public health

States scramble to contain Covid spikes without enough workers to track outbreaks

The failure to stage the tracing workforce harks back to U.S. officials’ inability to build up adequate testing in the early days of the pandemic. Severe shortages of public health workers to track disease spread helped fuel coronavirus spikes in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona and could make it harder to stamp out new …

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How to Keep America’s Public Workers Safe as We Emerge From the COVID-19 Lockdown

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Steve Scarpa began fishing antibacterial wipes, socks and even T-shirts out of the sewers in Groton, Connecticut. Scarpa, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9411 and a member of the city’s wastewater treatment crew, said residents went into “mad hysteria cleaning mode” and simply flushed potentially contaminated objects down the …

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The Other Victims of California’s Fires: Workers Inhaling Toxic Fumes

With the death toll now standing at 42 and with some 7,200 structures destroyed, officials are now calling the wildfire in Paradise, CA (dubbed the “Camp Fire”) the deadliest and most destructive in California’s recent history. Two other massive fires—dubbed the Hill Fire and Woolsey Fire are simultaneously scorching Southern California. As frontline firefighters—including many prison laborers—continue to …

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Seattle’s minimum wage increase deals a blow to yet another Republican scare tactic

Here’s yet another study that punctures all those scare tactics about what will happen when the minimum wage is raised. Seattle’s minimum wage for large employers went to $13 an hour in 2016—and a recent study from the University of Washington School of Public Health finds that the increase didn’t affect grocery prices in the city: Otten and colleagues …

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New Congress on Track to Block Long-Sought Workplace and Public Health Protections

An estimated 10,000 Americans die from asbestos-caused diseases each year, a figure that’s considered conservative. Asbestos is no longer mined in the United States but it still exists in products here, perpetuating exposure, especially for workers in construction and other heavy industries. In June 2016, after years of debate, the country’s major chemical regulation law …

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.