Build Back Better? Health, Disability, and the Future of Work Post-COVID - Bill of Health

Struggles Over Care Will Shape the Future of Work

March 16, 2022March 16, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Andrew Milne

The future of work will largely be the future of care work. Health care is rapidly becoming the largest employer in the U.S., expanding to serve the fastest growing demographic, aging seniors. As a lawyer for seniors in need of free legal services, I see my clients struggle to access care made scarce by the for-profit care industry’s understaffing and underpaying of workers attempting to meet the growing need. The future of work and of aging will be shaped by struggles over care from both giving and receiving ends, perhaps against those profiting in between.

Recall that the first COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. spread between nursing homes. These facilities, like most nursing homes, are for-profit businesses that pad their margins by cutting labor costs. The resulting understaffing has deadly effects in normal times. The pandemic intensified those effects, as underpaid care workers, forced to work at multiple facilities to survive, unintentionally spread the virus between facilities.

Achieving Economic Security for Disabled People During COVID-19 and Beyond

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Robyn Powell

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pervasive inequities experienced by historically marginalized communities, including people with disabilities.

Activists, legal professionals, scholars, and policymakers must critically examine the limitations of our current disability laws and policies, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), to elucidate why disabled people continue to endure these inequities, including those related to economic insecurity.

NFIB v. OSHA and Its Contradiction with the GOP’s Disability Employment Agenda

March 14, 2022March 14, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Doron Dorfman

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the incoherence of the Republican party’s employment agenda, which, on the one hand, deifies full, in-person employment, and, on the other, makes the workplace hostile to this aim through relentless deregulation.

Throughout the pandemic, the GOP has vocally advanced the narrative that employees must physically return to the office to prevent recession.

Additionally, the conservative view frames disability law and policy in terms of its economic value: these policies are desirable insofar as they increase productivity and participation in the job market among disabled Americans.

Social Security Administration Important Information letter next to flag of USA.

Blue Booking Long COVID: Accounting for Long-Term COVID-19 Complications in Social Security Disability Benefits Evaluations

March 11, 2022March 11, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Jacob Madden

Long COVID has left an estimated 1.6 million Americans unable to work. Those experiencing Long COVID face long-term neurological issues, heart problems, lung damage, and myriad other complications following an initial bout with COVID-19.

Though some who are incapacitated by Long COVID will eventually be able to return to work, others may never work again. Going forward, we must find a way to account and provide for these individuals. Here I suggest a potential solution in amending the Social Security Administration’s Blue Book to include Long COVID in the evaluation of disability benefits.

View over woman' shoulder seated at desk, videoconferencing on computer.

Our New Remote Workplace Culture Creates Opportunities for Disabled Employees

March 10, 2022March 9, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Arlene S. Kanter

While the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an enormous toll on the nation, it has also opened an unprecedented opportunity to transform our workplaces and offer greater flexibility for employees with and without disabilities.

This shift in our workplace culture presents employment opportunities for disabled people that they may not have had in the past, even with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Who ‘Deserves’ Health, Who ‘Deserves’ Freedom? A Recurrent Divide in SCOTUS Vaccine Mandate Cases

March 9, 2022March 8, 2022 wparmet Leave a comment

By Wendy E. Parmet

In October 2020, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya issued what they called the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). In it, they argued that “The most compassionate approach [to the pandemic] … is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

Eighteen months and over 600,000 additional deaths later, the Supreme Court embraced that view. On January 13, in Missouri v. Biden (Missouri), the Court by a 5-4 vote refused to stay a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) rule requiring health care workers in facilities that participate in Medicare or Medicaid to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (subject to legally-required exemptions) in order to protect patients. In contrast, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor (NFIB), the Court by a 6-3 vote ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) likely exceeded its statutory authority by requiring employers with over 100 employees to mandate vaccination (subject to required exemptions) or masking and testing. The per curiam majority stated: “Although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most. COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.” Concurring, Justice Gorsuch added that a broad reading of OSHA’s authority would “enable intrusions into the private lives and freedoms of Americans.”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: MAY 18, 2020: A jogger runs past a banner by the Battery Park City Authority reminding park visitors to please wear face masks.

Negotiating Masks in the Workplace: When the ADA Does and Does Not Apply

March 8, 2022February 10, 2023 Katherine Macfarlane Leave a comment

By Katherine Macfarlane

Workplaces are, by and large, no longer safe for employees who are high-risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19.

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was common for workplaces to require masks, at least in shared spaces. Two years later, though the pandemic is still ongoing, mask requirements are now far less prevalent as a result of the politicization of masks, so-called mask fatigue, and new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This move to relax masking rules presents significant dangers to those most vulnerable to severe outcomes from COVID-19. High-risk employees still need their co-workers to wear masks. They must now negotiate for safe workplaces in a social and political climate that is increasingly indifferent (or actively hostile) to their needs.

Professional business teleworkers connecting online and working from home for their corporate company, remote working and networks concept.

Introduction to the Symposium: Build Back Better? Health, Disability, and the Future of Work Post-COVID

March 7, 2022March 7, 2022 Chloe Reichel Leave a comment

By Chloe Reichel, Marissa Mery, and Michael Ashley Stein

This week marks the two-year anniversary of World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom declaring COVID-19 a pandemic.

It is at this particular moment that we, in the United States, are beginning to see the sociological construction of the end of the pandemic: metrics measuring COVID-19 transmission have been radically revised to reshape perceptions of risk; masks are, once again, being shed en masse; and remote workers are being urged back to the office. “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people,” President Joseph Biden said during his March 1, 2022 State of the Union address.

Category: Build Back Better? Health, Disability, and the Future of Work Post-COVID