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Last Wednesday, Derrick Palmer clocked in for his 7:15 a.m. shift at Amazon’s giant warehouse on Staten Island and spent the day packing boxes with board games, iPhones and mini vacuum cleaners. The following morning, he boarded a train to Washington, D.C., where more experienced labor leaders hailed him and his best friend, Christian Smalls, for doing what had once seemed impossible: unionizing an Amazon facility.

In the past week, their David-versus-Goliath victory has become a symbol of growing worker power. On a recent episode of “The Daily,” the two men relayed the twists and turns of their story, from a fateful misdirected email that rebounded in their favor, to the D.I.Y. tactics they used, like free marijuana and bonfires, to forge a bond with co-workers.

But whether their victory will last is far from assured. In the coming weeks, the fight between the new union and Amazon is likely to become even more heated. Amazon is marshaling its legal might to try to overturn the election. The new union will attempt to win another, more difficult vote at a second Staten Island location. And everyone will be watching to see if similar efforts emerge at other Amazon facilities — and whether the company will be able to extinguish them.

As this unfolds, here are three questions to watch for:

1. What does this union want?

Smalls and the other Amazon Labor Union leaders won in large part because the Staten Island workers have a long, varied list of frustrations. This week, he said that the A.L.U. was prepared to demand broad changes in Amazon’s working conditions and on safety, pay and benefits. But the campaign lacks the kind of single, galvanizing goal, like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, that has given other labor organizing efforts a focal point.

Amazon, partly responding to the political pressures of the national minimum wage campaign, raised wages to $15 in 2018 and now pays an average starting pay of more than $18 an hour.

2. How will Amazon respond?

To overturn the election, Amazon would have to meet a high bar, proving not only that misconduct occurred but that the problems were so widespread that they tainted the entire vote, Wilma Liebman, a former head of the National Labor Relations Board, explained.

But no matter the outcome, or whether the new group succeeds in negotiating a contract, the company has a larger question to answer: How will it respond to the underlying concerns that allowed the union drive to get this far?

Amazon, in a sense, faces the same conceptual challenge that the new union does: The list of workers’ grievances with the company is just so long.

Our Times investigation last year revealed how strained Amazon’s labor model had become, with a sky-high 150 percent annual turnover rate and a low-trust, management-by-machine approach. In contrast to its precise handling of packages, its human resources systems were so overtaxed that we found a pattern in which the company inadvertently fired its own employees. Injury rates continue to be a serious concern. And there’s more.

On Thursday, in his first letter to shareholders since taking over as chief executive, Andy Jassy acknowledged the breadth of problems. “We’ve researched and created a list of what we believe are the top 100 employee experience pain points and are systematically solving them,” he wrote.

But Amazon, known for its ambition, shows no sign of making fundamental changes. In yesterday’s letter, Jassy said he would continue to take an “iterative” approach — making repeated tweaks — to the company’s year-old goal of becoming “Earth’s Best Employer.”

3. Will other warehouses follow?

Smalls has said that workers at more than a hundred other Amazon facilities have contacted the union, interested in organizing at their locations. In an interview this week, he said that the A.L.U. now plans to go national. If the Staten Island efforts prove contagious, Amazon would start looking more like Starbucks, where more locations are voting to unionize every week.

But it’s too early to tell if anything like that will happen. “Let’s not make a single event a movement,” Andrew Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview this week. “We don’t know whether this is an extraordinary occurrence or a reproducible event.”

Last month, in another contested election, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama appear to have narrowly rejected unionizing, though the margin is close enough that the results will not be known until hundreds of contested ballots are litigated.

The key difference between Amazon and Starbucks is the sheer size of each site, which must individually unionize. For Starbucks, the union needs about 20 votes to prevail in a single cafe; at Amazon, with its enormous warehouses, the union needs more than a thousand, making each election a far harder task.

The stakes of this fight could not be higher for Amazon, whose entire retail model rests on a coast-to-coast chain of manual labor, or for unions themselves. Despite the rapid organizing at Starbucks — and the frequent arrival of high-profile examples of other new organizing efforts — union membership has been on a downhill slope for decades.

If workers at Amazon — the nation’s second-largest employer, and perhaps the most influential one of our time — decide they don’t want or need unions, or cannot overcome Amazon’s resources, it will be an ominous sign for the relevance of organized labor. So expect nothing less than a bitter, messy, drawn-out battle that could help determine the future of American work.

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War in Ukraine

Bringing consent to ballet

For dancers, touch is routine. Now, when it comes to choreography that simulates sex or violence onstage, some companies are hiring intimacy directors, Laura Cappelle writes in The Times.

In recent years, more films and plays have turned to intimacy directors to choreograph scenes and look after the physical and emotional well-being of performers. But intimacy work for screen and theater doesn’t necessarily translate to dance, where the choreography mostly can’t be altered. And dancers have been discouraged from speaking up when they feel uncomfortable. Tales of boundaries being crossed are commonplace in ballet, where training starts young and most companies maintain a strict hierarchy.

Intimacy coaching sessions offer a space for dancers to voice their concerns. For a production at Scottish Ballet, two intimacy directors gave workshops and had private discussions with dancers. Afterward, the change in the dancers was “instant,” the company’s director said.

In one exercise, the dancers used a drawing of a body to mark the areas that felt vulnerable, and then communicated that to their colleagues. “To see it in black and white, and to speak to your partner, it opens up that whole trust,” one dancer said. “And it wasn’t just me saying it. It was the whole group.”

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

The most recent United Nations climate report reminds us, once again, of what we already know: The steady rise in global temperature spells catastrophe. We must adapt to what cannot be undone and commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

We at home are left to wonder whether our daily decisions matter, as we watch a continuing parade of environmental and humanitarian disasters. Many of us have begun to accept that our children and theirs won’t know the same planet that we do.

Still, out of habit or hope, we continue to refuse plastic bags and search the underside of containers for the faint chasing-arrows symbol, eager to place them correctly into recycling. And we wait, looking to our elected officials for policies that will change our trajectory. We’ve been waiting for decades, as the distance in years between where we are and where we don’t want to be shrinks.

The question remains: What can we do?

We must, increasingly, look to ourselves and take charge of what we can change on our own. A starting point is in our own yards.

The gas leaf blower is by all measures, and without dispute, harmful — to the environment, to neighbors, to workers who carry them on their backs. These hazards have been the subject of countless articles. Local and national organizations work to educate and empower property owners, providing guides to alternatives.

Neighborhoods remain divided into those who allow the noise and pollution and those who have no choice but to live with it. Yet we all bring our recycling to the curb on the same day.

The fix is so easy. Electric leaf blowers are effective, available and affordable. They emit no fossil fuel pollution. Their decibel output is safe. The best part? To make the switch requires only the simplicity and speed of personal decision. Yours. Today.

Landscapers may throw up hurdles, but you can jump them. Invest in your own electric leaf blower to have charged and ready to use. Or share one with neighbors. Or seek out a yard service that is equipped to support you. They exist. As more of us join together, the landscaping industry will adapt. (There is, always and forever, the rake.)

Some may feel they offset the impact of the gas leaf blowers with robust recycling, choice of vehicle, “green” purchases and more. But by any measure of carbon footprints, this machine wears a dangerously outsize shoe. To see my neighbors’ electric car charging in their driveway as a gas blower blares across their yard leaves me bewildered. What breakdown in thought has happened there?

California is banning the sale of gas leaf blowers and other small gas-powered equipment starting in 2024, citing severe impact on environmental and human health and the imperative to reduce carbon emissions. A few cities, including Washington, D.C., have banned the use of gas leaf blowers entirely. They point the way, but this hard-won legislation is taking much too long.

What does a street, a community and a country made up of property owners who say no to gas blowers look like? It looks the same. But it smells better, it sounds better, and it’s a safer, kinder place to all who call it home.

Last summer, Hurricane Ida battered my New Jersey town and many others, with waterfalls pouring through basement windows and people drowning in their cars. The curbs were lined for weeks with heaps of flood-ruined furnishings, boxes of unsalvageable memories and rolls of drenched carpeting. This is what a climate in crisis looks like. It’s no longer just the heartbreaking images we’ve been shown for years of faraway polar bears trying to find firm footing on melting ice. It’s here.

We’ll only know more of this. We’ll fare far better if we choose thoughtfully how best to care for ourselves, one another and our thin slices of this fragile planet. Who comes first to rescue the stranded in a flood? It is always the neighbor who has a boat. Ending destructive emissions and noise in our communities matters. So does considering the impact of our choices on all those working and living nearby.

The privilege that brings a landscaping service into one’s yard must make room for the privilege of caring for the surrounding world in the best possible way. Neighbor by neighbor, yard by yard, the switch to electric will mean real change in the air this spring and from now on.

These conversations may be difficult to have with the good people we live alongside. Tell them you come in peace.

Jessica Stolzberg is a writer who lives in Montclair, N. J.

As Vladimir Putin vows to continue his genocidal invasion of Ukraine, investigators at the Treasury Department and Justice Department are scrambling to seize Russian yachts, mansions and the other spoils of his despotic regime. Meanwhile, in Washington, Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Joe Wilson of South Carolina have advanced a bipartisan measure to clarify exactly how much power the executive branch has to liquidate those assets.

These efforts are laudable and important. But they are neither bold enough nor swift enough to provide what Ukraine needs.

Even if the Justice Department were able to sell every yacht and mansion it seizes over the coming months, earmarking the profits for military and humanitarian aid, the process would be too slow, and the proceeds too insignificant, to meet Ukraine’s growing and urgent needs: for tanks, antiaircraft missiles, food and medicine. And as the war enters its eighth week and its costs balloon, the American people may not be willing to foot the bill much longer.

An obvious solution is staring us in the face: President Biden could liquidate the tens of billions of dollars the Russian central bank has parked in the United States as part of its foreign exchange reserves; by some estimates, those funds may total as much as $100 billion. These assets are already frozen at the Federal Reserve and other banks thanks to Treasury sanctions banning transactions with the Russian central bank. With new details of Russian atrocities making the prospect of lifting those sanctions increasingly untenable, those funds have, in effect, been seized indefinitely. Liquidating them now would not only be likely the fastest way to increase American aid to Ukraine without further burdening and fatiguing American taxpayers. It would also send a potent signal that the United States is committed to making even the world’s most powerful states pay for their war crimes.

The seemingly radical character of this step explains why it has not been taken already, but, contrary to recent misapprehensions, it would be anything but “unprecedented.” The United States has occasionally made hostile foreign government funds available for various humanitarian and remedial purposes. In 2003, President George W. Bush seized approximately $1.7 billion in Iraqi funds sitting in American banks, allocating the proceeds to aid the Iraqi people and to compensate victims of terrorism. In 2012, Congress made frozen Iranian central bank assets available to settle lawsuits with the families of those who had died in Iranian terror attacks. In 2019, the Trump administration made some frozen Venezuelan central bank assets available to the exiled opposition leader Juan Guaidó. And just this February, the Biden administration began the process of liquidating around $7 billion in assets of the defunct Afghan central bank rather than hand them over to the Taliban, reserving half for Afghan humanitarian efforts and half to satisfy court judgments in suits filed by the relatives of those killed or wounded on 9/11. That move has been controversial, owing mostly to unsettled questions regarding court attachment of assets and allocating claims among dueling plaintiffs, but those questions would fall away if Russian assets were transferred directly to assist humanitarian organizations and the Ukrainian government.

While Congress should certainly consider new legislation refining the tools with which it has armed the executive, Mr. Biden already has ample statutory authority to liquidate Russian assets under a section of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, enacted in 1977 to clarify the previously overbroad and tangled mess of presidential emergency economic powers. As the Supreme Court affirmed in a landmark case about the Iran hostage crisis, the act gives the president “broad authority” to act in times of national emergency and the power to “nullify, void, prevent or prohibit” any foreign country from “holding” or “exercising any right, power, or privilege” over property in which it has “any interest.” It also authorizes the president to “direct and compel” the “transfer, withdrawal” or “exportation” of such property.

Since the reserves in question are Russian state property — unlike the assets of oligarchs — they are not shielded by the usual protections our legal system affords private property. The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against government seizure of property “without due process of law” applies only to “persons” — not foreign governments — as the Supreme Court suggested in 1992 and multiple federal courts have since held. Protections against the “taking” of property without “just compensation” likewise apply only to “private property,” a category that clearly excludes Russia’s sovereign reserves, even if they are conveniently parked within the United States and in dollars.

The Russian government would no doubt complain bitterly that liquidating its currency reserves was “thievery,” just as it did with the existing sanctions. But Russia’s continued violation of the most basic principles of international law and human rights — and the Ukrainian people’s dire needs — must count for more than its self-serving rhetoric.

To challenge the seizure and liquidation of its assets, the Russian government would have to look not to the Constitution but to a more obscure body of law which shields governments from liability in certain circumstances: “sovereign immunity.” But that immunity protects foreign assets only from judicial process — not from liquidation by the combined action of Congress and the executive branch. And as a mere creation of Congress, as the Supreme Court emphasized as recently as 2016, such immunity cannot survive a congressional enactment like the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Congressional Republicans might push back, claiming that any such seizure would constitute a grand expansion of presidential power at Mr. Biden’s behest. But the act’s clear grant of authority should alleviate any genuine concerns. So too should the clear precedent of similar moves by presidents of both parties who have seized the central bank assets of human rights violators like Venezuela, Iran and Iraq.

Mr. Putin’s genocidal regime belongs in that dastardly category — and by treating Russia as such, Mr. Biden can do a lot to smoke out the Trump wing of the Republican Party which, like their leader, has been reluctant to acknowledge the extent of Mr. Putin’s atrocities and the threat he poses to the United States.

Mr. Putin’s Russia knows no rule of law — only brute force. He views our legal protections as “obsolete” sources of weakness, part of his broader boast that free societies cannot stand up to him and other despots around the world. He’s wrong. As Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at Yale, has persuasively argued, our adherence to the rule of law, far from serving as a straitjacket, “frees us and empowers us to do things we could never do without law’s legitimacy.” To meet Mr. Putin’s challenge, we needn’t sacrifice our historic principles or confirm his nihilistic vision of governance. By deploying the powers our legal system affords, we have the tools we need to help the courageous people of Ukraine survive and defeat him. It will be poetic justice under law for us to do so by turning his own treasure against him.

Laurence H. Tribe (@tribelaw) is the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University. Jeremy Lewin is a third-year law student at Harvard.

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JERUSALEM — Clashes between Israeli riot police and Palestinians erupted at one of the holiest sites in Jerusalem early on Friday, the first day of a rare convergence of Ramadan, Passover and Easter, culminating weeks of escalating violence in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The clashes between the Israelis and Palestinians throwing stones lasted for hours at the site, the Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, as tens of thousands of Muslim worshipers were gathered there for dawn prayers on the second Friday of Ramadan, the holy fasting month.

Many more people were expected to pour into the Old City during the day for the Muslim weekly Friday Prayer and to celebrate Good Friday and the first night of Passover, which begins at sundown.

The Israeli police fired sound grenades and rubber bullets during hours of clashes at the site, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. The police expelled many of the worshipers, but some returned afterward. At least 117 Palestinians were injured, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. The Israeli police said that several officers had also been injured.