Originally published in The Intercept on March 17, 2021.

IN APRIL 2020, as the world was coming to terms with the new coronavirus pandemic, workers at an Amazon sorting facility in Chicago launched a series of safety strikes to demand Covid-19 protections for all staff. It was one of several organized protests by Amazon workers nationwide, and the actions in Chicago, at the DCH1 delivery station in Pilsen on the south side of the city, came after management announced in late March that a worker had tested positive for the virus.

“We decided to take a stand,” said Shantrece Johnson, a worker who was involved. “Most of us, we don’t mind working, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we had the potential to bring this [virus] home.” Johnson ultimately contracted Covid-19 in mid-April, before Amazon agreed to provide personal protective equipment to workers at the warehouse.

Roughly 70 to 80 workers participated in the four safety strikes. Among other things, the Chicago workers demanded that their warehouse be shut down for two weeks and cleaned; that Amazon cover the costs of any medical bills for workers who get sick on the job; that the warehouse pause processing nonessential items; and that management provide immediate transparency if and when anyone else got infected.

Following the strikes, DCH1 Amazon workers said they faced retaliation in the form of intimidation and disciplinary write-ups. Johnson herself was written up, she said, for ostensibly not obeying social distancing. The workers banded together and filed a charge with their regional National Labor Relations Board office. Their charge, known as an unfair labor practice, or ULP, included five allegations of National Labor Relations Act violations. The workers accused their site lead, Domonic Wilkerson, of unlawfully disciplining them for protected activities, unlawfully interrogating them, unlawfully engaging in surveillance, unlawfully breaking up their gatherings, and maintaining an “overly broad rule” that precluded gatherings on Amazon’s property outside their normal shifts.

In text messages reviewed by The Intercept, the NLRB regional agent assigned to the case informed the workers on February 24 that the federal agency had reached a decision and found merit to the workers’ claims. On March 10, the NLRB told the workers that “Amazon has stated its intent to settle” and that the agency was working with the company to clarify an agreement. (A settlement would lay out how Amazon will remedy the violations, but if Amazon does not ultimately agree to settle, then the NLRB would issue a complaint and schedule a hearing before an administrative law judge.) The timeline is not clear, but as redress, the workers requested that Amazon provide notice, both physically and electronically, to all relevant employees about what happened and make clear that their rights will not be violated again.

Neither Amazon nor Wilkerson returned requests for comment, and an NLRB spokesperson told The Intercept that the agency could not comment on the case until a final decision is released.

Ted Miin, one of the workers who filed the charge, said that the most significant thing to him about the NLRB’s decision is “the message that we have rights, we should know them, and we should know how to use the NLRB as a tool to make more room for us to organize.” Miin said that, while anecdotal, he feels that over the last year as their charges have been investigated, management has “been more careful” with workers on a daily basis; Miin also said that personally he felt higher-ups were more accommodating with requests for warehouse supplies, equipment, and day-to-day issues.

Johnson also called the NLRB decision “a major victory” given Amazon’s “big team of lawyers.” Both Johnson and Miin said they received calls from the regional NLRB in late February informing them that the NRLB found merit to their claims.

THE AMAZON WORKER organizing happening in Chicago — under the banner of Amazonians United Chicagoland — looks different from the ongoing high-profile union drive in Bessemer, Alabama.

In Alabama, nearly 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers have been casting votes on whether to form a union with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Voting continues through March 29, and if a majority votes in favor, it would mark the first Amazon union in the United States. (The only previous election, at a warehouse in Delaware in 2014, failed.) The Washington Post reported that more than 1,000 Amazon workers in other parts of the country have contacted the RWDSU about potentially launching their own union organizing drives, and President Joe Biden recently offered support for the workers.

In Chicago and in other cities, including New York City and Sacramento, there are worker-led Amazonians United groups that consider themselves unions, though they are not affiliated with any formal legally recognized union like the RWDSU.

“We are not affiliated with any legal organization that claims to be a union, especially major business unions, many of whom have tried to recruit us,” said Miin. He said that they support the Amazon workers in Bessemer and did not rule out affiliating with a formal union in the future but that they have a different approach to worker organizing. Miin added that affiliating with a legal union would be a decision determined democratically by the workers later when and if they felt ready.

Amazonians United Chicagoland got its start in April 2019, when a handful of DCH1 workers came together to demand clean water be made available to them in the warehouse. Their five-gallon water stations were often left open to dusty air and were never clean, and there were often no cups available, they said. Workers collected 150 signatures from colleagues protesting the conditions, and after delivering the petition to management, Amazon consented to provide water.

Later that summer, workers banded together again to organize for air conditioning, health insurance, and a pay increase, and by the fall, workers organized around a manager they felt was abusive. Miin says their largest campaign was their successful effort in early 2020, before Covid-19 hit, to push for paid time off. Their organizing was inspired by a similar PTO campaign launched by Amazon workers in Sacramento in December 2019. In a formal update dated March 20, 2020, Amazon confirmed that the workers could begin taking paid time off.

While the workers are celebrating their not-yet-official victory at the NLRB, their latest fight is against a new policy Amazon began rolling out in January known as “megacycle” shifts. These 10 1/2-hour shifts, which run from 1:20 a.m. to 11:50 a.m., were presented to DCH1 workers as new nonnegotiable work schedules going forward. Vice reported in February that the megacycle shifts were being rolled out quietly at delivery stations nationwide, collapsing multiple shorter shift options into one long one. Workers noted that the new option leaves no flexibility for parents and caretakers. Amazon also recently announced it would be closing the DCH1 warehouse, shutting down operations on April 2.

Amazonians United is fighting back, and recently launched a new petition for megacycle accommodations, with demands that include a $2-per-hour pay increase, Lyft rides to and from work to compensate for inaccessible public transit after midnight, and flexibility for associates who can’t work the full shift. They say if Amazon tries to split them up into different warehouses, they’ll respond by organizing new warehouses.

“I think we’d be really naive to believe closing DCH1 was in no way related to the organizing we’ve been doing,” said Miin.

Originally published in The New York Times on March 11, 2021.
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Last spring, as a poorly understood virus swept the planet­, something remarkable happened: Across the country, all levels of government put in place policies that just a few months earlier would have been seen by most people — not to mention most politicians — as radical and politically naïve.

Nearly 70 percent of states ordered bans on utility shut-offs, and more than half did so for evictions. Mayors authorized car-free streets to make cities safer for pedestrians, and the federal government nearly tripled the average unemployment benefit. Within weeks, states eliminated extortionist medical co-pays for prisoners and scrapped bail. New Jersey passed a bill that released more than 2,200 incarcerated people all at once.

The pandemic has been a long nightmare, but those were progressive pipe dreams turned reality. The arrival of the coronavirus, along with the wide-scale economic shutdowns to slow its spread, forced American policymakers to admit that a new world wasn’t just possible — it was necessary.

While the United States ultimately failed to deliver a coordinated response to the pandemic and millions of people are still struggling, there are important lessons here. Over the past several months, I’ve interviewed dozens of activists and policy professionals who have recounted stories of politics shifting quickly on issues they have worked on for years. Measures that were once viewed as likely to cause a spike in crime or a collapse of the housing market, or that were considered just too expensive or simply impractical have, in fact, worked out pretty well.

But many of these emergency interventions are set to disappear. The pandemic’s end now finally appears on the horizon, and millions are desperate to return to normal — to our schools and offices, our family visits and holiday celebrations. But when it comes to so many issues — from climate change to child care — a return to “normal” is aiming far too low.

The pandemic offered glimpses of what is possible. But will all this become a blip in history, or will it provide impetus for long-term change? The public has a genuine but brief window over the next few months to make America a fairer, more just and more humane place. If people recognize that, seize that and demand that, they could reshape this country for decades.

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As I researched new policies deployed during the pandemic, I learned about successful innovations intelehealth spurred by social distancing, relaxed rules for addiction treatment that improved access to daily methadone and students who discovered virtual learning to be a better fit. It will take time to evaluate all of the many policy experiments, but three particular areas stuck out as where these lessons are among the clearest: housing, prison reform and internet access.

Through nationwide public health orders to stay at home to contain the virus, the pandemic forced lawmakers to strike better balances between the property rights of landlords and the safety of their tenants. While the efforts have been imperfect, with loopholes and uneven enforcement, never before has Congress thrown its weight behind protecting all residents from the threat of eviction. President Biden, too, recognizing which way the winds have blown, extended an eviction moratorium on his first day in office.

Take Maryland, for example. After years of inaction, lawmakers are now considering a sweeping housing package that includes a statewide right to counsel for low-income tenants facing eviction, a rental assistance fund and an increase to eviction filing fees for landlords. “The pandemic definitely changed the conversation,” Zafar Shah, a housing attorney at the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center, told me.

Yet for all this momentum, Mr. Shah fears that his state might fall too easily back on its old ways. Landlords are eager to collect back rent, and when lawmakers in Montgomery County, a Washington suburb, recently considered a proposal to require a “just cause” for evicting tenants, Mr. Shah said leaders “really struggled to wrap their heads around restraining rights of property owners.”

But the pandemic has also helped policymakers better grasp the value of giving homeless people their own independent living spaces. Last spring, cities across the country realized that crowded shelters could be hot zones for the virus and so quickly moved to rehouse thousands into newly vacant hotel rooms. Researchers at the University of Washington found that the shift from shelters to hotels improved feelings of stability among the homeless, boosted their health and well-being, and increased rates of transition to permanent housing.

States and cities financed these moves with emergency stimulus funding, but as that money dries up, policymakers should explore how they might purchase hotels or distressed property and turn them into long-term, supportive housing. They should look to Austin, Texas, where the City Council did just that, voting this winter to purchase two hotels for the homeless.

Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says she and her colleagues see “an extraordinary opportunity” with Mr. Biden and Congress to expand tenant rights, invest in public housing and finally authorize universal housing vouchers. Just a quarter of the people eligible for federal vouchers ever get one, with thousands languishing for years on waiting lists. “Our job now is to build off this broad recognition that housing is health care,” Ms. Yentel told me.

When it comes to America’s criminal justice system, pressure to revert to the previous status quo has already begun. While many prison systems suspended their unconscionable medical co-pays during the crisis, at least three states have already reinstated them. And in states that allowed for early release of prisoners, many who requested it were not freed.

Still, there are reasons for cautious hope. More Americans are now aware of the unsafe conditions in jails and the thousands there who are dying preventable deaths. “There are more than 60,000 people age 55 and up serving life sentences in prison, because of harsh sentences we handed out like candy,” said Amy Fettig, executive director of the Sentencing Project. “It’s incumbent on us to make sure that we show that these reforms like in New Jersey are noticed, that we can do these things safely.”

Criminal justice reformers head into the future with new, pandemic-era tools. In Virginia, advocates succeeded last fall in passing a bill to facilitate the early release of prisoners that had been shot down before Covid-19. A bill Delaware legislators are now considering would be modeled on New Jersey’s successful early release law from 2020.

Bryan Kennedy, a public defender in Fairfax County, Va., said it was remarkable to watch judges release people from jail early, some of whom he had seen sentenced just two months prior. “I hope I am able to look a judge in the face when this is over,” he said, “and say, in 2020 you wouldn’t have incarcerated this guy, so why are we doing this now?”

The pandemic made us all more reliant on the internet, but uneven access to it exacerbated inequalities. Over the past year activists pressured cable companies into reducing their rates so that students could afford to participate in virtual learning; city and state governments tried to deliver hundreds of thousands of tech devices to rural and low-income households. It was slow and messy, but there was finally the will to tackle a years-old problem with real focus.

But to address this in the long term, not only so that all students can study at home but also to make remote work viable for anyone and to encourage economic development in parts of the country in desperate need of investment, the answer is straightforward. Last year the House passed Representative Jim Clyburn’s bill for universal fiber broadband, which included an $80 billion investment to build a new high-speed infrastructure. “Fiber would be cheaper, long-lasting and revolutionary,” said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If the Senate passes the companion version this year, we’ll be much closer toward ending the digital divide once and for all.

“Covid shined a light that was necessary, and the wins and gains can give us momentum to shift the tide,” said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a prison reform group. But no one I spoke to believed positive change is guaranteed, and everyone warned of threats posed by diminishing political will. Sure, President Biden has pledged to “Build Back Better,” but it’s on Americans to hold him accountable to those words.

It is essential we get the word out on what has been accomplished as a result of this crisis and what our government still can do, and to remember what grass-roots activists understand deeply: Whether anything happens at all is largely up to us.

We’re still months from the end of this calamity, which has killed more than half a million Americans and severely disrupted the lives of countless more. But the time to push for permanent change is now. This is the moment to ensure that lessons from the pandemic become part of the policy conversation moving forward — to remember we can do more than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

Originally published in The New Republic on March 8, 2021.
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Last month in Chicago, after months of heated negotiations, the teachers union and Chicago Public Schools emerged with one of the most detailed school reopening agreements in the nation. Brad Marianno, an education policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has been studying these agreements since last spring, called it the most comprehensive he’s seen, citing its inclusion of things like testing protocols, measures that might lead to reclosing schools, and vaccination commitments. Among other things, the union succeeded in negotiating accommodations for hundreds more members at higher risk of Covid-19 complications, or who serve as the primary caregiver for someone at higher risk, than the district had originally agreed to accommodate.

Stacy Davis Gates, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said one of the most important components of the agreement was the so-called “school safety committees”—a demand the union put forward in December to hold leadership accountable to the health and safety promises it’s made. The school-based committees include up to four CTU members, the principal, the building engineer, and a “reasonable” number of other employees like janitors, lunchroom staff, and security guards. On a regular basis, they will flag to the principal any issues that arise and can hold the school liable if they go ignored. “That is the part of the agreement which provides us with some space to enforce the safety protocols, and it gives people who are working in the buildings power to push back and keep themselves safe,” Davis Gates told me.

Likewise, when I asked the Baltimore Teachers Union about what they’re most proud of from the fall negotiations, Corey Gaber, a vice president on the executive committee, called the “key provision” in its Memorandum of Understanding the one that holds Baltimore Public Schools accountable for everything in its Covid-19 health and safety guidelines. In effect, this means violations of those guidelines could be pursued as formal contract grievances. “The district does not have a strong track record of following through,” he said. “Given past precedent, there is not a level of trust, so for us, it’s all about getting things in writing.”

The remarks from Davis Gates and Gaber reflect something relatively basic to those familiar with the labor movement: When it comes to workplace safety, avoid taking an employer at their word. They also highlight something that, following dragged-out reopening fights, has been confusing to worn-out parents and community members, who are unclear why the pledges made by school districts have been insufficient to persuade educators to return more quickly: Isn’t this enough? Aren’t you letting perfect be the enemy of the good? These dynamics are compounded by a raft of shifting and not infrequently conflicting local, state, and federal public health guidelines—which can and are routinely used to accuse each side of “not following the science.” Even in February, following the release of the long-awaited Biden Centers for Disease Control and Prevention school reopening guidelines, experts quickly came out with contrasting opinions on the recommendations. Some felt the CDC shouldn’t have tied in-person learning to community transmission rates, despite evidence linking the two. Others thought the CDC should tie them but believed their metrics were too conservative. Others were frustrated the CDC stuck to recommending six feet of social distancing, and yet still others criticized the agency for downplaying the role of ventilation. (Two weeks after releasing its guidance, the CDC responded by releasing additional recommendations on school ventilation.)

“I was very disappointed in the school guidance that came out. I think it still has too much emphasis on ‘Covid theater’—like taking daily temperatures and cleaning down everything all the time,” said William Mills, a ventilation expert and engineering professor at Northern Illinois University. Mills, who has been advising his state on Covid-19, says governments have been resistant to embracing a more interdisciplinary approach to safety and have been too slow to accept what has been clear to industrial hygienists like him for a year.

“Many epidemiologists and infectious disease people do not get taught about the ‘hierarchy of controls,’” Mills said, referring to the standard way occupational safety experts analyze and address workplace hazards. While measures like personal protective equipment and social distancing are important, occupational safety experts put greater weight on so-called “engineering controls” like ventilation, which depend less on proper and sustained human compliance. Ensuring young children or teenagers consistently wear their masks and always remain properly distanced—in classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, and bathrooms—can be difficult, particularly if the school is crowded. “Engineered solutions remove the onus from individuals and their personal habits or attentiveness,” reads Covid-19 guidance from the American Industrial Hygiene Association. “Machines do not get tired, sloppy, or distracted.”

Bob Harrison, an occupational health specialist and clinical professor at the University of California-San Francisco, agrees what’s often missing from reopening conversations is the melding of different perspectives of safety. “While the CDC might determine that reopening schools will not lead to a surge in Covid-19 cases in the community, from a worker health perspective, whether or not I am significantly contributing to community health is not how I am coming to the issue,” he explained. In other words, in addition to fears of inadvertently getting their neighbors sick, school staff also just worry about their own health. Schools are workplaces, and since the passage of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, employers have a general duty to ensure all employees “are free from recognized hazards” that cause or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.

A year into the pandemic, it helps to understand that school reopening battles have involved different experts carrying different assessments of risk. This has sometimes led advocates for faster reopenings to believe school employees are demanding “zero risk” on the job—an obviously untenable standard. Educators, in turn, see many academics and pediatricians making assured pronouncements about how public schools can be safe, with little reckoning of whether schools are safe and how to keep them that way. “Most doctors have never visited an inner-city school or been in a meatpacking plant,” Harrison said. “They probably have never taken much of an occupational history course, they don’t know what unions do, they don’t know about power dynamics in a workplace. So we’re speaking across a gap trying to understand each other, and it’s been a long and challenging road.”

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While the science on schools and Covid-19 continues to evolve—at least two new studies were published in just the last two weeks—many health guidelines often lag reflecting the latest research. Or sometimes, as the debate over the CDC’s guidelines revealed, experts just have conflicting views on how to represent the latest science. This has led to lots of finger-pointing in negotiations, with educators often charged with making demands that exceed what some experts or some guidelines deem necessary.

San Francisco is instructive in how this played out. In December, a coalition of school district unions including teachers, administrators, technical engineers, grounds workers, secretaries, and cafeteria workers collectively put forward reopening proposals around health and safety, including on student testing and ventilation.

The school district then publicly blamed the unions for going beyond what the local health department recommended. But in the weeks since then, as union leaders like to note, local, state, and federal health guidelines were all updated and now embrace more of what the workers had been criticized for putting forward in December. And once elements like student testing were incorporated into San Francisco’s health department guidelines, the school district dropped its earlier objections, and they reached a tentative agreement that included testing about a week later.

“We’re not in a bubble,” said Rudy Gonzalez, a spokesperson for the San Francisco building trades. “The majority of school district unions are regional, and some work in multiple school districts, as well as various aspects of the private sector, so we have perspectives on what’s happening elsewhere and in other industries. This gives us an edge, and knowledge.”

Gonzalez pointed to the Stationary Engineers union as an example, which has members who work professionally to install ventilation units. These workers can seek out reputable industry advice, Gonzalez said, regardless of whether it’s yet been adopted by local regulatory bodies. In mid-December, the demands the San Francisco unions called for included MERV 13 filters with five air changes per hour in every classroom, and compliance with ventilation guidance promoted by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE, in unoccupied buildings. The ASHRAE guidelines were later endorsed by California in its updated Covid-19 guidance released January 14.

“People seem hyperfocused when what we ask for is not directly in sync with state guidance,” said Gonzalez. “But if labor leaders only ever agreed to the minimum safety standards, well, there would be more dead workers on our rolls every year.”

Certainly, though, not all union demands are as straightforwardly reasonable as requesting to follow ASHRAE’s ventilation guidance, and sometimes the unions are operating on wrong or outdated information.

In December, for example, one proposal put forward by the San Francisco school unions was to require lids on all bathroom toilets, a proposal that was mocked as ridiculous and cited repeatedly by reporters in subsequent news stories. “We have to admit that twitter fear-mongers & teachers unions have hit rock bottom,” tweeted Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor in the University of California-San Francisco epidemiology and biostats department. “Next, will unions demand we slaughter a goat before schools can re-open?”

Jill Tucker, an education reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, said she felt the toilet lid demand was a clear example of showing “how much things were being asked beyond what is required.” The Chronicle learned of the demand through a public records request, and Tucker said it “demonstrates sort of the lack of information that the union was using in terms of what they were asking for. There is no evidence for that—zero. It’s an example of something they were asking for that had no foundation in science, in research, in expert opinion, so why was it in there?”

The union’s demand around toilet lids was based on research published over the summer. The study, which raised concerns about toilet flushes generating aerosol droplet clouds from the feces of an infected person, was covered at the time in The New York Times, CNN, and even the Chronicle. Some institutions did use the research to guide their reopening protocols, such as the University of Virginia, which installed toilet lids in all its bathrooms.

“The obsession with our ask around toilet lids felt like potty humor but not funny,” said Susan Solomon, the president of the San Francisco teachers union. “It was advice we had been given by some of our sanitation-worker members, based on research suggesting the virus could be transmitted through feces, so we put it in the proposal. It was never a top priority, and eventually we took it out because further evidence seemed to show it wasn’t necessary.”

In Chicago, one demand put forward by the teachers union was to close schools when community transmission rates exceeded 3 percent positivity—a threshold that had been used (and later abandoned) in New York City, and which, by late fall, most public health experts agreed was too conservative. When accused of ignoring experts or science, CTU’s attorney Thad Goodchild told the Chicago Sun-Times the union was basing its demand on other major cities, the threshold previously set by its local public health department, and metrics used by state health officials to require out-of-state travelers to quarantine upon arriving in Illinois. “What we’re proposing is not something we’re pulling from thin air,” Goodchild said. “Is the science evolving? Of course it is. We’re learning more about this every day. Is 3 percent the right number, or is it a different number? We want to bargain about that.”

Chicago Public Schools didn’t like the idea of agreeing to any metric that could require a return to virtual learning but eventually put forward the idea of closing schools if citywide case rates doubled every fewer than 18 days. The doubling metric, it argued, would better reveal how quickly the virus was spreading. But public health experts said relying on that one metric to guide school reopening decisions was flawed, too, because if you have high case rates but a slower doubling rate, that could still mean many infections within a school. “Following the science,” as usual, was less straightforward than it seemed.

In the end, the union and district settled on a relatively complex compromise, which involved using citywide positivity rates but with a much higher bar for closure than the union had originally wanted.

And then sometimes unions and districts just confront what are ultimately subjective judgments of risk, where qualified experts have different opinions. In Baltimore, for example, the teachers union demanded high-filtration masks—such as KN95s—to wear in schools, but the school district said experts it consulted believed cloth masks would be sufficient given other mitigation strategies Baltimore was deploying. In Colorado, by contrast, the state committed last summer to providing all teachers with KN95s, stating its priority was to offer school staff as much protection as possible. If you take at face value that those involved in the negotiations are working in good faith to protect themselves and others, these kinds of disagreements will inevitably arise.

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Confusion in school reopening debates has been compounded by leaders in media, government, and even public health mischaracterizing existing research or sometimes conflating science with scientific opinion. In December and January, Chicago Public Schools put out resources falsely stating that researchers had found no link between open schools and community transmission rates. (James Gherardi, press secretary for Chicago Public Schools, defended the communications and said they’re “written in a way that is meant to be accessible to the general public, and includes links to studies and articles [for those] who want to learn more on their own.”)

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“Look, the amount of information is dizzying,” said Gonzalez of the San Francisco building trades. “I say that as a labor leader, and as a parent of an elementary and middle schooler, and my 3-year-old who is soon to start preschool.”

Jeanne Noble, the director of the Covid response at the University of California-San Francisco medical center emergency department, has been one of the most outspoken physicians in the Bay Area advocating for reopening schools, including authoring a public letter in January that 30 of her colleagues signed. When the coalition of unions and San Francisco Unified School District reached an agreement on February 6 around health and safety standards, Noble criticized it in the media. “Their decisions are hurting our children,” she said. “It’s like the death of expertise, essentially.”

Noble marshals a lot of critical arguments about the risks to children from prolonged school closures—including heavy tolls on their mental and physical health. But she also downplays the role of school ventilation if universal masking is being enforced and places great stock in a handful of studies that some experts believe are less credible to assess the risks of reopening schools in the pandemic.

Noble and many proponents for reopening point to research in North Carolina, Mississippi, Atlanta, and rural Wisconsin that found evidence of very low transmission in schools when universal masking was in place. The studies were particularly encouraging, as the school transmission rates stayed low even in environments with high community spread, suggesting schools—with proper controls in place—could act as islands of safety for children and staff. “We no longer need to look at community-based data to make these decisions because we actually have stronger data from school-based observations,” Noble argued in a recent debate.

Yet with the exception of the Atlanta study, none of the research tested for asymptomatic infection, and it did not conduct follow-up testing with people quarantining from exposure. The CDC estimates upward of 50 percent of all Covid-19 infections are asymptomatic, with rates likely even higher for children. Two studies released in late February looked at how past Covid-19 research may have undercounted infection rates among children, and weekly random surveillance testing in the U.K. has shown kids with higher infection rates than most adults.

The Wisconsin researchers acknowledged they couldn’t rule out asymptomatic spread, and another CDC study released around the same time found 5,700 Covid-19 cases were linked to outbreaks in Wisconsin K–12 schools and childcare facilities last fall.

Theresa Chapple, an epidemiologist who focuses on child and maternal health, says the lack of testing of those in quarantine or those without symptoms were major limitations for her. “They were taking the ‘don’t test and let’s see’ approach, and that’s not helpful,” she said. “We already know if you don’t test you’re not going to find the virus.”

Noble says we should be able to trust what we’re seeing on the ground, and the fact that many schools have been open for so long should dispel the notion that more schools can’t be open safely. She often points to Marin County in California, which has a public dashboard reporting just 11 suspected cases of in-school transmission since schools opened in September.

Ken Lippi, an assistant superintendent for Marin County’s education department confirmed that asymptomatic testing of students is not commonly done. But he attributes their low reported case rates to strong planning. “I don’t believe public health officials think we’ve missed any cases at all,” he told me.

A new CDC study released in late February on elementary schools in Cobb County, Georgia, suggests those who worry past research may have missed asymptomatic spread have a point. Unlike earlier research, this study offered free testing between days five and 10 to any student quarantining from exposure and then tested household contacts of anyone who tested positive from that group. Twenty-six percent of household members living with infected students also had the virus.

“This gives us a clearer idea of how schools can contribute to community spread that none of the earlier studies have given us before,” said Chapple. “We now have concrete evidence that it is biologically plausible, and when you employ appropriate methods you detect it.”

One takeaway for Chapple was that even in schools that have mitigation policies like masking and social distancing, ventilation matters because, as industrial hygienists have warned, strategies that depend on perfect human compliance often fail. In the Cobb County study, while the schools had policies of three feet of physical distancing and mandated masking, in practice those approaches weren’t always followed. Another CDC survey released in February found that among students attending in-person school in October, just 65 percent said their peers wore masks “all the time” in classrooms, hallways, and stairwells, and even fewer said their peers wore masks on buses, in restrooms, and when not eating in the cafeteria.

Mills, the ventilation expert, said one of his frustrations has been when some doctors and researchers say we still lack good evidence to show that upgraded ventilation will work to prevent the virus’s spread. “Where some experts say they see no evidence, industrial hygienists understand that these aerosols work no differently from others,” Mills said. “In my field, we understand that every time you get a new hazard there’s a roadmap you can follow. It’s not so different from SARS. This isn’t really new science for us.”

Harrison, the occupational medicine doctor, thinks one reason ventilation and universal testing often get ignored or dismissed is because they can just be tough for some schools to afford or implement. He supports both—and says from a worker health perspective, testing can be a particularly important element to monitor occupational risk. “A colleague of mine who worked for a long time on Capitol Hill on federal policy once told me, ‘Look, Bob, if a problem gets so big that nobody knows what to do, then we just eliminate the issue from consideration, and therefore it no longer becomes a problem,” Harrison said. “And I think that’s what happens with testing.”

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A melding of different safety perspectives, as Harrison suggests, could help resolve some of the remaining sticking points in the months-long quest to reopen schools.

While the CDC has said vaccination is not a prerequisite to resuming in-person learning, the CDC’s advisory committee on vaccinations did recommend prioritizing teachers for the vaccine, and multiple studies have suggested that educators working in person face higher risk of infection. The new CDC study on Cobb County also emphasized the importance of vaccinating teachers to reduce in-school spread.

While the Chicago Teachers Union dropped its earlier demand to have all educators fully vaccinated before returning to school, Chicago Public Schools did agree at the eleventh hour to increase the number of doses prioritized for teachers, which helped the district and union finally reach an agreement. In San Francisco, the agreement with the union also hinges on vaccinating staff if transmission levels in the community remain high.

A spokesperson for D.C. Public Schools, Liz Bartolomeo, said the district is very proud to have already vaccinated 2,800 teachers to help facilitate in-person learning. Educators in D.C. have been prioritized for doses since late January.

Even as families are growing more concerned about the academic toll on children from missing school, a majority of adults across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines say that currently closed schools should wait to reopen until all teachers who want the vaccine have received it, according to a Pew survey released in late February. The U.S. House of Representatives recently approved a stimulus package that would dedicate an additional $130 billion for K–12 schools, and Biden just came out more forcefully calling for teacher vaccinations.

Baltimore students in kindergarten through second grade started returning to classrooms on March 1, with more grades set to return later this month. In February, Baltimore Public Schools announced it would finally begin weekly asymptomatic testing for students and staff, something the district had long resisted. Gaber of the Baltimore Teachers Union says that with lower community transmission rates, with commitments around ventilation and testing, and since most educators have by now gotten at least their first vaccine dose, members are feeling relatively comfortable about going back.

“It’s not perfect,” he said. “But it’s way better than it was.”

Originally published in The Intercept on February 27, 2021.
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ANDREW DEVORE, an Amazon vice president and associate legal counsel who manages the company’s “labor and employment” issues, has resigned from the board of the American Constitution Society. His resignation represents a sharp turnaround from a few months ago, when the liberal legal organization voted to renew DeVore for a second three-year term.

ACS, which was founded in 2001 to help create a pipeline of liberal judges and act as a counter to the conservative Federalist Society, faced growing pressure throughout 2020 to cut ties with DeVore and condemn Amazon for its anti-union practices. In the spring, DeVore’s boss, Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky, had urged colleagues to tell reporters that, among other things, a fired worker who protested the lack of Covid-19 safety protections in a Staten Island warehouse was “not smart or articulate.”

In response, a number of left-leaning groups, including attorneys and law students affiliated with ACS, sent a letter to ACS’s president, Russ Feingold, and the ACS board of directors protesting DeVore’s leadership role and calling for his immediate resignation. But the organization did not call for his resignation and six months later voted to extend his leadership position. At the time, ACS told The Intercept that DeVore, who had served on the board since 2017, was an engaged board member and that they saw him as helping to bring “a diversity of experiences” to the organization.

In a letter sent to New York University ACS student leaders on Friday, Feingold confirmed that DeVore had resigned. “Andrew is a principled person, his Board participation was exemplary, and we benefited greatly from his service,” Feingold wrote. “We are grateful for his dedication to the organization.”

ACS did not return a request for comment, but their website has already been updated to no longer list DeVore as part of the leadership.

Feingold’s letter did not say why DeVore had resigned. But since December, when ACS publicly reaffirmed its support for the Amazon executive, a major unionization campaign at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, has picked up national attention. The company has been fighting the union effort aggressively, including hiring a $3,200-per-day consultant to dissuade the some 5,800 workers there from voting for a union.

ACS has resisted pressure from its membership to speak more forcefully about Amazon’s labor practices for most of the coronavirus pandemic. In April, amid public backlash to Amazon’s warehouse conditions, ACS released a statement reiterating its support for workers’ rights but did not specifically mention Amazon by name. Amazon is listed as a 2020 corporate sponsor on ACS’s website, though how much the company has donated to the nonprofit organization is unknown.

“I think it was very concerning that ACS as a progressive organization won’t make a statement that specifically calls out Amazon and its bad track record,” Hooman Hedayati, a member of the Washington, D.C., ACS chapter board told The Intercept in December. “It makes me question to what degree they’d really be willing to speak up in support of the labor movement.”

In late January, a virtual panel hosted by ACS chapters at Harvard, New York University, and Yale was titled “Corporate Influence in Progressive Legal Spaces: Why Is an Amazon Lawyer on the American Constitution Society’s Board of Directors?” Among other legal activists, the event featured former Amazon worker Christian Smalls, who was fired last March for protesting warehouse conditions.

Eight days after the virtual panel, ACS released its first statement directed at Amazon. “The American Constitution Society encourages all employers, including the Amazon Corporation, to respect the right of workers to collectively bargain and to follow the law in remaining neutral as to their employees’ decision to unionize or not,” Feingold wrote in the statement. “The upcoming unionization election at an Amazon plant in Alabama is scheduled to occur on February 8, and there have been concerning news reports outlining anti-organizing actions by the company. We are also disturbed by first-hand accounts of mistreatment of Amazon workers, particularly in the midst of the pandemic.”

Voting for the Bessemer warehouse union began February 8 and will continue through March 29. It is the first union election for the company in the United States since about two dozen Delaware warehouse workers rejected forming a union in 2014.