Tag: employment

Petrie-Flom is Hiring a new Communications Manager

Susannah Baruch Leave a comment

Come work with us!

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics (PFC) seeks an experienced, dynamic, passionate, and flexible Communications Manager to support, promote, and creatively amplify the work of PFC with the overall goal of raising its profile and advancing its mission. PFC is a highly collaborative and agile team that works together on all aspects of our work.  

As an integral part of the PFC team, the Communications Manager has three major areas of responsibility: (1) communications and marketing to promote PFC’s work, including managing production of a bi-weekly newsletter and sharing information externally about events, sponsored research projects, publications, and other activities; (2) managing all aspects of PFC’s blog Bill of Health, website, and social media accounts; and (3) writing, editing assistance, and proofreading for the PFC’s written products and publications, as well as support for publications from grant partners.

Check out the full job description here.

London, England, UK, January 22nd 2022, Long covid symptoms sign on pharmacy shop window UK.

Mobilizing Long COVID Awareness to Better Support People with Acquired Disabilities

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Marissa Wagner Mery

Long COVID exposes an often-unacknowledged facet of disability: that one is far more likely to develop a disability than be born with one.

Estimates suggest that, at present, approximately 10 – 20 million Americans are now afflicted with the array of debilitating symptoms we now call Long COVID, which include fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive dysfunction or “brain fog.”

The upswell of advocacy and awareness around Long COVID should be mobilized to call attention to and address the challenges faced by newly-disabled adults, particularly with respect to employment.

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Open front door.

Re-Imagining Work in the Post-Pandemic Era: An Arendtian Lens

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Xochitl L. Mendez

The coronavirus pandemic changed the world in countless ways, and for a moment it challenged the pre-pandemic separation of — in Hannah Arendt’s terms — the Private and the Public. To Arendt, the Public is defined as the sole realm where a human can live in full, as a person integral and part of a community as an equal. Being human is only fully procurable by the presence that a person achieves when acting among others. Contrastingly, to Arendt the Private is a shadowy space without the sufficient worth to merit “being seen or heard” by others. The Private is also the place where toiling with the endless necessities of providing for one’s body resides.

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged this separation. As many people and their loved ones fell seriously ill, an overwhelming portion of our nation found themselves for the first time living a struggle that previously was familiar mainly to those who suffer from chronic medical conditions. Millions were locked down and marooned at home — a radically novel experience to many, yet one that is sadly commonplace to a considerable number of individuals who live with disability and illness every day. Large portions of the workforce found themselves restricted to working remotely — a reality habitual to individuals who lack access to the workplace. All of these experiences suddenly stopped being private experiences — they became critical concerns discussed by a citizenry of equals, worth “being seen or heard” by others, and demanding policy and political action.

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Female freelance programmer in modern headphones sitting in wheelchair and using computers while coding web game at home.

Injustice Anywhere: The Need to Decouple Disability and Productivity

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Brooke Ellison

There is a profound need to deconstruct and actively reconstruct the interpretation of disability as it is currently understood.

The current framing of disability as inability — whether an inability to be employed or otherwise — has utterly failed not only people with disabilities, but also the communities in which they live.

This perception of disability is a relic of attitudinal and policy structures put into place by people who do not live with disability themselves: people who may have been ignorant to the virtues that living with disability engenders.

Current calls for attention to a disability bioethics or a disability epistemology have heralded not only highlighting, but also actively promoting, the qualities, leadership skills, and valuable character traits associated with surviving and thriving in a world fundamentally not set up for one’s own needs.

Before any meaningful movement can be made when it comes to the employment of people with disabilities — whether in the form of workplace accommodations, flexible work settings, recruitment practices, or limitations on earnings — the underlying assumption about the value of their presence in the workforce needs to change.

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Supreme Court of the United States.

The Bind We’re in — And How the Supreme Court Put Us There

Jennifer S. Bard Leave a comment

By Jennifer Bard

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages into its third year of global death and destruction, the Supreme Court of the United States has effectively thwarted every measure by federal or state government to implement the public health tools that for hundreds of years have been used to stop the spread of contagious disease. They have done so by operationalizing what were previously fringe and relatively harmless academic views in ways that extend their powers beyond any previous boundaries. These include, but are not limited to, extending the protection for religious exercise past any previously imagined, and limiting Congressional authority to respond to emergencies by imposing impossible standards of specificity on its delegation of authority to the agencies which it creates, funds, and directly oversees.

In so doing, the Court has not only undermined the health of the nation, and pushed millions of people into unnecessary long-term disability, which our fragmented health care and social security system is unequipped to handle. It has also threatened our national security by infecting what is already more than half of the children in the country with a virus that has the potential to damage every organ in their bodies, from heart to brain.

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Patient receives Covid-19 vaccine.

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

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.

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U.S. Supreme Court interior.

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

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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.”

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Washington, DC, USA - Closeup view of December, 23, 2020: COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card by CDC on blurred documents background.

Private Employer Vaccine Mandates in the Courts

Kaitlynn Milvert Leave a comment

By Kaitlynn Milvert

After the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large employers was withdrawn last month, many pronounced private employers to be “on their own” to make decisions about vaccine requirements for their employees.

Until one outlier Fifth Circuit decision last week, federal courts have largely agreed. In lawsuits challenging private employers’ COVID-19 vaccine mandates, federal district courts have routinely denied requests for preliminary injunctions to halt private employers’ vaccination policies from taking effect.

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U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s Rulings on COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, Explained

Kaitlynn Milvert Leave a comment

By Kaitlynn Milvert

In a pair of rulings issued January 13, the Supreme Court put on hold the federal vaccine-or-test requirements for large employers, but allowed federal vaccination requirements for health care workers to take effect while they are litigated in the lower federal courts.

The Court decisions each addressed questions of whether federal agencies — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — have authority to set these vaccination-related requirements.

In doing so, the Court drew new and unprecedented lines between the kinds of risks that agencies operating outside of the health care context — such as OSHA — have power to address through federal regulations. The Court’s decisions on these issues are likely to loom large in future litigation as federal vaccine requirements continue to be litigated in the lower courts.

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Person filling syringe from vial.

The Beginning of the End of Federalism

Jennifer S. Bard Leave a comment

By Jennifer Bard

Friday’s emergency hearing by the Supreme Court regarding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) vaccine-or-test mandate was extraordinary both in that it happened at all and what took place.

The hearing came in a response to a petition by a coalition of states and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) to halt an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) issued by OSHA mandating that all employers with over 100 employees “establish minimum vaccination standards” including “vaccination verification, face covering, and testing requirements.”

That the Court heard the case on an emergency basis signaled their concern that OSHA, in issuing the ETS, was overreaching its authority, as they ruled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had done in issuing an eviction moratorium.

But what made the colloquies particularly unsettling is that the ETS was carefully crafted to be, as Professors Larry Gostin and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss explain lucidly, well within contemporary standards for an exercise of federal power affecting a health matter usually within the jurisdiction of a state. It applies only to employers already obligated to follow OSHA workplace standards and fell far short of a vaccine mandate. Moreover, however severe the risk of COVID when this was drafted six months ago, the risk from the Omicron variant is many times greater.

Yet the sympathetic ear given by the majority of the Justices to the arguments made by the lawyers seeking a stay made it possible to wonder if the whole thing was happening in either one of DC or the MCU’s multiverse. This is because the questioning, directly and by implication, calls into doubt what past Courts have identified as the framework of federalism — a nickname for the Constitution’s balancing of a strong federal government against the rights of individual states. We cannot know the extent to which the Justices will adopt any of the arguments offered them for limiting federal agency power, but from this hearing we can anticipate substantial strengthening of an individual state’s ability to resist federal regulation.

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