It’s your Labor Day weekend installment of the weekly roundup. There was some decent news this week in the employment outlook, depending on how you look at it. The positive is that roughly 1.37 million jobs were added this week and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4 percent. The negative is that nearly 20 million Americans remain unemployed and of those 1.37 million jobs added over 230,000 hires are census workers, who will be out of a job shortly. Meanwhile, massive layoffs and furloughs have been reported by entities as disparate as the city of Los Angeles and MGM casinos, which recently laid off 18,000 workers, roughly 1% of job losses last week.
Additionally, the country remains significantly worse off than it was in February and the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has become a gaping maw, as the richest people, tech companies and health insurers in the world continue to hoover up profits while the poorest are lining up at food banks at historic numbers and a fearful they will not have a place to live soon.
In other news close to our practice, New York City’s school district has delayed in-person schooling until the end of the month, reflecting the concerns of parents, teachers, and unions. The city and the teacher’s union struck a deal that would give the city several more weeks to ensure the health and safety of workers and students.
So, it is appropriate that with many concerns over health and safety in the workplace, we highlight a story this week about the continuing fight to make hospitals safe for workers.
Bonnie Castillo is still fighting for safer conditions
Way back in January, before the pandemic became an inevitability, Bonnie Castillo was one of the first to bring attention to the dire lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) at hospitals. As the executive director of National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the country, she was already looking at the situation in China with concern and was on the forefront of realizing that US hospitals were seriously lacking in PPE, according to a feature at ProPublica. She had already been deeply involved in expanding workplace safety protocols and PPE access at hospitals and knew just how far behind the US was. The rest is history of course, as health care workers were devastated by the virus, forced to reuse inadequate PPE and labor in unsafe conditions as the pandemic swept across the country.
Castillo’s union has led hundreds of protests to highlight these working conditions and forced organizations, such as Kaiser, to redraw their workplace safety plans. However, the battle remains far from over and Castillo sees the fight for PPE part of the larger set of issues nurses and other health care workers face, including gender discrimination, unfair labor practices, and the fight for single-payer healthcare.
