What the Nurses See
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://norcallawfirm.com/2020/03/31/essential-employees-hav...
Applies only to the government. Your employer can restrict your speech -- and pretty much any aspect of your private life -- however they wish.
The NLRA is pretty much toothless nowadays.
https://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-firings-were-about-unionizing...
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organi...
> Nor is it strictly true for speech that takes place outside the workplace.
You are nominally correct. However, if I am your employer and I want to fire you I can almost certainly come up with some legitimate reason to put on the record. Your only recourse will be to file a wrongful termination suit and try to prove that the real reason I fired you was something other than what I said it was. Good luck with that.
Also, if you're in an at-will state, I don't even have to come up with an excuse. If I want you gone, you're gone.
Hospitals need all the workforce they can get. No matter what they do now, during the pandemic, there will be no shortage of patients. And I suppose it is in their best financial interest to treat as many as possible, and it means a lot of personnel.
Having it the other around makes a lot more sense: doctor doesn't feel safe because of a lack of PPE, refuses to work, gets fired, complains about it. If that's the situation, it is not about whistle-blowing, it is about the right to stop working if the conditions aren't safe. Both are (or should be) basic workers rights, but these are very different things.
The relevant quote: "Ming Lin, an emergency room physician in Washington state, said he was told Friday he was out of a job because he’d given an interview to a newspaper about a Facebook post detailing what he believed to be inadequate protective equipment and testing. In Chicago, a nurse was fired after emailing colleagues that she wanted to wear a more protective mask while on duty. In New York, the NYU Langone Health system has warned employees they could be terminated if they talk to the media without authorization."
Just as a stop sign doesn't physically make your car stop at an intersection, a law won't prevent someone from firing someone else illegally. A fired employee can bring bring a wrongful termination suit, but the recently fired rarely have the means to see these through, even in the best of times. Employers know this.
Are they afraid of lawsuits? These kind of statements could look bad in the court. You go to hospital for some standard procedure, then get covid, then sue the hospital for not taking proper precautions.
Good quality news though.
I sure hope that their irresponsible handling of the Feb 3rd case (and subsequent cases) is an exception to what hospitals have been doing. Yes, people weren't generally as aware of the disease on Feb 3rd, but healthcare workers definitely should have been (and from what I've seen quite a few were).
I feel like a lot of the variation in covid-19 outcomes is going to come from the competence of hospital administration.
https://crooked.com/podcast/emergency-room-a-dispatch-from-t...
The interview starts at 6 minutes if you want to skip over the intro. Alternate link:
There's this for 3D printing protective visors:
https://3dverkstan.se/protective-visor/
They print their own visors in Stockholm and distribute them to hospitals. They also act as a hub for amateurs that can help print, and companies with 3D printers with spare capacity, so that the hospitals have a single point of contact. I don't have any more details than what's said on the page.
Sure we can and should ramp up production but that takes time and effort. So who gets it in the meantime?
I think more precise would be to say “the country that thinks of itself as the greatest country in the world”.
Heck, they don't even have their own country code for dialing...
If the English Premier League were so dominant that it were nearly impossible for any team from any other league to compete with them, it wouldn't really bother me if they called their winner the World Champion soccer club.
”Many nurses and doctors have symptoms, like dry coughs, but are being denied tests and remain working, Ms. Norstein and other Montefiore health-care workers said colleagues have told them.”
This isn’t even second-hand information - it’s third-hand, and it’s irresponsible journalism. If the reporter couldn’t directly confirm the rumors, they could just say “there are rumors that...”
But then, this is buried in the article:
” One patient with confirmed coronavirus stayed in the Moses ER for over 14 hours and used the same bathroom as other patients, Mr. Mathew wrote in a March 14 email to the hospital epidemiologist and an environmental health and safety director. He said he received no response.”
That is just incompetence, and it’s documented. Why did the reporter bury the lede?
If hospitals were/are driving infection counts in the Bronx, that’s a huge story, and deserves more attention.