What needs to happen before your boss can make you return to work

There are few worse spots to be during a historic pandemic than a bustling workplace. They’re rife with shared door handles, shared bathrooms, shared fridges, shared desks, shared elevators, shared coffee, shared scissors, and inevitably, shared microbes.

Unfortunately for humanity, the new coronavirus, an especially devious microbe, leaped from animals to people some five months ago. Now it’s everywhere. You know the rest of the story. Over 46,000 Americans are already dead (as of April 23). 

With an effective vaccine at best a year to 18 months away, no proven medical treatments, and looming questions about how long immunity will last, there’s little question the virus will spread and sicken people once we start congregating again, especially at work. This parasite feasts on gathered humans. 

But, there is a way for tens of millions of Americans to return to workplaces while significantly limiting how many people infect one another. It will require extraordinary efforts on the part of both employers and governments. This will feel weird, at first: Imagine regularly having your temperature taken at work, routinely getting tested for an infection or immunity, mandatory handwashing breaks, and perhaps even wearing a mask.

Yet, these are exceptional times. So restarting the economy and returning to workplace normalcy will require unparalleled efforts.

“This is truly unprecedented,” said Christopher Hayes, a labor historian at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.

“This is like the 1918 flu and the Great Depression at the same time,” Hayes said.

Yet unlike previous recessions and depressions over the last 100 years, most recently the Great Recession of 2008-2009, American workers must now ask themselves an unsettling question: “People now have to worry, ‘Is it safe to go to this job?’” said Hayes.

Right now, many employers aren’t nearly prepared to tell workers in the U.S. to return to work and office spaces. To avoid infection, “the only tools you’ve got in your toolbox are the simple but hard-to-sustain public health tools like testing, contact tracing, and social distancing,” explained Michael Gusmano, a health policy expert at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

“We’re not anywhere near a situation where you could claim that you can, with any credibility, send people back en masse now,” Gusmano said.

How can a business protect its workers — if they absolutely can’t work from home? Public health experts Mashable spoke with have some recommendations for workplaces where people can’t stay at least six feet apart:

• Routinely test workers for infection (perhaps even once a week)

• Regularly check employee temperatures

• Have people come back in smaller shifts

• Put hand sanitizer everywhere

• Require that everyone wear masks

• Institute regular hand-washing breaks

These measures are unavoidable because the virus doesn’t care about human desires to return to work, movie theaters, salons, and restaurants. It simply spreads — even by just talking. “You can’t social distance any job that involves transportation,” said Hayes. “You can’t social distance Broadway. You can’t social distance theme parks. You can’t social distance most warehouses and retail work.” (Critically, a significant number of infected people — perhaps around one in four — don’t show symptoms, so they can unwittingly spread the microbe.)

“Employers are going to have to implement measures to keep employees and customers safe,” said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve, noting we should see gloves, masks, and temperature tests in many workplaces.

State governments now have the opportunity, if not onus, to give employers a big hand in ensuring people are working in safe, ethical conditions. That’s because there’s no robust national plan to reopen the country’s businesses, just these three-part guidelines for states to use, if they want. “The federal government has abdicated its responsibility for the American people and the safety of the American worker,” said Hayes, the labor historian. “The federal government has made it explicitly clear they don’t want a national plan.” The White House, for example, offers social distancing advice, gave many taxpayers $1,200 to weather the pandemic storm, and told Americans to “follow the directions of your STATE AND LOCAL AUTHORITIES.”

So states are largely on their own. There’s a with loans, tax cuts, and extended unemployment benefits, but nothing like the transformative, years-long “New Deal” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt led in the 1930s to raise America out of a debilitating national crisis. This lack of a national plan is inherently unfair to American workers, explained Hayes, because they’re at the mercy of how much their states and localities will direct, support, and guide the opening of workplaces, and generally reopen society. 

For example, the Governor of Maryland, Republican Larry Hogan, recently bought 500,000 testing kits from South Korea, flown over by Korean Air, to help his beleaguered state. In sharp contrast, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman called to reopen casinos, but told CNN’s Anderson Cooper the city will not require or facilitate social distancing at businesses. “…They better figure it out,” Goodman said Wednesday, referring to businesses. “That’s their job. That’s not the mayor’s job.”

This puts workers — who need to work — in a bad place.

“Now we’re saying people can work, but you could get this disease and bring it home,” said Craig Klugman, a bioethicist and medical anthropologist at DePaul University. “It’s unfair for society to make that sort of sacrifice. We need to give people the support they need to get through this.”

Reopening without physical protections for workers will inevitably result in sickened employees.

“Quicky opening up will condemn a whole lot of people to death,” said Klugman. “And that’s just not who we are.”

“Is it safe to go to this job?”

But some states look better positioned than others to ensure their citizens are generally protected as businesses reopen and employees return to workplaces. California plans to recruit “an army of tracers” some 10,000-strong, to track down and isolate infected people. Massachusetts is building a “consortium” of health agencies and private businesses to deploy wide-scale testing and trace infections (to figure out who infected who). In Florida, however, some popular beaches are already opening with the hope people follow “guidelines” to stay six feet from each other. 

Reopening, then, will inherently be uneven, and potentially, unfair. 

“I worry about who is going to be pressured to come back to work,” said Rutgers’ Gusmano, noting it’s more likely to be people with lower incomes. Already, it’s predominantly lower-wage essential workers who are being exposed. 

If employers can’t guarantee unprecedented safety measures, many office workers, at least, can still work from home, significantly minimizing their chances of getting infected, bringing the microbe home, or shedding it in a grocery store or on a train. “It might be irritating to be on your tenth Zoom call of the day, but you can get through it,” said Gusmano.

Another bitter pill to swallow is that the country is currently mired in its first wave of infections (which is bound to kill tens of thousands more Americans). There will be future surges of this disease — like a second or even third wave.

After all, we give this virus legs.

There’s no question the virus will be circulating around society later this year, for example. “There will be coronavirus in the fall,” Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday at the White House, after President Trump mused the virus might not come back at all.

“The question is, ‘What is the size of the wave?'” said Gusmano. With social distancing, increased testing, and a widespread use of masks, we can greatly limit the spread, but can’t contain it completely.

It’s a gargantuan task. 

“I’d say this is probably kind of like the modern Manhattan Project,” said DePaul’s Klugman, referencing America’s intensive, concentrated, and rapid research mobilization to build the weapons that would eventually end the ghastly Second World War. Except now, the enemy is a nefarious, microbial parasite with no brain. 

Perhaps the (like on the East Coast between NY, NJ, CT, PA, RI, DE, and MA) could eventually provide reliable, standardized testing programs for individuals, and even businesses (instead of the over 100 different, unvetted antibody tests currently on the market). Or, hypothetically, a different presidential administration might eventually institute a robust, standardized national testing strategy. 

“We need good tests, and we need a way to distribute them,” urged Klugman. “Let’s use the creative American spirit towards that goal,” he said, noting a program that allows tests to be delivered and picked up en masse from homes— rather than requiring potentially infected people to visit testing centers — would go a long way. 

But in the short-term, employers have a weighty problem on their hands. “You don’t know who is positive and who isn’t,” said the bioethicist Hoffman.

Such is the hard consequence of failing to curb the coronavirus earlier this year. U.S. intelligence agencies warned of the pandemic threat in January. No one contained it.

“Now we’re paying the price,” said Hoffman.