Anchorage, Alaska (KINY)

The Alaska House State Affairs and Health and Social Services standing committees will hold a joint meeting. The meeting will focus on worker safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those testifying will include Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka, Director of Personnel and Labor Relations Kate Sheehan, Labor Standards and Safety Director Joseph Knowles, Alaska Occupational Safety and Health Senior Enforcement Officer Brandon Field, Alaska Occupational Safety and Health Chief of Consultation Elaine Banda, Statewide Director of the National...

All Things Considered

Many people with underlying medical conditions are worried about what's going to happen at the end of the month. It's not currently safe for many of them to go back to work. The COVID-19 death rate is 12 times higher for people with underlying conditions.

Block says the added federal benefits are needed for unemployed workers in general — but especially for those with serious underlying health conditions.

"They're very, very vulnerable to retaliation for speaking out when it's this kind of labor market," she says. "Most workers have to be afraid that an employer could very easily replace them if they make trouble."

Block's program at Harvard just released a report on what state officials can do to require mandatory rules to make workplaces safer. She says the focus is on what states can do because so far there are basically no federal mandatory safety workplace requirements for the pandemic.... Read more about 'We Need Help': People At Higher Coronavirus Risk Fear Losing Federal Unemployment

Story by Josh Eidelson
Data analysis and graphics by Christopher Cannon
Bloomberg Businessweek

For Americans with a less fancy résumé than the typical physician or Google engineer, the coronavirus has exacerbated an already dire lack of employment security. A great many essential workers have been growing, picking, tending, slaughtering, packing, preparing, and delivering food throughout the country without paid sick days. While other countries moved quickly to backstop payrolls and freeze their economies more or less in place, the U.S. let 40 million people go unemployed and has kept many of them waiting months for temporary assistance.

In January, Harvard Law School’s Labor & Worklife Program, following a year of discussions among ­working groups of activists and scholars, released a sweeping proposal to reboot labor law from a “clean slate,” including by ending at-will employment, installing elected “workplace monitors” in every U.S. workplace, and establishing a “sectoral bargaining” process à la Europe. Advocates say such a system, in which labor and management hash out industry­wide standards, would help fix one of the flaws baked into the NLRA: As long as collective bargaining rights are limited to the individual companies where workers have won a unionization election, executives have an overwhelming incentive to fight like hell to stop that from happening, and they have cause to fear they’ll be outcompeted by lower-cost rivals if they don’t.