For a long time, Kathy Visser struggled to find the right school for her son Jordan.

There had always been options in Arizona’s public school system. The state has long had a policy of open enrollment, allowing any family to apply to any of the state’s public schools, and it still has a nation-leading percentage of students attending charter schools.

She remembers vividly the public school teachers who worked tirelessly to teach Jordan when he was younger, marveling at the talent and commitment they displayed. But when the family had to move, or when his teachers moved on, her experience navigating the system and finding the right fit for a son who’s struggled with developmental and emotional challenges felt like being in a frustrating bureaucratic maze, she says.

“Sometimes they fight the parents, and when they’re fighting the parents, the freedom to find an appropriate education for your child is a luxury only for the rich,” Ms. Visser says.

On a desert-hot day in August, however, she’s standing with Jordan in a modest stable of horses at the private school where she was able to send her son, using funds from an education savings account that Arizona calls “empowerment scholarships.” The school, The H.E.A.R.T. Center in Glendale, is a 16-student “microschool” that combines equine therapy and personalized instruction, and her son, now 18, has flourished here, both of them say.

“Arizona is a lot more free when it comes to parent-directed education,” says Ms. Visser, who taught public school herself in the mid-1990s, when she lived in Colorado and worked with lower-income students in some of the state’s outlying rural districts.

Chad Dahlquist/Courtesy of Kathy Visser

Kathy Visser, her son Jordan, and a horse named Sisu spend time together in the stable of Jordan's school, The H.E.A.R.T. Center in Glendale, Arizona, in August.

Her experiences have made her a vocal advocate for a nationwide movement its supporters now hail as “education freedom,” a relatively new label in conservative education circles for a movement of controversial ideas and education policies that have mostly been known as “school choice.”

Ms. Visser was among the first to participate in Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program nearly a decade ago, when it was limited to families with kids with certain challenges or those enrolled in public schools the state deemed failing. 

But in July, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a major, universal expansion of this scholarship program, which he and supporters around the country are calling “the gold standard for educational freedom.”

“Today we’re taking additional action to ensure that every Arizona student can attend any school of their choosing,” Governor Ducey told a raucous crowd of supporters in August, at a ceremonial signing at Phoenix Christian Preparatory School, one of the state’s largest and longest-running private evangelical schools.

“There is no one-size-fits-all model to education,” he continued. “Kids and families should have access to the school or learning program that best fits their unique needs, regardless of income. ... Misguided special-interest groups will try to tell you that this legislation will diminish our public education system. They couldn’t be more wrong. Public education means educating the public.”

This redefinition of public education is intentional, and Arizona has in many ways become not only a leading laboratory for school choice ideas that have simmered in U.S. education for over half a century, but also a battleground in which traditional ideas in public education are clashing with a movement by religious conservatives to bring taxpayer funding to private education.

This decadeslong movement has found momentum after a series of Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for states to fund private religious schools. Florida, Idaho, Indiana, West Virginia, and other conservative states have also worked to expand programs to help support private and religious schools with state funding.

Controversies over curriculum, especially when it comes to race and human sexuality, have fueled these efforts. And a growing number of parents around the country, frustrated with pandemic restrictions and state bureaucracies, have begun to lose confidence in their public schools. In a June 2022 poll, Gallup found that only 13% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. public schools.

As a result, many have become attracted to an understanding of freedom that includes a model of education pluralism, supporting state funding for a wide variety of schools that could in turn send an innovative jolt through American education.

“I believe this program and ones like it across the country are going to revolutionize education in the U.S.,” Ms. Visser says of Arizona’s approach. “It will give immediate access to educational options for students and bring accountability to our public education in a way that will improve the entire system in ways that are not possible now.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

In Phoenix, Shari Griswold, a public school supporter, speaks to voter Jesse Tomchak on Aug. 20, 2022, to ask him to sign a petition to put the recent Arizona school choice law on the ballot. Opponents need about 119,000 signatures before Sept. 24 to put the new legislation in limbo until it could be voted on in 2024.

Pushback and signatures

Opponents of Arizona’s new law, however, have a very different understanding of the meaning of freedom when it comes to universal education. 

On another unusually hot and humid August day, Rachel Clawson is canvassing a neighborhood in East Mesa, near Phoenix, asking residents there to sign a petition to put the state’s expanded school choice program on a voter referendum. 

And if Ms. Clawson and a well-organized coalition of union members, teachers, and other parents can collect about 119,000 signatures before Sept. 24, the state’s effort to provide universal support for all Arizona schools will be put to a majority vote. 

It’s already too late to put such a measure on the 2022 ballot, however. So the law would remain in limbo until voters potentially have a say in 2024.

These opponents have a sense of optimism. In 2017, the Arizona legislature passed a similar universal voucher bill, but opponents then collected enough signatures to put that measure on the ballot. Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected it by a 2-to-1 margin.

Until recently, Ms. Clawson taught high school history and government at her hometown alma mater. Now a mother of three kids, she’s turned her career toward education advocacy, and she’s now a staff member with Save Our Schools, the group spearheading the signature collection campaign.

“Education is the bedrock of democracy,” she says. “It’s the bedrock of our economy. And now we’re taking taxpayer dollars, funds from public schools, and putting them into systems that are not transparent and for which there’s no academic accountability tied to them.”

Ms. Clawson believes that Arizona’s voucher measures will only siphon more taxpayer dollars from an already struggling and underfunded public school system. Arizona ranks near the bottom of both the country’s spending per student and the amount it pays teachers. Heading into the new school year, Arizona had about 2,000 general teacher vacancies and more than 800 special education teacher openings, according to a survey last month by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association.

“My kids are in public schools, and I see teachers leaving,” Ms. Clawson says. “And I mean, I have three kids under the age of 9, and I’m just like, what is that going to mean for my kids’ future that we can’t seem to keep teachers?”

Yard signs in support of public schools are piled up at a Save Our Schools rally, Aug. 20, 2022, in Phoenix.

Differing definitions of freedom 

Arizona’s public schools, like most around the country, are funded through a combination of federal, state, and local taxes. The state plans to pay for its Empowerment Scholarship Account program by transferring 90% of the state funding portion that a public school receives for each student, providing up to $7,000 for families that opt out of the system.

The program will weaken the state’s public schools, say members of the Arizona Education Association, a teachers union. Those schools serve the vast majority of Arizona’s students, over 1.1 million. If the program goes into effect, over 66,000 students who attend one of the state’s private or religious schools will now qualify for a $7,000 scholarship.

“You can talk about red tape and bureaucracy, but you can also talk about rules and rights,” says Jack Schneider, associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. “And if you say that your goal is just to free everybody so that they can pursue their own interests in a free market, what you’re also saying there is that we’re going to pull down the rules that we have collectively established, that we had democratically established.

“And so when you do peel back those rules and those rights, is that freedom that people are left with?” he continues. “For some it will be, but it will be the freedom to dominate the weak and the less privileged and the marginalized.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Leda Devlieger signs up volunteers to go out and get signatures to oppose the recent school choice law at an August rally in Phoenix for Save Our Schools.

In many ways, the entire ethos of American public education from the start has been rooted in an idea of freedom that emphasizes equality, supporters say.

In the middle of the 19th century, the civic vision of Horace Mann, a Massachusetts reformer who helped establish the nation’s first statewide, taxpayer-funded education system, saw public education as “the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” 

“School is a place – and it’s one of the few places that we have – to try to help young people learn the kinds of ideas and practices that are compatible with a multiracial modern democracy, where there are lots of different kinds of people who also need to be included,” says Professor Schneider, who with Jennifer Berkshire co-wrote the book “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.” 

Indeed, one of the biggest issues that those on the left have with taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools, and with the school choice movement in general, is the fact that the vast majority of private schools are religiously sectarian, and maintain the freedom to exclude LGBTQ students and others.

“They don’t believe that LGBTQ people belong at their schools to teach or to learn,” says Jeanne Casteen, a former public school teacher now running for the Arizona Senate, speaking at an August Save the Schools rally in front of the teachers union headquarters in Phoenix. “And this means we have state-sanctioned discrimination against our kids and our teachers.”

Bob Christie/AP

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey speaks at an event supporting a new universal school voucher program he signed into law in July and re-signed again in a ceremony Aug. 16, 2022, at Phoenix Christian Preparatory School. The law will be the nation's most expansive voucher program, allowing all students to take public money to attend private schools, if opponents fail to block it by collecting enough signatures to refer it to the ballot.

“A radical shift of paradigm”

Jeff Blake, the superintendent of Phoenix Christian Preparatory School, says it was pretty exciting when Governor Ducey chose one of Arizona’s longest-serving Christian schools to host the event for the state’s new universal voucher bill.

The governor’s office had been looking for success stories to highlight some of Arizona’s education initiatives, and nearly 96% of Phoenix Christian’s students have a significant part of their tuition paid by a “school tuition organization,” another financial strategy that school choice thinkers created to indirectly channel funding to private schools. 

In Arizona, anyone who donates to such an organization gets a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, while these organizations then relay these donations to private school tuition. The Supreme Court declared such tuition programs constitutional in 2020.

But in many ways, the governor’s choice to celebrate the new law at the school reflects the fact that the school choice movement has been dominated by a coalition of religious conservatives going back at least a half-century, scholars say, when private Christian academies began to proliferate after the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Those who promote the ideas of education freedom often note that their vision contains a more pluralistic understanding of education. Instead of seeing the classroom as a “common,” nonsectarian civic space, advocates believe religious education should be understood as part of a larger American tapestry of different kinds of schools.

But this brand of education pluralism, built into the idea of school choice, had a surprising and transforming effect on Phoenix Christian, a theologically conservative evangelical institution. 

“There’s been a radical shift of paradigm,” Superintendent Blake says. “About the same time that the [school tuition organizations] came about, that was about the same time Phoenix Christian took the initial steps in becoming a missional Christian school – that is, a family did not have to adhere to our statement of faith to attend.”

In many ways, this only sharpened the school’s identity as an unapologetically Christ-centered school, he says, and in interviews with prospective families, they explain their emphasis on chapel, Bible study, and their code of Christian ethics, including a view of human sexuality in which any sex outside a marriage of a man and woman, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is outside God’s plan.  

He doubts whether families with LGBTQ students would be comfortable in such an environment. “But as long as you’re aware of that, and are comfortable with that, we’re able to enter into a covenant relationship and work together to build a Christ-centered school.”

The shift to understanding itself as a mission school open to the community, too, began to transform it from within.  

Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor

Denise Ceballos Viner, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who is running for the Phoenix City Council, became a vocal supporter for Arizona’s school choice policies because she felt the public schools serving Black and Latino communities in the Phoenix area were failing.

“When I first started here 27 years ago, the majority of the kids, the vast majority, were Caucasian, and generally coming from upper-middle-class or upper-class families,” Mr. Blake says. “You fast-forward to today, we’re a school of no majority.”

“There’s kids piling out of city buses and kids piling out of Mercedes in our parking lot, and now they’re coming from every corner of the city,” he continues. “And we really think that’s part of our unique calling, too, in a world that’s kind of tearing itself apart. Here at school, where we build a Christ-centered environment, we seek to pursue unity, both racial and socioeconomic.”

The governor’s visit to Phoenix Christian included a coalition of Black faith leaders and community activists as well, including Janelle Wood, founder of the Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix, who spoke during the August event.

“As a concerned Black mother, I want to make sure that we are heard loud and clear from this day forth,” she said. “We matter, our children matter, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to keep speaking to each system that holds our families back and our children back.”

Denise Ceballos Viner, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who is running for the Phoenix City Council, became a vocal supporter for Arizona’s school choice policies because she felt the public schools serving Black and Latino communities in the Phoenix area were failing.

She sent each of her six daughters to public schools, but she says she used the address of a family member in a different district to send her two oldest daughters to better schools.

That was before Arizona began to pass its school choice initiatives, including a statewide open enrollment policy, which allows any Arizona family to enroll in any public school. “The majority of people that believe in school choice don’t want public schools to be shut down. We just want to hold them accountable for the teaching failures that have been happening for decades,” Ms. Ceballos Viner says.

Private Catholic schools have served poorer urban communities for over a century, says Christine Accurso, another parent of a child with learning challenges who’s been organizing parents to fight for the state’s voucher expansion. She’s also been organizing families to rally against the Save Our Schools effort to gather enough signatures. 

“When we have freedom, and a parent gets to choose, we will look sincerely at what’s happening in our public schools, district, or charters, and see if that’s what we want for our children,” Ms. Accurso says. “And if it’s working for them? Awesome, don’t move that child. But if it’s not working for them, then they can take a path that they know their child deserves.

“What I’m saying is, the world is a better place when the parent of a child, the mom and dad of a child, are freely directing 100% of a child’s education,” she continues. “And a lot of parents can’t do that because they can’t afford something else outside the government-paid schools.”

Police Constable Imran Rasheed is on standby for duty during the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. He is also second-generation British Bangladeshi. As such, he says the queen’s death has stirred up conflicting emotions.

On the one hand, the monarchy evokes the agonies of “horrific acts conducted in the name of empire, dividing nations and conquering lands overseas," he says. But he also holds very personal affection for the queen for her “countless charitable causes.” As miles of mourners file past her casket, he feels a sense of attachment to Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.

Those born in Britain to immigrant parents “occupy a gray, middle area, constantly changing,” he says, finding difficulty separating “the individual from the institution.”

Mr. Rasheed’s conflict is widely shared among Britain’s immigrant and diaspora communities with links to former colonies, particularly in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. For many of them, celebrating the departed queen’s life comes with added weight. Like many others among the 14% of the U.K. population who identify as nonwhite, he has developed a growing understanding in recent years of the legacy of empire and the monarchy’s place within that. There is a sense among many that their reverence for the departed queen should not come at the expense of remembering the Crown’s role in British colonialism.

“Growing up in the Midlands, many West Indian [Caribbean] households had pictures of the queen, Jesus, and the West Indies cricket team,” says social commentator and cultural historian Patrick Vernon, born to Jamaican parents who had arrived in the 1950s.

“Bit by bit, the front room has changed. That reflects where we are now.”

The queen and the monarchy

Like much of the country, a deep-seated reverence for the queen endures among Britain’s immigrant and diaspora communities.

Over 5,000 members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a minority sect founded in the 19th century, sang a “pledge of allegiance” chant at a three-day congregation mourning the queen’s death.

“As British Muslims, we are saddened by the demise of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and we stand together with the nation during this difficult time,” says Abdul Quddus Arif, president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association.

Older worshippers at London Central Mosque, partly funded by Winston Churchill’s war Cabinet in 1940, remember the queen as an anchor in their lives in an ever-changing, socially liberalizing world. Both her Christian faith – which they found a source of inspiration and commonality against the backdrop of the modern decline in religious affiliation – and her policy of noninterference in the early years of Pakistani and Indian independence still resonate.

Alberto Pezzali/AP

Anthony Brown, a campaigner for reparations for U.K. immigrants whose right to live in Britain was illegally challenged by the government, takes part in a march in London on Aug. 1, 2021, to mark the anniversary of the act that freed enslaved people throughout the British Empire.

Older members of the so-called Windrush generation, too, had a “degree of deference” toward the queen, says Mr. Vernon. They were British nationals from the Caribbean who had arrived between 1948 and 1971. In 2017, it emerged that many were wrongly detained, deported, and denied legal rights under successive governments, culminating in a “hostile environment” policy driven by former Home Secretary Theresa May.

Such injustices, along with painful memories of colonialism and the struggles of postwar migration, have led some to question whether mourning the queen betrays both their ancestors and the harsh realities of the immigrant experience in Britain.

For Fatima Rajina, an academic specializing in British Bangladeshi social history, honoring the queen’s memory is an affront to those who have had their lands “looted” for precious resources, including royal jewels such as the Kohinoor diamond and the Great Star of Africa, mined in India and South Africa during the colonial era.

The monarchy, she says, symbolizes “intrinsic values Britain holds very dear, and we see this in [the] everyday: obeisance to authority with little critique, stifling any form of resistance, and upholding the stratification along social class lines.”

Challenges for King Charles

Whatever the legacy of the queen, King Charles III faces a new set of challenges.

He will have to maintain broad support for the monarchy at a time of deepening inequality in Britain, where immigrant communities are already at the sharp end of the poverty line. According to the Office for National Statistics, people of Bangladeshi origin earn on average 20% less than their white British counterparts – by far the largest ethnic pay gap in Britain, with Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean households not far behind.

Charles has, though, established a connection over many years with religious leaders, particularly in the British Muslim community.

“He spoke out against Islamophobia at a time when hate crimes and assaults on Muslims were on the rise, especially after 9/11,” says Kazi Rehman, imam of the London Central Mosque. The new king’s acknowledgment in his inaugural address to the nation that Britain is now a country of “many faiths” has already won some hearts and minds.

Charles faces plenty of work ahead of him. Mr. Vernon, a “reluctant” recipient of the queen’s Order of the British Empire honor, says the king must quickly prioritize potentially tricky conversations about colonialism.

“He will have to face the big issue of reparations and the history of Britain’s past in the Caribbean and other parts of the Commonwealth,” he says. “That’s not going to go away. The genie is out of the bottle.”

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

A Ukrainian man hauls a cart with wood for cooking and heating in his temporary house in Izium, Ukraine, Sept. 14, 2022. The strategic town was recently recaptured by Ukrainian troops from the Russian army.

In Ukraine, the battle map has been shifting in Kyiv’s favor. Yet in the critical weeks ahead, it’s the weather map that may turn out to matter more.

In the Kremlin, in war-ravaged Ukraine, and in the allied capitals on which Ukraine is relying for military and financial support, the countdown to winter has begun.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is hoping it will be a long and punishingly cold one. And he’s giving every indication that he is determined to maximize day-to-day suffering – and economic damage – by denying heat and electricity to Ukraine and its allies in Europe.

The twin aims are to break the morale of Ukrainians and to weaken European public support for Kyiv by raising the price of such solidarity.

The question is whether it will work. His invasion six month ago, intended to subdue and swallow up Ukraine within days, proved an epic misjudgment.

Has he miscalculated again?

The answer will lie with the Ukrainians and their allies. And for months now, they too have had their eyes on the winter ahead.

That has already been evident in Ukraine’s dramatic offensive against Russia’s occupation forces in the east of the country. As long ago as mid-July, a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was stressing the need to make major advances before winter, when the Russians would be able to “dig in” and better resist attacks to dislodge them.

That helps explain the urgency with which Ukraine has moved – retaking some 1,500 square miles of its territory in the northeast – and its push to make further gains before winter sets in.

How successful they are will hinge only partly on the Russian army’s readiness to fight; more important is whether Ukraine’s allies are ready to provide more and more powerful weaponry.

But the Kremlin will be just as worried by another aspect of Europe’s winter planning – the continent’s intensive efforts to cushion the effects of the energy crisis that Mr. Putin is counting on to undermine support for Mr. Zelenskyy.

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

Local volunteers carry bags with humanitarian aid on the pedestrian bridge across the Donets River in Izium, Ukraine, recently recaptured from Russian troops, Sept. 14, 2022.

For months, European Union states have been urgently restocking badly depleted stores of natural gas. This week, the president of the EU’s executive commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that their storage facilities were now nearly 85% full.

She also announced an unprecedented plan for a $140 billion windfall tax on gas, oil, and coal producers to help pay for government subsidies that will limit European households’ gas bills. Britain, despite having left the EU, is also finalizing a package, which could total nearly $200 billion, to cap energy price increases for households and businesses.

A number of EU states, including Germany, have also been taking steps to cut energy use and drawing up plans for more drastic cutbacks if necessary.

So far, the main effect of Russia’s sharp cutback on natural gas supplies to the EU – it provided some 40% of the bloc’s imports before the war, but less than a quarter of that today – has been to harden Europe’s political resolve and accelerate moves to find long-term alternatives.

Inevitably, the Russian cutbacks have inflicted damage on European economies, if only because they’ve contributed to a steep worldwide hike in energy prices. But EU countries have set themselves the goal of eventually importing no Russian gas at all, and they have been adapting more quickly than the Kremlin will have expected.

Yet, winter could still be grueling.

In Ukraine, more than 6 million people have lost their homes as a result of the invasion. Half a million, mostly in the east of the country, are already living without electricity.

And the Russians’ immediate response to recent Ukrainian success on the battlefield – missile strikes on civilian power plants – leaves little doubt that Mr. Putin is ready to deny Ukrainians power, heat, and light when the winter nights arrive.

In Europe, too, the EU’s preparations may not be sufficient to prevent blackouts if the winter proves especially severe. Even if things do not get that bad, there is every possibility that EU economies will be tipped into recession.

Still, recent polls indicate that grassroots European support for Ukraine is holding up, six months into the war. And Ms. von der Leyen, while frankly acknowledging that the EU “will be tested” in the winter ahead, was keen to remind member states that a deeper principle was at stake: “It is autocracy against democracy.”

Both she and Mr. Putin know, however, that the next stage of that struggle will depend on more than the military experts.

It’s in the hands of the weather forecasters.

Among the rugged hills and quiet, shady woods of central Alabama, it suddenly appears – a mountain of coal, hundreds of feet high, inky black against the orange of the setting sun.

Braxton Wright points across the mine’s sprawling complex. But Mr. Wright isn’t working today – and hasn’t since March of last year. Instead, he’s standing across the road, on a picket line with a handful of other miners. 

“We wanted our dignity back,” says Mr. Wright, a member of the United Mine Workers of America Local 2368, which was among those that went on strike April 1, 2021. The mine has since been kept running by nonunion workers, as a grinding impasse over wages and benefits drags on between the union and owner Warrior Met Coal. 

But politically, the Brookwood miners say, their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.

“The Republicans have kind of always been anti-union,” Mr. Wright says. “And most Democrats just see the word ‘coal.’”

The miners and their union say they’re determined to press on, relying on a far-from-depleted strike fund. But with the outcome anything but assured, the plight of miners like Mr. Wright could be a harbinger of a larger problem – a canary in an even larger coal mine. As the country shifts toward green energy, a looming need is to ensure that workers like coal miners are able to find new work. The general idea is referred to by policymakers as a “just transition” to cleaner energy.

So, what does justice for workers look like in this transition? Some states are seeking initial answers. But the experience of these coal miners may also suggest that, as workers raise their voices, it will require a shift in thought for party leaders on both sides to listen.

“When people, right now, oftentimes talk about ‘just transition,’ [away from fossil fuels] they’re often looking at it from a very moral, ethical viewpoint. ... I see more of a contract” between workers and politicians, says Michaël Aklin, associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. But, he adds, “This grand bargain only works if both sides trust each other.”

“Many fossil fuel workers have started to turn more towards voting on the right,” he adds. “It’s not clear whether they will actually trust the Democrats on this. And if so, then that’s going to limit how successful this can actually be down the road.”

Nick Roll

Braxton Wright, a member of the United Mine Workers of America, stands on strike outside the Warrior Met coal mine in Brookwood, Alabama, Sept. 6, 2022.

To some onlookers, the question of a just transition for these miners will become salient when and if the mining jobs actually disappear. But for others, at a time when coal jobs are fading around the nation, the miners’ cause already intersects with the debate over caring for workers affected by industry upheaval.

Amid a resurgence of activism around organized labor in the United States, the 1,000 or so striking workers of UMWA might have been expected to catch some of the spotlight. Indeed, some Democrats and Republicans on the campaign trail here in Alabama have voiced support for the miners, and Sen. Bernie Sanders attended a union rally and invited miners to testify on the strike in Congress. But in general, the miners say they have only received a smattering of political support – despite being just down the road from Bessemer, where an effort to form a union at an Amazon warehouse last year became a major flashpoint for Democrats to tout their support of organized labor. It was just days later that the UMWA workers formed their picket lines. 

Using coal: steel versus electricity

The mining jobs in Brookwood aren’t in immediate danger, even as Democrats tout the green energy investments of the Inflation Reduction Act and, separately, as renewable forms of energy become more competitive against fossil fuels. That’s because the coal mined in Brookwood is used in steel production – something Mr. Wright wishes the green energy crowd would acknowledge. Still, steel production is responsible for 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, making it a prime target for innovators hoping to curb carbon output. 

The outlook is worse for other coal miners: The number of Americans employed in the coal industry has already more than halved, to around 40,000 workers, since 2012. Even under President Donald Trump, who pledged to bring back the coal industry and succeeded in cutting regulations, long-term economic trends meant the industry lost around 10,000 jobs while he was in office. 

“I don’t think [the miners at Warrior Met are] as endangered as steam coal is, but it does concern me – about why haven’t [politicians] been out there, if nothing else but to come talk to the people that’s on strike, and see what they can do?” says Larry Spencer, vice president of the UMWA district that covers the striking miners in Brookwood. “That would help so much with the people feeling that they are being heard.”

Indeed, the impetus for the current strike has nothing to do with climate change. In 2015, the mine’s previous owner, Walter Energy, declared bankruptcy. In a bid to save their jobs, the union accepted pay cuts. Now, with the new owner, Warrior Met, running a profitable mine, they want the return to the status quo – something they say they were promised would eventually happen when they originally agreed to the cuts. Warrior Met has offered multiple contracts during the impasse, but the union is still holding out for a return to 2015 standards. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Men work in the generator room at Longview Power, a coal-powered energy plant, on Jan. 23, 2020, in Maidsville, West Virginia. Longview is one of the most efficient coal plants in the U.S., with much lower emission rates than older coal plants. Many states are seeking to phase out coal burning for electricity, and the coal mining jobs have fallen sharply.

Solutions from the states

The idea of a just transition for certain workers – whether because of a shift to green energy, or because of jobs moving overseas amid expanding global free trade – has been around for decades. As industries come and go, it’s not just individual jobs on the line, advocates say, but entire communities built around them.

In 2016, long before talk of a Green New Deal, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton gave a speech where she staked out the competing priorities of adopting clean energy, adjusting to the macroeconomic headwinds long driving out coal mining, and supporting workers left behind by such changes.

“We don’t want to forget those people,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.” She proposed bringing jobs and economic development to coal country.

But voters and the media latched on to a different line in the speech, where Mrs. Clinton said she was “going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Fairly or not, a sentiment had formed among many voters that the party at large, despite its past relationship with coal unions, was more focused on green energy than miners’ livelihoods. (This sentiment also coincided with more and more of the Democratic base being made up of both urban-dwelling and white collar workers.)

Today, even as President Joe Biden touts himself as leading “the most pro-union administration in American history,” and his new legislation routes $369 billion to climate and clean energy efforts, the United States largely lacks a national strategy for a just transition.
Some states, however, have begun to act.

New Mexico has dedicated tens of millions of dollars to help workers and communities displaced from looming coal mine closures as the state transitions to 80% renewables by 2040. Colorado has established an Office of Just Transition at the state’s labor department, dedicated to managing not just the jobs lost, but tax bases taken out by closures of mines and coal-fired power plants, scheduled to be phased out anytime between the next few years and 2070.

“We try to have respectful interactions. We try to follow communities’ and workers’ leads in terms of what they want to do moving forward. And hopefully over time we will prove ourselves worthy of some trust,” says Wade Buchanan, director of the Colorado office, who notes that support for its mission has become increasingly bipartisan. During a recent vote for more funding, Republicans still weren’t necessarily warm to the idea of an energy transition, Mr. Buchanan says, but they expressed that “If we’re going to do that, we’re glad we have an office like this.”

While the miners in Alabama say they feel politically abandoned, one group has made inroads with them – but not from the political center. The Birmingham chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been active on UMWA picket lines. Haley Czarnek, the local DSA labor committee co-chair, says she doesn’t see a contradiction between supporting coal miners and advocating for climate change action.

“As long as my electricity is coming from coal being burned, I want the people that are mining it to have a dignified life,” Ms. Czarnek says, sitting at a recently unionized Starbucks in midtown Birmingham. 

Buoyed by being suppliers of the steel industry rather than of power plants, workers on the picket line remain confident in the future of their mine. And what they want, they say, is less complicated to figure out than the uncertain future around the transition to renewables and how it will play out. 

“It goes up and down, that’s the way it works” Rob Wright, another miner on the picket line on a recent evening, says about the coal industry. This strike is the longest he’s been above ground in 16 years, and he desperately wants to go back into the deep. “All we want to do is provide for our families.”

“The Woman King,” directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, tells the story of Nanisca, played by Viola Davis, general of the Agojie warriors – an elite, all-female fighting force. Set in the 1820s in the West African kingdom of Dahomey, present-day Benin, the film balances ferocious action with intimate moments, creating compelling characters and bringing to life a complex and little-known time and place.

Period pieces featuring predominantly Black characters from the 19th century are typically slave stories, harrowing tales of grief and loss set in the American South. By contrast, “The Woman King” shows us a world rich in resources and culture. The stellar cast delivers intimate portraits of the women of the Agojie, their ambitions, passions, and dignity.

Interest in the Agojie fighters, sometimes referred to as the Dahomey Amazons, increased after “Black Panther” depicted Wakanda’s fictional fighting force, thought to be loosely based on the Agojie. In “The Woman King,” we get an in-depth look, going inside the Agojie training compound to see what led women to join the forces, how they trained, and what they did to protect the kingdom from neighboring realms and European armies alike.

Africans’ role in the slave trade

The movie’s depiction of Dahomey’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade is rare in mainstream American film. It brings to light the complex role Africans played as traffickers and those trafficked, as advocates who expanded kingdoms through voracious slave trading and abolitionists who sought to end it.

Dahomey’s domestic economy was built on slavery and the gains from war. The kingdom engaged heavily in trading captives to other Africans and to Europeans, exchanging them for weapons to support itself in wars, to fend off neighbors, and to free itself from the yoke of the Oyo kingdom to the east. Additionally, the Dahomey paid annual tribute to the Oyo in the form of captives intended for slavery. 

Yet, while the film depicts Dahomey’s part in the transatlantic slave trade, it does not capture the full brutality resulting from it. Few Africans could have imagined the horror of chattel slavery that awaited captives across the ocean. While West African groups did participate in slavery, enslaved people were still seen as human beings with rights and opportunities to be freed in a variety of ways, depending on the kingdom. In contrast, people who were trafficked overseas were considered property under Colonial laws, controlled with horrific levels of violence and worked until their death in captivity.

Femininity’s strength

“The Woman King” also features a Black perspective on concepts of femininity and feminism. The characters don’t fall into the typical binary of strong and masculine or soft and feminine. Instead, they embody both strength and softness in ways that may feel familiar to many Black women today. In our own time, Black women are sometimes penalized for seeming too masculine, too aggressive, and yet they often face substantial inequities requiring them to fight for their rights. 

“The Woman King” reminds us that Black women come from a long line of fierce women. The Agojie were empowered elites answerable only to the king. They were early feminists, whose strength, power, and fearlessness were welcome and who wielded the same power as men, while retaining their unique identities as women. Called Mino, or mother, the Agojie warriors were highly respected among the Dahomey people. Their ferociousness was an important aspect of their femininity, not a contradiction of it. 

Hollywood depictions of Black people have too often been portrayed through a stereotypical white gaze, resulting in Black characters narrowly represented as slaves or brutes, jezebels or mammies, caricatures painted in racist brushstrokes – if they’re represented at all. More recently, increased diversity in casting has met with resistance. “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” released this month, drew backlash for its Latino elf and other nonwhite characters. A trailer for the remake of “The Little Mermaid” (2023), featuring a Black Ariel, has been met with cheers from little Black girls who see themselves represented in one of their favorite stories but complaints from others accusing studios of caving in to “woke” demands.

History’s diversity

“The Woman King” may spark interest in a largely unexplored past. But satisfying that desire would require studios to invest in more period pieces that delve into the richness of Black history. The onus for presenting the complexity of the slave trade should not rest on one film, but on all the studios that decide which historical periods and places are worth depicting on screen. 

Despite a growing commitment to diversity, Hollywood still has a long way to go to create nuanced and empowering images of Black people, by making space for more Black producers and writers and by greenlighting more projects that build a complete picture of our past.

Diverse representation does not mean sprinkling Black faces into existing shows. It means telling stories that center Black people where we can visualize our own history and a pathway to liberation. Just as the end of the civil rights era saw the rise of blaxploitation films, the social and political upheaval Black people have faced in recent years creates a craving – and market – for movies depicting Black power and beauty, particularly in the face of white supremacist attitudes and actions.

Black storytellers are creating opportunities to connect to our history and celebrate a lineage of power and self-determination. “The Woman King” plants the seeds for a new genre of movies that reframes the cultural power and legacy of Black people.

Susan X Jane works to create more equitable environments as the principal of Navigators Consulting. “The Woman King” is in theaters. The film is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing material, thematic content, brief language, and partial nudity. 

AP

A locomotive driver waits at the rail yard in Selkirk, N.Y.

For post-pandemic America, an agreement struck Thursday to avert a strike of railroad workers could mark an important transition in the U.S. economy. Details of the pact are still not public, but it appears the rail industry and its employees found a compromise on a very common issue in today’s workplace: What is the best balance between one’s job and the rest of daily life?

“This agree­ment is val­i­da­tion of what I’ve al­ways be­lieved: Unions and man­age­ment can work to­gether,” said President Joe Biden, who added that the pact, if approved by union members, will improve working conditions.

For the rail workers, the issue during negotiations was not so much more pay as better rules for taking time off for unplanned personal needs. The industry, both during the pandemic and before, has experienced a massive loss of jobs and a greater push for efficiency. Trains got longer. Schedules got tighter. Payrolls got smaller. More was demanded of remaining workers. And more workers wanted unscheduled time off.

Other industries might learn from this agreement on how to balance efficiency, work conditions, and the interests of consumers at a time of shifting attitudes among many workers. That shift is partly generational. Young people are entering the workforce with less confidence that the economy will provide stable employment. A common strategy among the youngest workers  is to develop their talents through entrepreneurial side projects that nourish the hope of economic autonomy.

Worker mobility and a rise in support for unions also reflect how people are reassessing how work shapes their lives and defines their identities. A McKinsey study in July noted that the 25% voluntary quit rate in the post-pandemic labor market shows that more people want “to reevaluate what they want from a job – and from life – which is creating a large pool of active and potential workers who are shunning the traditionalist path.” Support among Americans for organized labor has risen to its highest level – 71% – since 1965, according to a Gallup Poll.

“Workers just want to best accommodate, integrate, balance – whatever word you want to use – work into their lives,” Chris DeSantis, a behavior specialist who focuses on workplace attitudes, wrote in Fortune Magazine this week. They are moving “beyond the notion that work is simply the thing we do for a paycheck, and ‘life’ merely the momentary reprieves between showing up at the office. Work, when it engages us, is life-affirming.”

Those ingredients are bound to get noticed at a time when workers are seeking to build unions in companies like Starbucks and Amazon while many health care workers are picketing for better working conditions and patient services. 

“Employees want to make a meaningful social impact, and they will do this earlier in their lives instead of waiting for retirement,” according to an assessment of changing worker attitudes by the consulting firm Gartner. “People will actively seek opportunities to tie the impact and value of their work to their mission, purpose, and passions … [for] social innovation and equitability.”

The history of work and labor relations, long defined by competing interests and contested trade-offs, may be entering an era shaped by new standards of work-life balance – both on and beyond the job site.