Are we slow walking into the next pandemic?
Another cheery post feat. Stephen Knight, Executive Director of Worksafe!
If you haven’t heard, we could be gifted with another public health emergency for the fifth anniversary of the onset of the COVID pandemic. As summed up in the New York Times recently,1 things are looking a bit scary:
Scientists have long considered bird flu, or H5N1, a leading candidate for causing a human pandemic. Since 2003 the virus has infected at least 954 people around the world and killed at least 464 — an almost 50 percent mortality rate — mostly in people in proximity to infected birds. These have been largely one-off infections, including the first U.S. death from bird flu in January (a person over 65 with underlying health conditions). But scientists fear that bird flu could adapt to pass from one person to another, resulting in a fast-moving lethal epidemic that would resemble the world-spanning 1918 flu [which killed at least 50 million people].
Although the virus is most dangerous to humans when caught from wild birds, infections from cows or other mammals increase the chance of deadly mutations. This means that dairy workers are most at risk of getting sick themselves, and of becoming patient zero for a new strain. A report released this month by the UC Merced Community & Labor Center dives into what this means for California’s Central Valley, the capital of U.S. milk production:
On December 18, 2024, Governor Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency in California in response to dozens of human cases of bird flu, mostly in the Central Valley Region; of the state’s over 1,100 dairies, 985 were under surveillance and 614 under quarantine. As of January 15, 2025, California has had thirty-eight cases of bird flu, nearly all among dairy workers. While milk is thoroughly tested, the testing of workers has been limited and as a result cases are likely undercounted. Moreover, the USDA reports asymptomatic cows have tested positive for bird flu.
The Merced report suggests a number of salubrious interventions, including better guaranteeing sick leave, testing, and protective gear for dairy workers. As it stands, then, we are on the precipice of another climate- and capitalism-fueled crisis, with people pitted against profit. To be fair to our milk producers, though, they are facing potential ruin, without much in the way of public subsidy to guard against losing their livelihoods. Again from NYT:
Unlike their peers in the poultry business, dairy farmers [are] pressured to take instruction from public health authorities, but without the support they need to make those steps bearable []. As a result, these farmers have been hesitant to act, despite being maligned for moving too slowly. Unless something changes, the specter of bird flu’s devastation will hang over the United States indefinitely — as will the threat of other emerging diseases.
Brooke Rollins, Trump’s USDA secretary, does seem to be taking bird flu seriously, at least, promising nearly $1 billion in spending to keep farmers profitable, egg prices manageable,2 and, with some luck, workers protected. Of the cabinet picks, I much prefer Rollins to RFK here, but it’s already clear how much worse it would be to deal with a public health crisis at the outset of a Trump administration, rather than at the tail end of one. In addition to slashing funding for basic research, the DOGE-MAGA dream team has fired many CDC scientists and silenced the rest. So, we need the states to step in.
As I wrote about lugubriously last month, there is only so much one state can take, though I am glad to live in a place where public health is still, well, a thing. One of the good groups keeping us afloat is Worksafe (a delightfully self-explanatory name — looking at you, think tanks). For decades, Worksafe has trained lawyers and labor leaders, helped pass and improve many worker health and safety regulations, and had national influence; Doug Parker, the organization’s previous Executive Director, was director of OSHA under Biden.
At the risk of sounding like a magazine profile piece writer, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen Knight, current Executive Director of Worksafe, at a Berkeley bakery on Valentine’s Day. I wanted to learn more about his perspective on the current moment, informed by lessons from our recent past. As Stephen wrote last month in a blog post about bird flu risks:
Our experience with COVID need not define how we respond in the future. With preparation we can be smarter and more effective in our measures to prevent unnecessary deaths[.] We learned in 2020 that workplace safety for essential workers in particular is a vital element to keeping our economy running — and to protect the most vulnerable populations that too often bear the brunt of our collective failure to look ahead.
Enjoy this (lightly edited) interview; I’ll be back next month with…something.
You've worked on a lot of different issues, and now you’re ED for an org that comes to things through a pretty particular lens of occupational health and safety. How does it feel to be focused on workers’ rights from that angle?
SK: It’s true, I’ve pivoted a lot. I cut my teeth in college activism with the labor and technical workers strike and learning a lot about the world through the reactions of the university as a corporation. Then the anti-apartheid movement took over the rest of my years in college and and the ties that we built with the unions on campus were very important to that whole struggle. Then there was Prop 187, which again was unplanned but changed the course of my education and eventually led me to refugee work in law school, because of this incredibly reactionary trend in the country. So, yes, coming back to labor felt like a coming home in a lot of ways, and then to have the COVID pandemic break out less than two months after I started, it turned our somewhat niche issue into front page news. All of a sudden, the number one issue was essential workers’ safety at their jobs. “Am I gonna die if I go to work?” People have whitewashed what that time was like. Very intense.
So now we’re in California, on the verge of potentially another public health crisis with bird flu. What have people forgotten five years on?
SK: When we submitted our emergency petition for COVID workplace protections in 2020, with the help of nurse advocates and health care workers, we also asked for general standard for the next pandemic. And all the attention went to the COVID-specific standard, which expired [February 3], but we’re still waiting on the general standard. We need to be prepared for the increasing impact of climate change on the workplace, for the next novel virus. That’s one thing a strong worker movement can help us secure.
Do you think that law schools and lawyers undervalue the importance of health and safety work in the broader workers’ rights movement?
SK: There needs to be more focus on labor rights generally. And it’s true these often aren’t high-dollar cases. The strength and weakness of this area of law is that it’s focused on systemic fixes: The point is to fix the hazard. Not to walk away with a large cash settlement, but to walk away with a safe workplace. But our system so prioritizes large recovery, it can be hard.
Speaking of, EEOC and NLRB are getting dismantled right now, and the new OSHA director will likely come from a pro-corporate background, right?
SK: That's almost like the old Republican Party, putting a worker-crushing Amazon executive in charge. Compared to the likes of Hegseth or Patel, that's pretty normal. With the NLRB, though, that's less normal. He’s fired people and hasn’t replaced them. So the NLRB is currently broken, beyond just corporate capture, you just can't get a ruling from the NLRB today. Still, labor is at the forefront of resistance to this fascist turn that we are experiencing, with mass layoffs and targeted, racialized vengeance. It’s a very challenging moment, but it feels good to be standing with workers at this time.
Final question then: I'm sure you've seen over your career different relationships that nonprofits can have with broader social movements for labor justice, environmental justice, migrant justice. Are there models that you've found work well to keep interests aligned between the nonprofit workers and the community or movement they're trying to serve?
SK: Being grounded in community means breaking through the single issue that you're paid to work on. When people walk through your door, the only thing going on their life is not that occupational safety issue, or that environmental concern, and so on. In my years at Save the Bay, we battled against one of the most powerful corporations on Earth, which was looking to make billions of dollars in profit. And we stopped them from destroying wetlands that support endangered species that live there, including the famous salt marsh harvest mouse, which is about the size of my thumb. But for the community there that wanted to stop this development, was saving the harvest mouse, or even the bay, their top concern? No, it was not. And so we learned to engage on other local issues, which was empowering for us as a staff, too. And it’s the same thing with occupational safety and health. What we’re really after is greater worker power, general protections against retaliation. And you only get that by working with strong coalitions.
Great answer. Thank you.
And thank you for reading!
The author of this piece, Maryn McKenna comes by her worry honestly, having warned about the threat of a bird flu pandemic in the Times for nearly a decade.
Tens of millions of chickens have been killed to prevent spread, a tragedy in its own right, even if those birds weren’t exactly destined for a happy life to start with.
A sober read, yes, but I had never heard of Save the Bay before, and there’s an example of communities and coalitions winning a victory for people and nature, in the face of a bad idea.