Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell departs from the Senate floor after a vote as the Senate reconvenes on Monday, May 4, 2020.
Mitch McConnell is back in town, which, as ever, is bad news for the future of the human race. His current crusade is to enact legislation that relieves employers from legal liability should their workers sicken and die from coronavirus contracted at their workplace. Under McConnell’s doctrine of laissez-mourir, bosses could call their employees back to work and station them six inches apart, while pumping virus-laden air through the vents.
McConnell’s strategy appears to be to withhold financial support for states and cities—currently a leading demand of Democrats and labor—unless they agree to his Get Out of Jail Free card for even the deadliest of bosses. Democrats and labor are fiercely opposing McConnell’s proposal, with unions noting, correctly, that it would allow employers to recall their workers despite manifestly unsafe conditions. But if McConnell hangs tough, as he invariably does, some version of his proposal might actually be enacted if he refuses to pass any further pandemic assistance until his bill becomes law.
Blue states might be able to end-run this de facto back-to-work mandate by adopting a proposal that labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein advanced in our recent “Future of Labor” symposium: requiring all companies with more than 25 employees to have worker safety councils that would have the power to decide whether workplaces are safe enough to open or unsafe enough to close, and to monitor safety conditions on an ongoing basis. Let’s hope our nation’s workers don’t have to work under McConnell’s diktat, but if they do, let’s hope states like California can counter some of its consequences by boosting workers’ control over their own health and lives.
Also: Congratulations, Chris Mooney!
Yesterday, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer for “explanatory reporting” for its ten-part series “2°C: Beyond the Limit,” which exposed and analyzed some of the most dangerous consequences of the climate crisis: the rapid warming of particular parts of the globe. The series was conceived, and half of its pieces authored, by the Post’s climate specialist, Chris Mooney. Chris got his start as a journalist as a Prospect Writing Fellow in the first years of this century; he and his fellow Fellow, Nick Confessore (now at The New York Times), initiated Tapped, the Prospect’s groundbreaking digital policy/politics blog. The perils that humans were inflicting on themselves and the planet was one of the many topics Chris covered while at the Prospect; he expanded on his work in his 2005 book The Republican War on Science—which, as current events make terribly clear, has escalated. (See above.) That said, congratulations, Chris!
