable of how even the mightiest organizations can be taken down by a betrayal of trust.

“The NRA survived all of these years as the political winds have changed [and] the issues in the gun debate have changed,” says Professor Winkler. Now, “the NRA is definitely suffering from the hubris that comes with success.”

Michael Conroy/AP/File

Former National Rifle Association President Oliver North, shown in Indianapolis on April 26, 2019, said in court filings that he was thwarted at every step as he tried to raise alarm bells about alleged misspending at the gun lobbying group.

Brand built on loyalty

In the 150 years since its founding, success for the NRA has largely meant loyalty.

“The NRA has worked for decades to cultivate and enlarge, to the extent they could, a very strong, loyal, and vociferous grassroots base all around the country,” says Robert Spitzer, a political scientist and expert on gun politics at the State University of New York, Cortland. “That really has been the key to the NRA’s strength and durability compared to other groups.”

Developing such a large base – today around five million members – requires attending to its goals, and historically the NRA has done just that. After more than a century focused on accuracy and outdoorsmanship, the organization reoriented its mission toward gun rights advocacy in the late 1970s, when a new generation of members demanded it enter politics. 

In the decades since, says Professor Spitzer, it’s earned a near-monopoly on the gun lobby by prioritizing its political work and adopting an aggressive, uncompromising posture. As gun control laws grew more popular and gun owners grew more anxious, the NRA styled itself as a defender of freedom for salt-of-the-earth Americans. 

That message crescendoed in 2016, when the NRA’s enormous campaign spending helped sow Republican power in Washington. 

“They conquered the worlds that they had declared were important,” says Rich Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist and firearms advocate.

The fall

But when left without a foil, the NRA began to splinter.

Starting in 2017 a four-year harvest of scandals, allegations of graft and self-dealing among leadership, and damaging litigation has threatened the crucial bond between members and management. 

“You claim to represent these very middle-class, working-class folks who are scraping by ... and then you’re out there chartering private planes and living the life of a multimillionaire,” says Mr. Feldman. “It’s the reality versus the illusion.”  

For the Rev. Kenn Blanchard, host of the podcast “Black Man with a Gun,” that illusion faded long ago, as he worked with the NRA in the 1990s. At first excited to lobby and advertise with the organization, Mr. Blanchard says he grew disenchanted with the NRA’s “insatiable” political wing and elitist management.

“They’re about themselves,” he says. “They’re about self-preservation more than anything else.”

Yet Mr. Blanchard is still an NRA life member, and plans to remain one. The NRA still has deep roots in America’s gun culture, he says, and four years in the wilderness won’t change that. Many states require an NRA certification to become a firearms instructor. The group’s endorsement still matters come November.

“Everything that’s in the gun world is touched by them,” says Mr. Blanchard.

That includes other gun rights groups. 

The NRA has long been a lightning rod in the firearms community, allowing other advocacy groups to operate with less scrutiny, says Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation. Disaffected NRA members can join other, less embattled groups. But that time of shelter may be over. 

“Obviously, it’s not good for the firearms rights community to have the NRA filing bankruptcy,” says Mr. Gottlieb. “Of course, most of us in various groups around the country are trying to pick up the slack as quickly as we can.”

Last week, New York’s attorney general asked a judge to dismiss the bankruptcy filing, saying the NRA was trying to evade oversight. A lawyer for the NRA called it “another transparent move in a partisan crusade to shut down the NRA,” and added, “it welcomes the opportunity to litigate these contrived claims and the motives which led to their filing.”

“Making it accountable”

NRA members are then left with a choice: take their advocacy elsewhere or, as Mr. Blanchard says, “hope this too shall pass.” 

Dave Dell’aquila, a life member in Nashville, Tennessee, made his choice years ago after watching management waste the money of too many trusting blue-collar Americans. Mr. Dell’aquila plans to leave the NRA but only after “making it accountable to the members” through internal reform.  

Most recently, that’s involved filing challenges to the NRA’s bankruptcy – seeking to stop improper debts from being annulled and to appoint an independent trustee to take control of its finances. 

The organization’s recent missteps, experts say, come from a lack of internal guardrails. If the NRA wants to earn back the trust of its estranged members, accountability may be the place to start. 

Scott Gray, a heating and air technician in Nashville, became a member at the height of his interest in firearms, back in his days visiting gun shows each year and never missing an NRA tent. 

Ten years later, in the early 2000s, he cancelled that membership, after increasingly feeling like the NRA was an ineffective advocate. To him, the organization seemed like it was distracted, and he felt ignored. If Congress could pass an assault rifle ban, he says, then the NRA wasn’t spending his money wisely. 

But even though Mr. Gray isn’t as involved in the gun community as he once was, he has an open mind – as do the other gun owners he knows.

“Some people feel like the bankruptcy would be the best thing for them,” says Mr. Gray. “That way they would restructure and go back to their roots and not their lush lifestyles and asking for donations.”

To him, that means refocusing on members’ rights, and being the attentive “guard dog” the NRA was always meant to be.

“People don’t mind giving to them,” says Mr. Gray. “It’s just they want to see results.”

Penguin Random House

“How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” by Bill Gates, Knopf, 272 pp.; and “Mike Nichols: A Life” by Mark Harris, Penguin Press, 688 pp.

This month's fiction offerings span the globe – with stories set in Tunisia, Chile, and Britain – while the nonfiction titles tackle climate change and the labor movement.

1. The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson

Anne Youngson follows her charming epistolary novel, “Meet Me at the Museum,” with another soothing, heartening read about the possibility of forging new connections and changing one’s life at any age. Two women, new acquaintances and both at a crossroads in their lives, agree to help a stranger by skippering her narrowboat some 300 miles north along England’s canals. In the course of their adventure, they meet some unusual people and untangle their thoughts about how they want to live going forward. Read the full review here.

2. How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

When 7-year-old M skips school to accompany her father on his rounds as a traveling salesman in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the two embark on an adventure that alters their lives. Their successful partnership soon deteriorates, and along with it, a way of life. María José Ferrada, whose previous work includes children’s books, imparts a tale that captures a child’s perspective on a world created and disrupted by adults.

3. The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

Amazon Crossing

“The Ardent Swarm” by Yamen Manai, Amazon Crossing, 192 pp.

In a beautifully written novel that blends poetry with politics, Tunisian author Yamen Manai explores the era that followed the Arab Spring in the 2010s. In an allegorical tale, he writes of a devoted “bee whisperer” who finds one of his hives destroyed. Searching for answers, he ventures beyond his village and discovers a world filled with people with competing interests. 

4. My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee

Tiller Bardmon, the antihero of  “My Year Abroad,” returns to the U.S. from an international escapade. His discombobulating journey becomes an outstanding bildungsroman confronting identity, familial bonds, misplaced loyalty, and consumption culture. 

5. The Girl From the Channel Islands by Jenny Lecoat

Jenny Lecoat’s World War II novel follows Hedy Bercu, an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis in Vienna only to find herself working for them as a translator. Inspired by true events, this sweeping story of humanity and hope celebrates courageous individuals surviving oppression.

6. Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris

This entertaining, illuminating biography of famed director Mike Nichols stays focused on his work, spanning his comedy improvisation duo with Elaine May and his direction of several Neil Simon plays along with movies such as “The Graduate” and “Silkwood.”

7. The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Macmillan Publishers

“The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” by Anna Malaika Tubbs, Flatiron Books, 272 pp.

This eye-opening debut corrects the erasure of Alberta King (Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother), Louise Little (Malcolm X’s mother), and Berdis Baldwin (James Baldwin’s mother) from the historical record. Each woman was a strong influence on her famous son; all three buried their sons as well.

8. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee

In this near-perfect combination of author and subject, Hermione Lee crafts a biography of one of the greatest living playwrights. Stoppard’s work includes not only plays (“Arcadia”) but also films (“Shakespeare in Love”). The book will surely be the jumping-off point for all future studies of Stoppard.

9. Midnight in Vehicle City by Edward McClelland

Fed up with erratic pay and dangerous working conditions, workers at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, went on strike in late 1936. Edward McClelland vividly recounts how the strikers fought off local law enforcement to maintain control of the plant, enabling the fledgling United Auto Workers to negotiate one of the biggest labor victories in U.S. history.

10. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

Bill Gates offers a clear summary of the climate crisis and argues, unsurprisingly, that technological innovation is the solution to the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. The book is a treat for technophiles, and a crash course for nature lovers on how our civilization works. Still, the book provides little guidance on how to mobilize the political will or the personal resolve to live more sustainably. It is a sobering yet hopeful assessment, and a call to arms.

Reuters

The World Trade Organization's new director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, takes part in an online meeting in Potomac, Maryland.

One global achievement during the pandemic is that major countries put aside their differences and agreed on a person to lead the World Trade Organization. And not just any person, but the first woman and the first African to be director-general of this guardian institution of open trade. This consensus hints at what Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala herself calls the WTO’s potential to be a “force for good” in countering the coronavirus’s economic effects and in lifting up the world’s most marginalized people.

The last thing the world needs, says the Harvard-educated economist, is a “surge of nationalism” in response to the pandemic and a closing of borders and a disruption of global supply chains. Multilateralism has never been more needed than now, says this Nigerian-born American citizen.

The pandemic, she points out, has forced many countries to be transparent, predictable, and fair in how they contain the virus – all fundamental principles of the multilateral trading system set up after World War II and especially in the WTO’s founding 26 years ago.

Her first priority is to make sure health supplies flow freely between countries. After that, her biggest task is to spread more widely the benefits of the global trading system. Last year, as the pandemic was starting, she wrote that out of the “doom and gloom” of an epidemic, “there are fresh insights about the value of caring work, the need for empathy and the importance of community.” Will the world, she asked, see “a new spirit of kindness based on the dramatic reminder of our shared humanity?”

Growing up in Nigeria, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala saw how trade protectionism can lead to political patronage and corruption. As the country’s first female finance minister, she stood up to special-interest groups in a campaign against corruption. As managing director of the World Bank, she honed her managerial skills as an honest broker, as a listener, and as someone with what she calls “an objective head.”

The WTO needs such skills to form a new consensus about its purpose. The 164-nation body has faltered in the face of a backlash against globalization and a contest between China and the United States, especially over their competing models for running an economy. Trade, she says, cannot be made “a bogeyman to blame for the economic problems that some countries face.” She suggests one solution is to allow countries to self-select their commitments to lesser trade agreements.

Her ascendancy to the WTO comes as her home continent officially started a free-trade zone on Jan. 1. African leaders now see how trade has reduced poverty in other parts of the world.

Trade is not an end itself but a means, says Ms. Okonjo-Iweala. If properly managed, it can be an inclusive force to bring marginalized people into an economy, or what she says is an equal opportunity to make progress. One good example is the selection of someone who once lived on one meal a day to fix the global trading system.