“In the days since George Floyd’s death, it is impossible not to feel grief for his family—and anger, revulsion, and frustration that his death is the latest in a long line of tragedy and injustice, and a painful reminder that a person’s race still determines how they will be treated in nearly every aspect of American life.
No one deserves to die the way George Floyd did. And the truth is, if you’re white in America, the chances are you won’t. That truth is what underlies the pain and the anger that so many are feeling and expressing—that the path of an entire life can be measured and devalued by the color of one’s skin. Fifty-seven years ago, Dr. King dreamed of a day when his “four little children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Today, that dream seems even more out of reach, and we’ll never reach it if we keep treating people of color with the unspoken assumption that they’re less human.
We need to see each other as equally deserving of life, liberty, respect, dignity, and the presumption of innocence. We need to ask ourselves and each other hard questions, and listen carefully to the answers.
Here’s where I’d start.
If George Floyd had been white, handcuffed, and lying on the ground, would he be alive today?
Why does this keep happening?
What can we do to ensure that every community has the police department it needs and deserves?
What can I do?
We can’t honestly answer these questions in the divide and conquer, us vs. them, shift the blame and shirk the responsibility world we’re living in. People with power should go first—answer the questions, expand who’s “us” and shrink who’s “them,” accept some blame, and assume more responsibility. But the rest of us have to answer these questions too.
It’s the least we can do for George Floyd’s family, and the families of all other Americans who have been judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character. The future of the country depends on it.”
This statement originally appeared on the Clinton Foundation website, which can be found here.
Gary Pearce on Politics and Public Policy in North Carolina
2020 feels like 1968.
Peaceful protests erupt into looting and burning. Police battle demonstrators in the streets. Black Americans vent their rage and frustration.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis lit the fires. This year, it was the death of George Floyd at the hands of policemen in Minneapolis.
In 1968, the nation was already divided by the Vietnam war – and protests against the war. This year, our nerves were already rubbed raw by the Covid pandemic, the economic meltdown, stay-home orders – and protests against the orders.
Then, as now, there was the sickening sense that the floor under American society was collapsing.
1968, like 2020, was a big election year. 1968 ended 36 years of Democratic dominance in Washington, since FDR’s election in 1932. It ushered in an era – more than half a century now – dominated by a Republican Party dependent on white Southerners and dedicated to the proposition that government is the problem, not the solution.
In 1968, an anguished President was trapped inside the White House by protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Four years after winning a historic landslide, he withdrew as a candidate for reelection. His dream of a Great Society slipped away.
Today inside a White House again surrounded by protesters, an angry President lashes out at critics, the media and political opponents. Four years after winning a historic upset, he fears his dream of a smashing reelection victory fueled by a rising economy is slipping away.
In 1968, Democrats’ election hopes were shattered when their national convention in Chicago exploded in violence. This year, the Republican convention will be in Charlotte, assuming the city and state can come to terms with the Republican Party and President Trump over Covid precautions.
They also must consider the risk that Charlotte could attract a volatile mix of protesters against racism, “tyranny”-protesting Reopeners and camo-clad white nationalists waving Confederate flags and wielding assault weapons.
We don’t want Charlotte to be to 2020 what Chicago was to 1968.
Then, the violence in Chicago and the riots nationwide set off a white backlash that helped elect Richard Nixon President. George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, fanned the flames.
Nixon benefitted from Democratic disarray, Roger Ailes’ TV genius and Strom Thurmond’s Southern Strategy. Republicans began their rise in North Carolina and the South. In 1972, North Carolina elected a Republican governor and a Republican Senator named Jesse Helms.
It almost didn’t happen. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the seemingly hapless Democratic candidate, nearly caught Nixon in the final days.
Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford and his chief political adviser, Bert Bennett, helped lead Humphrey’s national campaign. Bennett said years later that Humphrey would have won with another week.
But he didn’t. Nixon won and promised to “bring us together.” But he didn’t. The Vietnam War dragged on, and our racial divide persists today.
Politics, like life, rarely moves in a straight line. We don’t control events; they control us.
Even people with power – Governor, President, police chief, protest organizer – are no more in control than a ship in a storm is in control of the winds and waves.
A few months ago, we thought this election would be about impeachment and a roaring, soaring economy.
Then a virus kills 101,000 Americans and puts millions out of work.
A white policeman keeps his knee on a black man’s neck for almost nine minutes even after the victim pleads “I can’t breathe.”
An angry protester throws a firebomb.
History pays no attention to human intention.
Gary Pearce writes on policy and politics in North Carolina, and is a guest writer for the Progressive Policy Institute. You can learn more about Gary by visiting www.NewDayforNC.com.
Conservatives call the House Democrats’ Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act a “gigantic political scam.” Senate Republicans say HEROES, passed by the House on May 15th, is “dead on arrival when it reconvenes. As they negotiate with Democrats, Republicans should think carefully about certain student loan relief provisions in the bill.
Even in good times, a substantial portion of 45 million Americans’ paychecks go to student loan payments rather than to goods and services that keep our economy churning. There’s little doubt that this debt contributes to suppressed consumer consumption, which stifles economic growth. In this bad time, Americans collectively owe $1.6 trillion in student debt. This debt burden is now dramatically heavier with the economic shutdown and coming diminished post-pandemic employment opportunities.
Some say no additional student loan relief is needed because the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act that Congress passed in March temporarily suspended student loan payments. That would be a decent argument if CARES applied to everyone, but it doesn’t.
Conservatives call the House Democrats’ Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act a “gigantic political scam.” Senate Republicans say HEROES, passed by the House on May 15th, is “dead on arrival when it reconvenes. As they negotiate with Democrats, Republicans should think carefully about certain student loan relief provisions in the bill.
Even in good times, a substantial portion of 45 million Americans’ paychecks go to student loan payments rather than to goods and services that keep our economy churning. There’s little doubt that this debt contributes to suppressed consumer consumption, which stifles economic growth. In this bad time, Americans collectively owe $1.6 trillion in student debt. This debt burden is now dramatically heavier with the economic shutdown and coming diminished post-pandemic employment opportunities.
Some say no additional student loan relief is needed because the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act that Congress passed in March temporarily suspended student loan payments. That would be a decent argument if CARES applied to everyone, but it doesn’t.
Getting the economy back on its feet again isn’t going to be easy. New types of digital platforms can help.
A well-functioning business is like a table with four legs: Customers, capital, workers, and suppliers. The pandemic knocked out all four legs simultaneously, with terrible consequences.
When and if the health impacts of the pandemic are mitigated, the big question is: How fast can we stand all four legs back up again?
Zillow CEO Rich Barton recently tweeted that he was giving all employees the option to work from home for the rest of 2020. “My personal opinions about WFH (work from home) have been turned upside down over the past 2 months. I expect this will have a lasting influence on the future of work … and home.”
Barton’s epiphany about working from home – echoed by other U.S. business leaders – may mark a decisive shift toward pervasive telework in the post-pandemic economy. Before COVID-19 appeared, just five percent of the U.S. workforce worked remotely full-time. Now, thanks to America’s extensive digital infrastructure, two-thirds of employees are working from home.
Some companies say they have witnessed an immediate bump in productivity as workers save time on commuting and have fewer in-office distractions. The temporary switch to remote work has gone so well at Twitter that the company has decided to make it the permanent default for most employees. Other tech companies may soon follow suit.
But before too many companies go all in on work from home, there is an important reason for caution: the current increase in productivity may be an illusion.
DRAWING DOWN ON ORGANIZATIONAL CAPITAL — NETWORKS, CULTURE, AND PROCESS
Even as they work from home, employees are leveraging the relationships, routines, and habits they developed from interacting with coworkers in person on a daily basis. Over time, however, as workers begin drawing down on this social and organizational capital — culture, structure, and processes — we may find that they become less productive as collegial networks and opportunities to acquire new skills erode. Ironically, the demographic that most identifies with telework — millennials — would likely be most harmed over the long run, since more senior employees typically have a deeper reservoir of institutional and professional knowledge.
As employees switch jobs, problems linked to the withering of collegial relationships may start to seem more obvious. Eventually, companies will have trouble hiring the right people and integrating them into a cohesive team.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis took a closer look at this phenomenon and found that professional networks are, indeed, central to the career advancement. In a 2016 paper titled “Network Search: Climbing the Job Ladder Faster“, the authors found that “…jobs found through a worker’s network have (i) higher wages and (ii) longer employment duration and (iii) workers experience shorter unemployment spells.”
EVERYONE’S DOING IT RIGHT NOW. BUT FOR HOW LONG?
Work from home also faces a systemic collective action problem — when every company does it, then it’s easier for each company to do it. That dynamic is a tailwind right now because so many workers are telecommuting. But as some companies start to revert to their previous policies, it will quickly become a headwind.
These things are extremely difficult to quantify but they must be important. Otherwise, companies wouldn’t invest heavily in offices and travel aimed at building personal and professional relationships and trust. For any kind of creative work, the serendipity of sharing ideas in informal and unscheduled collaboration is crucial.
It seems unlikely that all this sunken investment in office culture and relationships is irrelevant, as the newfound enthusiasm for telework often implies. What’s more, we’ve seen spurts of interest in telework come and go.
It wasn’t so long ago that the trends in corporate America were moving away from work from home. In 2013, newly installed Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer ended the company’s work-from-home option, forcing several hundred employees to either move to the nearest office or quit. In the next few years, IBM, Bank of America, Best Buy, and Aetna followed suit.
COVID-19 WON’T BE THE LAST DISASTER TO FORCE WFH
But Mayer’s all-or-nothing approach doesn’t seem quite right either. It’s time to think about making work more resilient against unforeseen catastrophes like COVID-19. Central to that thinking is finding the optimal balance between office work and work from home for white-collar employees.
For instance, periodic telework commits individuals to exercise their “remote work environment”. This forces employees to spot-check necessities such as network compatibility and hardware and software updates, which can be essential to business continuity and resiliency planning in the event of emergencies suddenly dictating work from home.
Additionally, organizations need to address the increased cybersecurity risks associated with a remote work force, which provides new opportunities for sophisticated attackers to insinuate themselves within a network. As Verizon Business Group CEO Tami Erwin told Reuters, “A lot of people ended up sending workers to work from home without really thinking through what were some of the security elements in the future. I think employees working from home are probably more vulnerable to attacks.”
Overall, as workers spread out, risk increases and corporate decision-making needs to respond appropriately. A challenging economic environment only compounds the difficulty in managing new risks due to work from home policies. According to a recent Moody’s investor research note, “As profits fall, strong governance will be required to ensure that any reduction in cyber security budgets does not expose issuers to increased cyber risk.”
Insurance alone cannot be the answer – legal liability precedents are still in their infancy and the entire cyber insurance offering is under defined and risky. And even if insurance does mitigate some risk, it can’t prevent negative reputational impact, harm to employees (trust, retainment, etc.), and damage to client and customer relationships.
According to one executive of a Chicago based firm that specializes in cyber security risks and responses for large corporations, “Those who started mitigating increased telework risks before Covid-19 are doing well, and those trying to play catch up are making mistakes that will be amplified due to the distributed workforce and economic pressures.” They noted that time is not the only thing lost: “It’ll cost more too.”
CONCLUSION
Remote work can include financial advantages in lower fixed costs like office space, and lower benefit outlays for commuter and daycare. Employers are even seeing a decline for lower overall worker salaries as qualified employees are willing to take less pay in exchange for telework benefits.
And the technology supporting remote work has clearly improved, especially in the last five years. The “consumerization” of enterprise software means there are finally products for telework that employees want to use, from videoconferencing, to instant messaging to new tools for managing relationships with customers. But because of heavy investments in organizational capital, companies are beginning to realize that having the right tools wasn’t the only thing holding them back from transitioning to full-time work from home earlier.
The future will likely feature a robust and variable mix of telework and office work. Companies that leap prematurely to the conclusion that their ability to prosper during the shutdown proves that the “office” is obsolete risk burning through their organizational capital, just as their rivals start to build it back up.
For Bryan Morton and Parents for Great Camden Schools, the fight for a great school in every neighborhood is the best way to ensure that no child in Camden, New Jersey, falls into the pre-K-to-prison pipeline.
Parents for Great Camden Schools (PGCS) is, in many ways, built in the image of its founder. A native of Camden, Morton grew up seeing police officers, firefighters and schoolteachers who looked like him.
Educated in the Camden City Public Schools (CCPS), Morton attended the only public schools available to him. He excelled early and tested into gifted and talented programs.
By the time Morton entered high school, Camden looked very different. The municipal unions had negotiated away city workers’ residency requirements, creating an exodus of the African-American workers Morton grew up emulating.
As schools wind down from a, hopefully, once-in-a-lifetime shutdown, many students and teachers find their motivation also winding down. Educators are calling this “zoom fatigue,” referring to the commonly used teleconference platform. To end the year on a high note, teachers could turn to project-based learning (PBL), by asking students to complete a project they are interested in.
Motivation is the key to learning. “If the kids want to learn, you can’t stop ‘em,” former Ohio State professor of education Jack Frymier once said. “If they don’t, you can’t make ‘em.”
So urge students to work on something they care about. Education researchers have identified four main strategies to motivate students: focusing on learning students find relevant; giving them autonomy, or ownership of their learning; using positive feedback; and creating strong student-teacher relationships. So let students pick something they find relevant and give them some autonomy.
Jodi Chamberlin, a Tacoma, Washington, elementary school teacher, provides a good example. She selected projects “based on my students’ individual interests,” she wrote on DonorsChoose.org, a website where teachers can ask for donations for school projects. “I selected car building kits for my students who are interested in physics and mechanics of cars. I selected origami kits for a few of my kiddos who are always folding paper into various games during class time. I selected comic book templates for kids who are interested in being illustrators one day.”
Projects do not have to be physical. Some could be built online, through video games such as Minecraft, in which users enter a blocky, 3-D, computer-generated world in which the user has free reign to create any structure he or she can imagine using the tools built into the game. The first graphic shows a Minecraft world, while the second shows a suggested school project using Minecraft, from Fusion Yearbooks.
Source: Planet Minecraft
Irene Weinstein, a library media specialist at New Beginnings Family Academy in Bridgeport, CT, has used BreakoutEdu, an immersive learning games platform, to get her students excited about learning from home. “I have given students completely digital breakouts that I was able to access for free and the excitement and focus that I saw has been unmatched by any other activity,” she wrote on DonorsChoose.org. “However, there are only a handful of free lessons. With the access that this kit gives us, students can continue their thinking adventures throughout the year.”
Another teacher raised money to give students the material needed to build a terrarium at home, so they can grow plants and record their life cycles in a closed environment. Another raised funds for aquaponics sets, so students could grow their own vegetables.
Larry Berger, CEO of the curriculum and assessment firm Amplify, described a science project for older students from Amplify’s curriculum, in a recent interview. “Every kid participates in what we call an engineering internship for each unit,” he said. “They are on a fictional team at a science and engineering company. In the unit where we’re learning about changing climate, we’ve been tasked with designing rooftops for a city, and we are trying to use the science we’ve learned, but in an applied way, working with our team, designing rooftops, and we’ve set it up so most of the time, the really good idea that your team has fails for an interesting scientific reason and you’ve got to go back to the drawing board, like real engineers.”
Teachers could ask students who are passionate about sports to design the reopening of their favorite professional league. They could give students a series of questions they have to answer, such as how they would keep players and referees from exposure to the COVID-19 virus, whether any spectators would be allowed, how much television revenue each game would generate, whether the teams could make any profit this way, and if not, how the league would keep teams from going bankrupt. As they developed answers, teachers could continue to challenge them, poking holes in their reasoning and asking them to think more deeply.
Some teenage boys, who are disengaged in most classes, might love working on a project like this.
Through PBL, teachers serve as coaches and guides, giving inspiration and constructive feedback to help their students succeed. By posing increasingly demanding challenges and questions, they help students learn many different skills, from math and writing to critical thinking and digital publishing.
Students without computers or internet access could be put on teams with students who do have those resources. For individual assignments, teachers could either have the family photograph or record the student’s project and send it to the teacher or drop it off at a designated pick-up location.
At the end of the year, students and/or teams could showcase their work through an online show-and-tell. Every student or team would talk about their project, why they care about it, and what they were able to learn from it. This would help students develop the confidence to present in front of the class. For the students without internet, the teacher could present the project visually as the students discuss their work through a phone connection.
Whether it is origami animals, a Minecraft world, a terrarium, or an NBA restart, every student has something unique and noteworthy to contribute. Through these projects, students would be able to fuel their passions without ever leaving home.
And who knows, perhaps teachers would learn something they could use to motivate and engage their students in future years.
Bruce Arao, a spring 2020 intern at the Progressive Policy Institute, is a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, double-majoring in economics and sociology.
As the coronavirus crisis grinds on, state and local leaders are warning of a looming fiscal meltdown. Unlike the federal government, most state and local governments are required to balance their budgets, so they may need to implement painful budget cuts as unemployment soars and as tax collections dry up. Cuts are not inevitable, but they can only be avoided if the Democrat-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate pass flexible aid for state and local governments. But rather than coming to the rescue, Congress is in gridlock over the next package of economic relief, in part because of misplaced Republican concerns about giving aid to state, county, and city governments.
Based on the most recent economic projections from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Progressive Policy Institute estimates that state and local governments will need an additional $445-$835 billion in federal support through the end of 2021 just to maintain their normal operations without cutting spending or raising taxes. If Congress does not pass more aid, the budget cuts made after the Great Recession suggests that schools and universities, Medicaid recipients, and state and local government employees will bear the brunt of the coming cutbacks. Steep budgets cuts would also lead to a more severe recession and a slower economic recovery.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in the years after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, 44 states laid off or cut pay for state employees, 43 states cut higher-education spending, 31 cut health-care spending, 34 cut K-12 education spending, and 29 cut services or cash benefits for the elderly and disabled. Eight states also cut the maximum amount of time for which workers can draw unemployment benefits. Some of those cuts were never reversed: Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that a decade after the recession, states employed 132,300 fewer noneducational workers and spent $1,175 less per student on higher education than they did prior to the recession. As of 2016, states also spent 1.75 percent less on K-12 education in inflation-adjusted dollars than they had spent in 2008.
The cuts state and local leaders are considering now look a lot like those made during the Great Recession. Ohio leaders have proposed cutting $775 million from the state’s budget, primarily to K-12 education, Medicaid, and higher education. Colorado expects it will have to cut about a quarter of its discretionary spending, and is deliberating over cuts to K-12 education, health care programs, and infrastructure. In Oregon, leaders are considering cuts to policing, prisons, financial aid for college students, and social programs that benefit children, people battling addiction, and the elderly. Local governments of all sizes, from New York City to small cities in Mississippi, claim that they will have to furlough workers or cut back on city services such as transit and garbage pick-up.
Prior to the pandemic, roughly 20 million people worked for state and local governments. As those governments reduce their workforces, the already record-high unemployment rate could rise even further. Meanwhile, cutting aid to low-income people – those who are most likely to spend whatever money they receive – would hurt our most vulnerable citizens while also depressing consumption, which would hurt businesses and undermine the recovery.
These short-term cuts can also have longer-lasting consequences. For example, students who were affected by cuts to K-12 education in the wake of the Great Recession earned lower test scores years later, and even became less likely to attend college. The effects were particularly pronounced for black children, Latino children, and children in low-income families.
In a normal recession, sales taxes (states’ largest tax revenue source) fall less than other revenue sources like income taxes, lessening the blow the recession has on state and local budgets. But experts fear social distancing will cut into sales tax revenues more than it has in the past, as even people who didn’t experience a loss in income have fewer opportunities to spend what they earned. And oil-producing states, which tend to have large “rainy day” fundsthat could insulate them from fiscal crises, will have to reroute some of those reserves to offset revenue losses caused by historically low oil prices in addition to making up for pandemic-related losses.
The stakes are enormous, but the Trump administration is trying to tie aid for state and local governments to unhelpful tax cuts, while Congressional Republicans complain that aid would bail out poorly-managed states. But those claims are misguided, because the scale of state and local losses will dwarf what even the most fiscally-disciplined governments could have foreseen. Federal support for state budgets now will prevent government workers from joining the ranks of the unemployed and prevent budget cuts that would hurt vulnerable Americans, both of which would slow economic recovery. If Washington Republicans really are serious about restarting the economy as quickly as possible, they should stop stalling and start working with House Democrats to deliver the aid our states urgently need.
We’re used to thinking of COVID-19 testing as an activity that is led by government public health agencies, supported by private testing laboratories such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp.
But American businesses have a broader role to play. Workplace-based testing for COVID-19 infections is shaping up to be a crucial component of managing the virus and getting the economy restarted again.
In mid-April Scott Gottlieb, former head of the FDA, wrote a op-ed (1) for the Wall Street Journal where he argued that:
As employees return to work, perhaps as early as May, employers can offer screening at their place of business. Rapid diagnosis and containment will be a critical part of limiting spread.
Government policy can encourage employer-based testing in two ways. First, without cutting corners, federal and state regulatory agencies should be open to approving employer-based testing laboratories that will add significantly more national testing capacity. Second, the U.S. should consider subsidizing sick leave for workers that test positive, in order to encourage more companies to do testing.
Oddly enough, the CDC is still treating testing as a scarce resource, as it has since the beginning of the pandemic, and actively discouraging employer use of tests. The current CDC guidelines (2) for employers suggest checking workers for virus symptoms or elevated temperatures, but goes on say: “[e]mployers should not require a COVID-19 test result ….to return to work.”
But to be polite, that attitude from the CDC misses the point. President Donald Trump has explicitly made testing the responsibility (3) of state governments, in conjunction with the leading private labs, and they simply don’t have the resources to carry the whole load. It’s time to harness the financial heft of the business sector to pick up some of the testing burden.
Even in the face of CDC discouragement, companies such as Amazon, U.S. Steel (4), Whirlpool (5), Microsoft, Intel and Las-Vegas based Wynn Resorts are either considering or already exploring (6) workplace-based testing. Amazon (7), in particular, is taking steps towards (8) setting up its own laboratory facilities in order to regularly test all staff, including those without symptoms, according to CEO Jeff Bezos in his letter to shareholders. According to its latest earnings report, the company expects to spend “hundreds of millions” of dollars in the second quarter to develop its own COVID-19 testing capabilities.
What are the pluses and minuses of workplace-based testing? Done right, it benefits workers, businesses, and the broader society. Individuals get a safer work environment and sick leave if they test positive. Businesses get to stay open in a sustainable way. And public health is improved, especially if the information gained from the test can be used to inform contact tracing. It becomes a bridge to broader testing. Workplace testing gets us a lot closer to the 500,000(9) to 1,000,000 (10) tests per day that many experts think are necessary.
Done wrong, workplace-based testing can be used as a hammer against workers, violating privacy without gains. The key is to understand what workplace-based testing can do and what it can’t.
It’s important to realize that we’re talking about tests for current COVID-19 infection, not tests for antibodies or immunity. Some people have suggested favoring workers who have coronavirus antibodies, but it’s going to be some time before we know how long immunity (11) lasts. As long as that’s unknown, companies have to test for infections, not antibodies.
A company that wants to do workplace-based testing has two key decisions. First, will the tests be voluntary or mandatory? The safest thing for workers is to test everyone at regular intervals, but that’s more expensive.
Companies also need to choose whether to contract for third-party testing services, to buy tests for use in in-house clinics, or to actually set up their testing laboratories. Most businesses will choose one of the first two options. Currently, each cartridge for Abbott Laboratories’ rapid coronavirus tests costs (12) $40. The Cepheid point-of-care test requires a cartridge (13) that sells for $35. In addition, companies have to figure in the cost of the equipment and trained personnel to administer and run the tests. Medicare is reimbursing as much as $100 per test. (14)
But these numbers will likely come down quickly as more tests come on the market. Big companies can buy in bulk, which can help bring down the costs.
Moreover, the largest companies have the financial strength and incentive to set up their own lab facilities, if they choose. That would add new testing capacity to the United States and take the pressure off both the supply of tests from manufacturers and off the leading private labs. LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics are both in the Fortune 500, but they are dwarfed by companies such as Amazon, Walmart, Target and even Tyson Foods, which has been hit by outbreaks (15) at some of its meat-processing plants.
One reason for large companies to choose the third option– setting up their own lab facilities— is economies of scale. COVID-19 is not going away, and the nasal swabs or saliva (16) analysis will have to be repeated regularly, both because of the possibility of false negatives and because workers can obviously pick up the coronavirus at home or in the community. At the volumes needed, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the marginal cost per test drop to $10-$20 per test. (that’s the added cost of running an additional test, not including capital costs).
Setting up a testing lab is not a one-day process, by any means. Companies that go this route have to hire a lab director and other professionals, buy lab equipment, and get CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) certification from the federal and appropriate state governments. The new labs also have to develop their own testing protocols for COVID-19, and get them approved, though that will be easier as more companies go this route.
None of these steps are true blockers for a motivated company that want to do this. But they do require the company to invest some money, and involves going through a regulatory approval process for each state where testing is done. State governments can help by encouraging companies to invest in testing laboratories that add more capacity.
However, as an economic and social decision, workplace testing is a positive for both employees and employers. Everyone wants to earn a living, and no one wants to die. So workplaces that pay more attention to safety will be more attractive to workers, especially if a positive test comes with paid sick leave and payments for care.
Similarly, as the cost of testing goes down, it looks increasingly appealing from a business perspective as well. A large body of economic literature (17) on the risk-pay tradeoff implies that businesses that don’t test will have to pay significantly higher wages in order to attract workers, even in these hard times. Workers have a good sense of their risk level, and vote with their feet accordingly. By contrast, businesses that implement an effective testing strategy will find themselves able to run their operations more efficiently and profitably, while protecting their workers.
The largest businesses are likely to be the ones that lead the way towards testing. Let’s do an illustrative calculation. Pre-pandemic, there were roughly 1400 firms with employment over 10,000 workers in the United States. Together these firms employ roughly 30 million workers. Not every big company will test, of course, but if 20% of these big-company workers are tested every two weeks, on average, that comes to an average 400,000 tests per day. Assuming a marginal cost of $10-$20 per test, that comes to $4-$8 million per day. That’s on top of the sizable capital cost of setting up the testing laboratories. (Amazon’s large outlays partly reflect the costs of being the pioneer in this area).
In addition, workers that test positive should be eligible for paid sick leave, probably averaging two weeks. That’s likely to raise payroll costs more than the testing itself. If we assume that 5% of the tests come back positive, that’s 300,000 additional workers on sick leave at any time. Assuming average compensation costs of $25-$35 per hour that raises annual compensation costs to large companies by $6-9 million per day. That’s a significant cost, but it can be absorbed or passed onto consumers as an essential part of doing business.
To be a good proposition for workers and businesses, testing doesn’t have to be perfect but it does have to be systematic. Businesses can’t stop and start — they have to pick a strategy and stick to it. And the strategy has to include a commitment to take immediate steps when positives occur, as they inevitably will.
It should be noted that there’s one part of the labor market where the risk-pay tradeoff doesn’t hold, and that’s immigrant workers, especially from Mexico. According to a 2010 economic study (18), Mexican immigrant workers “on average receive zero or very low levels of wage premiums for fatal injury risks.” The key factor appears to be whether the immigrant worker is fluent in English. So industries that employ a larger number of Mexican immigrants who are not fluent in English — notably agriculture and food production — may not be under the same pressure to test. That suggests a need for special scrutiny by state and local governments.
Legally, testing by employers (19) is on firm ground during a pandemic, as part of providing a safe workplace. The EEOC has noted that:
Employers may take steps to determine if employees entering the workplace have COVID-19 because an individual with the virus will pose a direct threat to the health of others. Therefore an employer may choose to administer COVID-19 testing to employees before they enter the workplace to determine if they have the virus.
In addition, the EEOC has noted that while employers must keep health records in a confidential file, they may disclose the name of employees that have COVID-19 to public health authorities.
That’s important. The information from the tests has to be available to the public health authorities for contact tracing and potential isolation of infected people.
While much of testing can be decentralized to workplaces, contract tracing and followup is something only the public sector can take the lead on, aided perhaps by the sort of technological capabilities that companies such as Apple and Google are building.
The public health system needs to be ready to act on the information garnered from employer testing with sustained contact tracing, to understand how the worker got infected and to potentially isolate their families and contacts who may be asymptomatic and not realize that that they are infectious. So business testing makes sense as a complement to investment in public health contact tracing as well.
The government can give businesses an incentive to do the right thing by subsidizing sick leave that is the result of a positive test. That would encourage more companies to test their workers.
The government could also help by finding a way to streamline the approval process for corporate testing labs in multiple states, in response to the pandemic. Simply having the CDC come out in favor of workplace testing would make things easier. And while the EEOC statement is reassuring, it may also be helpful for Congress to address potential liability issues connected with employer testing, which is the right thing for workers.
What about the downsides of workplace-based testing? It clearly raises issues of privacy, especially if the names of people who test positive are passed onto public health authorities. It’s essential that workers not be penalized for testing positive. Nor should they be penalized for being in a vulnerable category, like being over 60 or immune-compromised. Indeed, comprehensive testing makes it easier to employ such people.
Another issue is whether small businesses can afford workplace-based testing that allows them to compete with big businesses. Some provision should be made for allowing small businesses to take advantage of the testing supply chains that large companies develop, perhaps by giving them access to low-cost testing.
In the end, testing in the workplace is an affordable proposition. It will raise costs and likely prices, and lower profits, but that’s a small price to pay for a safer workplace. President Trump is eager to reopen the U.S. economy. But he doesn’t seem to understand that will require much more testing that we are doing today. Sustained business testing will take a significant burden off the public health system. If a significant number of large employers start workplace testing, it has the potential for reaching a large number of Americans quickly. It’s the right thing for businesses to do.
President Trump is promising a swift and seamless economic recovery if only the states will hurry up and lift their stay-at-home orders. “Those jobs will be back and they’ll be back very soon,” he said, reacting to last month’s horrendous spike in unemployment.
This is fantasy. Besides ignoring the health hazards of prematurely reopening the economy, Trump is raising false hopes among millions of U.S. workers whose jobs have vanished in the COVID-19 crisis.
In fact, getting everyone back to work once the pandemic is contained will be a huge challenge. It will happen in stages, not all at once, and it will require a well-focused national push to help less-educated and low-wage workers find new jobs, skills and careers.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems as woefully unprepared to grapple with this urgent task as it was to check the pandemic’s spread. That means Congress will have to deliver what we need: A full-scale, full-employment initiative in which the federal, state and local governments work in tandem with the private sector to upskill displaced workers, match them to openings in fast-growing sectors and lower obstacles to starting a business.
It is time for Latinx communities to build the political power necessary to demand education reforms that benefit their children, several Latinx leaders argue. Within 16 months, 30 percent of all public school students will be Latinx, they pointed out during a recent Progressive Policy Institute webinar. But school boards often have no idea what these students need.
“A lot of the problem I see is that the people in power don’t even take the first step to understand who they’re dealing with,” said Ricardo Miguel Martinez, who founded and leads Latin American Parents for Public Schools (LAPPS), in Georgia.
“These systems were designed” generations ago by white people, added Cinto Ramos, president of the school board in Ft. Worth and the Mexican-American School Board Association in Texas. “Our whole system was designed in whiteness.” Latinx parents are rarely at the table when decisions are made, so “we district leaders have got to get ready to listen like we’ve never listened before.”
“Most Latino families are low-income, and what we’re seeing is that low-income families are much more susceptible to health problems,” says Alma Marquez, who leads a public affairs firm called the Del SOL Group and founded La Comadre, a network of Latina women in California fighting to improve education for their children. “Only 15 percent of Latino parents can work from home, so most of them have to work outside the home, and that exposes them to this virus.”
“We have people in our community that are already selling their cars and their possessions to pay for groceries and rent and keep the lights on,” Martinez added.
Martinez’s LAPPS organization has helped create a COVID Relief Fund, to provide money to Latinx and black families in crisis, and Ramos’s district has worked to get laptops and WiFi hotspots to Latinx students so they can continue learning from home. But all agreed that deeper reforms are necessary.
The first step, several argued, is to give Latinx parents real information about the quality of their children’s schools. LAPPS prepared an “Equity Report,” which showed the disturbing reality that in Atlanta Public Schools, only 16 percent of black students and 20 percent of Latinx students read proficiently. “We show people the graphs and charts about how we’re doing, and the first thing we see is the jaws drop,” Martinez said.
“If you do not have an Equity Report for your district, you need one.”
The next step is to get parents to attend school board meetings and speak up. In Atlanta, LAPPS worked with the school board to pass the first language access policy in the state of Georgia. Other districts have begun to follow suit.
Parents should demand that the districts actively recruit quality Latinx teachers, the participants agreed. Districts should also create more options that fit the needs of Latinx students, such as specialized schools for recent immigrants, dual-language immersion schools, and career-tech high schools. In California, La Comadre is pushing the governor to mandate that districts create individualized learning plans for each English language learner, based on the success of a program in Modesto that has done that.
Rather than assign students to such schools based on where they live, districts should allow families to choose the school that best fits their needs, some participants added. “For Latino families, I think choice is something that could be of life or death importance,” Marquez said. “School choices really do dictate so much of family outcomes, socioeconomic outcomes, and as we’re seeing with this COVID crisis, health outcomes.”
Both Marquez and Ramos noted that they had benefited from the opportunity, as Ramos put it, “to attend a better school than some of my neighbors were able to, than some of my siblings were able to.”
They also stressed that schools need significant autonomy, so their leaders can hire more effective teachers and use their resources in more effective ways.
As an illustration, Beacon Network Schools Executive Principal Alex Magaña talked about the opportunity he had in Denver to transform a struggling district school — where 80 percent of the students were Hispanic and 96 percent qualified for subsidized meals — into an “innovation school,” with waivers from much of the bureaucracy’s red tape.
He and his teachers — all district employees — “redesigned the school to do something different for the population we were serving. We offer a unique program of enrichment activities [particularly through an extended day], personalized learning and blended learning [in which every student has a computer], and character development, or social-emotional learning.”
Because innovation school status gave them the flexibility they needed to do all of this, Magaña and his staff succeeded. A few years later the district offered them a chance to take over another failing school, which they also turned around. Now they are an “innovation zone,” with its own board, which advocates for the school, defends its autonomy, and raises money to fund its many enrichment activities.
With their autonomy, the schools were able to pivot to remote learning almost immediately when the district closed down. “The students were not shocked,” Magaña said. “They knew where to go on their computers for their assignments. We can quickly make adjustments and changes to serve the needs of our kids; we don’t need to wait.”
Marquez expanded on this theme in a subsequent interview: “We’ve got to trust educators at the local level, and too often, because of these big bureaucracies, and because people who work in them are disconnected from the daily realities that students and their families face, they just don’t have the connections to the students. We’ve got to trust that educators can make those decisions, and at the same time, we have to hold them accountable.
“We need to trust principals to hire their team. We need to trust that principals can be instructional leaders, who should have the autonomy to help others move out if they are not meeting the goals and vision of the school. In addition to hiring and firing their staff, we need to make sure principals are able to determine what resources are used where, with a very clear delineation that the kids who most need those resources get those resources. So we need to make sure that the money is being budgeted with an equity lens, that more of the money is going to kids who are furthest from opportunity. And we need to make sure that there is transparency and accountability about that money.”
Martinez emphasized that schools should be made accountable to parents. “We‘re big on accountability,” Martinez explained, also in a follow-up interview. “Accountability means that the customers and the customer service are based on facts and decisions are based on facts and figures. The customers are the kids and their parents, and the customer service is the teachers and principals. The customer service in so many of these schools is horrible; parents are treated like dirt.”
Marquez noted that accountability to parents can be made real by giving them the right to move their children to a better public school if they are not satisfied. “They deserve the same opportunity to choose a school for their children that upper income people have,” she said.
She added that parents should have the option of choosing public charter schools if they prefer them. “Latino families like the autonomy” charters have, she noted. “Latino families like the respect they get as customers” who can choose what’s best for their children.
But none of this will simply be given to Latinx families, Marquez and the others noted. Cinto Ramos, who described himself as “that pissed off parent who ran for the school board,” said Latinx leaders have not yet figured out how to mobilize their community to embrace its power. He quoted Martin Luther King: “You must have power with love. Power without love is reckless and abusive. And love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
“We must lift our people into positions of power to fight for our children,” Marquez added. “Often those in power don’t want to hear from black and brown moms — and surely don’t want to give them any power. So we are raising our voices to them. We’re going to continue to push you, to embarrass you, to love on you, whatever it takes to make sure our kids get what they need. Because our kids only have one chance. They don’t get a do-over in 10 years.”
Fears about the novel coronavirus, the economy, and prolonged self-isolation are taking a toll on Americans and is making us sick. Calls to the federal mental health crisis hotline have increased 900 percent compared this time last year. Telehealth provides an opportunity for Americans to access mental health and essential primary care providers from their homes.
Many health care providers including therapists and psychiatrists have adapted, moving their appointments from their office and meeting virtually with patients online. And there is evidence that telehealth provides benefits to patients with anxiety and depression. Virtual care can help people feel less isolated, learn coping tools, develop goals and routines, and provide emotional support for people struggling during this difficult time. And in bolstering mental health, telehealth offers a new highway for improving patients’ overall health.
Lucy McBride, MD, Neil Leibowitz, MD, JD, of Talkspace, and PPI’s Arielle Kane discuss how telehealth can improve access to mental health services and how policy can improve access and encourage better integration of mental health across the care continuum.
As school winds down for this year, discussion in education circles has turned to next year. After a spring of uneven distance learning and a long summer, should classes pick up where they were last March—or where they would normally start? Should they ask those who did not participate in distance learning to repeat a year?
But these questions miss the point. All students arrive, every year, at different stages in their academic growth. Some are multiple years behind grade level; some are near grade level but have gaps in their learning, topics they have never mastered. And some are at or above grade level.
Schools full of low-income children have struggled with this reality for years, because many of their students are years behind grade level. Many charter schools were founded to serve such students, and they have led the search for answers.
The coronavirus pandemic has had profound social and economic consequences but it also has moved the national health care debate beyond the narrow focus on universal coverage, to a larger question of how to address the disparities which underlie disease. We’ve seen the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on underserved populations. Former Governors John Kitzhaber, MD and Jack Markell, as well as special guest Gerard Anderson, Ph.D., discuss how to reform health care delivery and payment to improve outcomes.
The U.S. House of Representatives is moving ahead with plans to vote today on the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act: the fifth – and potentially final – a piece of major legislation addressing the coronavirus pandemic and its economic effects. The 1800-page bill is estimated to cost roughly $3 trillion and contains a mix of both good policies and bad but is perhaps most notable for what it leaves out: automatic stabilizers.
The biggest flaw with previous relief bills was that aid was limited by the availability of funds appropriated by Congress or arbitrary calendar dates it chose instead of being based on the real needs of our economy. As a result, measures like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) were exhausted within three weeks and many eligible businesses couldn’t get needed financial relief until Congress took additional action. The best way to prevent this problem in the future is by adopting “automatic stabilizers” — policies that cause spending to rise or taxes to fall automatically as predetermined economic or public-health benchmarks are met. For example, a proposal by Congressman Don Beyer and Senators Jack Reed and Michael Bennet would change the expansion of unemployment benefits included in the CARES Act to gradually phase out as the economy recovers instead of expiring arbitrarily on July 31st. The centrist New Democrat Coalition has also been vocal in calling on leadership to adopt automatic stabilizers in future relief bills.
Unfortunately, the HEROES Act doesn’t include any new automatic stabilizers – reportedly because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is concerned about the bill’s $3 trillion price tag. On the one hand, Speaker Pelosi is right to be concerned about wasting taxpayer money on unnecessary expenses given our nation’s serious long-term fiscal challenges. But the unfortunate reality is that supporting our economy during the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes is a large and necessary expense. It is no less fiscally responsible to pass one $3 trillion bill than three $1 trillion bills if the money is efficiently targeted to support our economy throughout this pandemic. Moreover, there are a number of costly provisions included in the HEROES Act that are a poor trade-off for sacrificing automatic stabilizers.
