Pete Davidson is no longer the most famous thing to happen to Staten Island. Employees at an Amazon warehouse there voted to unionize, making it the first facility to form a union in the company’s history. It ranks among the biggest wins for organized labor in decades.

• Employees cast 2,654 votes for the union, versus 2,131 against. In total, more than half of eligible workers cast votes.

This outcome, which few predicted, will likely send shockwaves across corporate America. Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the country and has staunchly fought unionization efforts in its workforce. But one foothold by organized labor could quickly set off a bigger movement that threatens to disrupt Amazon’s closely guarded relationship with its employees.

For evidence of the domino effect, just look at what’s happening at another Seattle-based giant: Starbucks.

• Last December, two Buffalo-area locations voted to unionize in a first for the company.
• Since then, more than 140 locations announced plans to unionize, and nine stores in total have taken the union leap.

Amazon employees’ push for better treatment stands in stark relief to the earnings of its C-suite. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, who replaced Jeff Bezos last year, brought in $212 million in total compensation in 2021, the company revealed yesterday. Just $175,000 of that came from his base salary, and the rest is derived from an award of 61,000 shares of Amazon stock. He made 6,474x the amount of the median Amazon worker.

Big picture: While this a stunning victory for organized labor, the union’s success in Staten Island remains the exception, not the rule. A union drive at Amazon’s Bessemer, AL, warehouse appears headed for defeat for the second time. And currently, only 6.1% of the country’s private sector workers belong to unions, close to a historic low.—NF

Will Smith resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In a Friday statement, the actor wrote that he was “heartbroken” over slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, and that his actions “deprived other nominees and winners of their opportunity to celebrate and be celebrated for their extraordinary work.” He said he will accept “any and all consequences” for his conduct.

The March jobs report asks, “What pandemic?” The US economy added 431,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.6% from 3.8% in February. That means the economy has added at least 400,000 jobs for 11 straight months, something that has never happened in records going back to 1939.

Markets go quiet in Q1. Global fundraising in capital markets dropped by $900 billion in Q1 2022 over the same period last year, with the war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, and wild market swings spooking dealmakers. Fewer than two dozen companies have IPO’d so far this year in the US, which is an awfully slow start to the year for public offerings.

The House passed a landmark bill to federally decriminalize cannabis Thursday. If the legislation is passed in the Senate (and that’s a big if), it would mean:

• Nonviolent marijuana offenses would be expunged from criminal records, which House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said “can haunt people of color and impact the trajectory of their lives and career indefinitely.”
• A nationwide sales tax could be placed on cannabis and used in part to open a fund that, among other things, would help small businesses in the industry.
• Plus, Veterans Affairs (VA) could recommend marijuana use to treat PTSD, and federal workers could partake without losing their security clearances.

The Senate has fewer Seth Rogans than the House, but the bill’s backers remain hopeful it can get its 60 votes. Whether it gets the green light or not though, this bill, along with previous attempts to pass cannabis reform on Capitol Hill, represents a seismic shift from the anti-pot PSAs millennials grew up with. Six-in-10 Americans think cannabis should be fully legal, about one-third think it should be legal for medical use, and just 8% say it shouldn’t be legal at all, per Pew Research.

Looking ahead…it’s unclear if and when this legislation will make its way to the Senate, though the Senate is expected to release its own take on the bill as soon as next month. No one would complain if they expedited it to 18 days from now.—JW

Stat: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the new movie where Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself, currently has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes after 24 critic reviews. That’s the highest rating of all 170 movies with a Cage credit on the site.

Quote: “It looks like we need to knock down Bruce’s page count by about 5 pages.”

Mike Burns, the director of Out of Death, warned in a June 2020 email to the film’s screenwriter that Bruce Willis’s parts would need to be made smaller, as reported by the LA Times. According to the paper, the film industry had been concerned about Willis’s diminishing cognitive abilities for years; it was just this week that his family announced that he would be stepping away from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia.

Read: Inside the virus-hunting nonprofit at the center of the lab-leak controversy. (Vanity Fair)

Cool YouTube channel: The Slow Mo Guys

Weekend conversation starters:

• Best Venn diagram ever?
• Which of these bosses would you rather work for?
• Magnetic slime robots
• What actually happens when you take your check in bitcoin?