When the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law in 1938, first establishing a national minimum wage, it came with an exemption: employers could pay some disabled workers less than minimum wage. The federal exemption still stands, even as many states roll back their versions—and that wage can still be as little as 25 cents an hour.

25 states have since introduced or enacted legislation to phase out this outdated practice. Defenders of the 14(c) certificate program often argue that the disabled workers it covers, most of whom have intellectual and developmental disabilities, just wouldn’t get a job elsewhere.

A study published today in JAMA Health Forum by University of Pennsylvania researchers refutes that argument. Its authors found that in two states—New Hampshire and Maryland—that banned the practice, employment rates for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as people who are autistic, either increased or didn’t change when employers had to pay them an equal wage.

Neurologist Mihir Kakara, the study’s lead author, says the finding “points towards the fact that these people are able to work in equal-paying, fully integrated jobs as their peers who do not have a disability, given the right resources.”

Many employers paying disabled workers subminimum wage use so-called “sheltered workshops,” which have also been criticized by disability advocates, as they segregate disabled workers. Whether or not a state maintains the subminimum wage, workers with cognitive disabilities still work fewer hours overall, and are paid less than those without cognitive disabilities.

Notably, New Hampshire had no below-minimum-wage disabled workers at the time of its repeal, unlike Maryland—but the employment rate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities still increased when the state legally kicked the exemption to the curb. The researchers theorize that “media coverage and debates around Section 14(c) repeal might encourage or signal to families and individuals with [intellectual and development disabilities] previously out of the labor force to apply for employment training.”

While the Biden Department of Labor was expected to introduce a rule to either make the program more equitable or get rid of it entirely, it has yet to take action. For now, paying a worker less than minimum wage because they’re in a protected class remains, in many states, entirely legal.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law in 1938, first establishing a national minimum wage, it came with an exemption: employers could pay some disabled workers less than minimum wage. The federal exemption still stands, even as many states roll back their versions—and that wage can still be as little as 25 cents an hour.

25 states have since introduced or enacted legislation to phase out this outdated practice. Defenders of the 14(c) certificate program often argue that the disabled workers it covers, most of whom have intellectual and developmental disabilities, just wouldn’t get a job elsewhere.

A study published today in JAMA Health Forum by University of Pennsylvania researchers refutes that argument. Its authors found that in two states—New Hampshire and Maryland—that banned the practice, employment rates for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as people who are autistic, either increased or didn’t change when employers had to pay them an equal wage.

Neurologist Mihir Kakara, the study’s lead author, says the finding “points towards the fact that these people are able to work in equal-paying, fully integrated jobs as their peers who do not have a disability, given the right resources.”

Many employers paying disabled workers subminimum wage use so-called “sheltered workshops,” which have also been criticized by disability advocates, as they segregate disabled workers. Whether or not a state maintains the subminimum wage, workers with cognitive disabilities still work fewer hours overall, and are paid less than those without cognitive disabilities.

Notably, New Hampshire had no below-minimum-wage disabled workers at the time of its repeal, unlike Maryland—but the employment rate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities still increased when the state legally kicked the exemption to the curb. The researchers theorize that “media coverage and debates around Section 14(c) repeal might encourage or signal to families and individuals with [intellectual and development disabilities] previously out of the labor force to apply for employment training.”

While the Biden Department of Labor was expected to introduce a rule to either make the program more equitable or get rid of it entirely, it has yet to take action. For now, paying a worker less than minimum wage because they’re in a protected class remains, in many states, entirely legal.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the United States. 

Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration—with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the US without permanent legal status—has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.

Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.

The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And then you look at food, and farms.” 

“Button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken? Like, hello?”

The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes at a time when the US food system is already being battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-term warming trends are affecting agricultural productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling, higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across the country—and economists have found that even a forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store prices to rise. 

Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the US as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done. But people living in the US without legal status also play a crucial role in the economy: During the pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential workers were undocumented. And the Center for American Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the US food supply chain.

A stunning half of those immigrants work in restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped environments at a time when poor ventilation could be deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and agriculture—where they might work in the field or sorting produce—as well as food production, in jobs like machine operation and butchery.

The agricultural sector is just one of several industries in recent years that has experienced a labor shortage, which the US Chamber of Commerce has classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of people without legal status an inherently bad policy, said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’ Like, hello?”

“With fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants have undertaken to keep Americans fed—both in times of crises and during all other times—have been met with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023. Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand protections for these essential workers, including fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.”

“Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he added. “They deserve to live with dignity.” 

If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported, without regard for their economic contributions to U.S. society or consideration of whether they actually pose a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous, according to Padilla. 

“Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,” said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

US farmers, who rely on many forms of migrant labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on undocumented immigrants would essentially bring business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and state proposals to require employers to verify the legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agricultural production in America.”

The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.”

Small farmers agree. A first generation Mexican-American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass deportation for the country’s food system would be hard to imagine, especially since he believes that “many Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay.

“We need people who want to work in fields and in farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the sun because of rising temperatures, and living in horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the US should remember “that we are a welcoming community and society. We have to be, because we are going to see a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all over the world because of climate change.” 

Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations as a labor market intervention that will boost wages for American-born workers. But analysts point out that previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for native-born citizens.

For example, when the US in 1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in the US, wages for domestic farmworkers did not increase, according to analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Additionally, a recent analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation program known as Secure Communities—which removed nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the US—resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented immigrants were deported, many middle managers who worked with them also lost their jobs.

Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a large portion of their workforce due to mass deportation, they may not have enough people to harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up prices at the grocery store. 

Many experts note that even attempting to deport millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no economic rationale for it.”

For instance, mass deportation would deprive governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the American Immigration Council found that a majority of undocumented immigrants—or three-fourths—participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to the United States of America, they have an intention to work, to make money and contribute not only to their families, but also to the federal, state, and local government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A recent report co-authored by Guzman found that undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.

Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass deportation would have on families. “What does this look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation, and whether it would require local law enforcement agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant families across the country are “mixed status”—meaning that some members of a household have documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go into people’s houses and rip families apart?”  

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement [mass deportations] a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution.”

Immigration is the purview of the federal government, and for decades, elected leaders across the political spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi. “And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But we just have not been able to get them through.”

In the absence of other policy solutions—such as addressing the root causes of migration to the US from other countries, including climate change—all-or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of American voters surveyed support mass deporting immigrants without legal status. 

Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations—pointing out that deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden administration has also enacted considerably more enforcement actions against immigrants than were carried out during the Trump administration.) Although the specific details on how the proposal would be carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court. 

“I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of such an enforcement process would be in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which effectively prohibits a state from adopting policies that target any person in its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to people being profiled across the country and treated in “a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,” said Chavez—triggering all sorts of lawsuits. 

“My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez. 

But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the threat of raids would send a strong message to workers, according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that represents laborers regardless of their immigration status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on US residents without legal status. “The point is not to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-Brust.

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on The View that she would pursue a new Medicare benefit to cover the costs of in-home care for qualifying disabled people and anyone 65 and up.

Disabled people have fought for more than half a century for the right to remain in their homes and communities, rather than being subject to institutionalization—which includes the support, such as home care workers, that they need to do so. A recent poll released by the University of Michigan found that around three in five people older than 50 with a caregiver also have a physical disability. Medicare already covers home care for some people—but in a highly limited way that’s much more challenging to get.

“If you don’t have those services, you might unnecessarily be institutionalized.”

I spoke with Nicole Jorwic, Caring Across Generations’ chief of advocacy and campaigns, about Harris’ new proposal—what it means the people who would qualify, and what it would take for the benefit to succeed, if Harris is elected.

Why does Harris’ plan to expand Medicare excite you?

The plan from the Harris administration to include coverage for home care and Medicare is really a game-changer for disabled people and for older people. This proposal is exciting, not only for the folks that would get the care that they need but also because of the people that would be impacted by not having to provide that care themselves.

The most exciting thing about it for me is that something that I hear when I’m out and about, meeting with folks in the in the care advocacy community—is so many people think Medicare already does this. It’s creating a a benefit in a government funded system that people already think that they’re going to get—fixing a problem that many people don’t even know that they’re going to have until they’re in a crisis.

How could it help disabled people remain at home, rather than in institutions like nursing homes or group homes?

95 percent of disabled people want to live in their homes and in their communities. But the reality is, because Medicaid has traditionally been the main funder for these services, you have to remain in poverty in order to access these services. Also because states can limit how many people they serve, there’s waiting lists.

Adding home care into Medicare would mean that more of the 7 million disabled people who are currently eligible for Medicare— 12 percent of Medicare beneficiaries—then maybe [do] not need to go on waiting lists for services. If you don’t have those services, you might unnecessarily be institutionalized. This proposal to add home care to Medicare would also take some pressure off of the Medicaid system. We could hopefully continue to pull people off of the waiting list and remove the institutional bias that currently exists today.

Why is it also crucial to address the care-worker shortage for a plan like this to be successful?

Anybody who needs home care, those services are going to be provided by a direct care worker, and we are in a direct care worker crisis. Not because there’s not enough people, but because there’s not enough good direct care jobs. What this proposal does also include is ensuring that the folks that are providing these Medicare services are being paid a good wage.

Disability advocates and aging advocates, when we have the opportunity to implement a policy like this [which] would have to move through Congress, we would also ensure that it rides alongside investments that would ensure that every direct care worker, whether they’re paid by Medicaid or Medicare, are paid a family sustaining wage. We have to also address the direct care workforce, that’s the human infrastructure, the people that are actually providing the services, for this program to be successful.

Right now we think about those direct support professionals or home care workers, those folks when they age, don’t have access to home care right away, unless they qualify for Medicaid, which we know can have waiting lists. Vice President Harris’s proposal to add home care to Medicare also would guarantee that those direct care workers who have been historically low-paid would also have peace of mind if they need home care.

Have there been examples of programs at a state level similar to what Harris is proposing?

There isn’t necessarily an example of a state adding to a federal program, but there are some examples of where states have invested in folks that just need a little bit of extra support at home. Under the Affordable Care Act, there was a program that was passed called the Community First Choice Option. It requires states who take up this option, like Oregon and Texas, to provide home and community based care for eligible folks, mostly through personal care assistance, in the same way that that Vice President Harris’s proposal does.

For folks that are on a waiting list, it provides a narrow benefit. We know that if we provide some benefit to people right when they need it, it actually can prevent them, maybe, from needing longer-term care further down the road.

Are there any lessons to learn from the state-level implementation of the Community First Choice Option?

When you look at implementing programs like the Community First Choice Option at the state level, something that’s important to think about is that you want to create as much flexibility as possible. You want to make sure that the services that are being provided are going to meet the unique needs of the senior or the disabled person who needs that care—also making sure that the definition of a workforce is broad enough. There might be somebody who might want it to be their family member, or a disabled person who might want it to be their spouse. You can’t just throw more people into the system without also addressing the workforce.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on The View that she would pursue a new Medicare benefit to cover the costs of in-home care for qualifying disabled people and anyone 65 and up.

Disabled people have fought for more than half a century for the right to remain in their homes and communities, rather than being subject to institutionalization—which includes the support, such as home care workers, that they need to do so. A recent poll released by the University of Michigan found that around three in five people older than 50 with a caregiver also have a physical disability. Medicare already covers home care for some people—but in a highly limited way that’s much more challenging to get.

“If you don’t have those services, you might unnecessarily be institutionalized.”

I spoke with Nicole Jorwic, Caring Across Generations’ chief of advocacy and campaigns, about Harris’ new proposal—what it means the people who would qualify, and what it would take for the benefit to succeed, if Harris is elected.

Why does Harris’ plan to expand Medicare excite you?

The plan from the Harris administration to include coverage for home care and Medicare is really a game-changer for disabled people and for older people. This proposal is exciting, not only for the folks that would get the care that they need but also because of the people that would be impacted by not having to provide that care themselves.

The most exciting thing about it for me is that something that I hear when I’m out and about, meeting with folks in the in the care advocacy community—is so many people think Medicare already does this. It’s creating a a benefit in a government funded system that people already think that they’re going to get—fixing a problem that many people don’t even know that they’re going to have until they’re in a crisis.

How could it help disabled people remain at home, rather than in institutions like nursing homes or group homes?

95 percent of disabled people want to live in their homes and in their communities. But the reality is, because Medicaid has traditionally been the main funder for these services, you have to remain in poverty in order to access these services. Also because states can limit how many people they serve, there’s waiting lists.

Adding home care into Medicare would mean that more of the 7 million disabled people who are currently eligible for Medicare— 12 percent of Medicare beneficiaries—then maybe [do] not need to go on waiting lists for services. If you don’t have those services, you might unnecessarily be institutionalized. This proposal to add home care to Medicare would also take some pressure off of the Medicaid system. We could hopefully continue to pull people off of the waiting list and remove the institutional bias that currently exists today.

Why is it also crucial to address the care-worker shortage for a plan like this to be successful?

Anybody who needs home care, those services are going to be provided by a direct care worker, and we are in a direct care worker crisis. Not because there’s not enough people, but because there’s not enough good direct care jobs. What this proposal does also include is ensuring that the folks that are providing these Medicare services are being paid a good wage.

Disability advocates and aging advocates, when we have the opportunity to implement a policy like this [which] would have to move through Congress, we would also ensure that it rides alongside investments that would ensure that every direct care worker, whether they’re paid by Medicaid or Medicare, are paid a family sustaining wage. We have to also address the direct care workforce, that’s the human infrastructure, the people that are actually providing the services, for this program to be successful.

Right now we think about those direct support professionals or home care workers, those folks when they age, don’t have access to home care right away, unless they qualify for Medicaid, which we know can have waiting lists. Vice President Harris’s proposal to add home care to Medicare also would guarantee that those direct care workers who have been historically low-paid would also have peace of mind if they need home care.

Have there been examples of programs at a state level similar to what Harris is proposing?

There isn’t necessarily an example of a state adding to a federal program, but there are some examples of where states have invested in folks that just need a little bit of extra support at home. Under the Affordable Care Act, there was a program that was passed called the Community First Choice Option. It requires states who take up this option, like Oregon and Texas, to provide home and community based care for eligible folks, mostly through personal care assistance, in the same way that that Vice President Harris’s proposal does.

For folks that are on a waiting list, it provides a narrow benefit. We know that if we provide some benefit to people right when they need it, it actually can prevent them, maybe, from needing longer-term care further down the road.

Are there any lessons to learn from the state-level implementation of the Community First Choice Option?

When you look at implementing programs like the Community First Choice Option at the state level, something that’s important to think about is that you want to create as much flexibility as possible. You want to make sure that the services that are being provided are going to meet the unique needs of the senior or the disabled person who needs that care—also making sure that the definition of a workforce is broad enough. There might be somebody who might want it to be their family member, or a disabled person who might want it to be their spouse. You can’t just throw more people into the system without also addressing the workforce.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Around 10,000 hotel workers went on strike over Labor Day weekend, picketing for better pay and working conditions in 25 hotels across nine cities, including Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu. UNITE HERE, the country’s largest hospitality union, had conducted several months of unsuccessful contract negotiations with leading hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt before escalating the dispute. The strikes, which lasted between one and three days, took place over the last holiday weekend of the summer and involved housekeepers, front desk attendants, bellhops, restaurant staff, and other hotel workers.

At issue, union officials say, is that while the hospitality industry’s profits have recovered from the extreme downturn during the pandemic, it has maintained the service and staffing reductions from that period. As a result, workloads for employees have increased while pay has stagnated. 

“Many [workers] can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to, and painful workloads are breaking their bodies,” Gwen Mills, the international UNITE HERE president, said in a statement. “We won’t accept a ‘new normal’ where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers.”

The weekend strikes could herald more to come—potentially also in New Haven, Providence, and Oakland—if contract negotiations continue to be difficult to resolve. In press releases, UNITE HERE highlighted last summer’s rolling strikes that impacted 65 hotels in Los Angeles, during which the union conducted brief work stoppages around the city over several months. Eventually, workers won wage increases of up to $10 more per hour over the five-year contract.  

As the Labor Day weekend strike unfolded, Michael D’Angelo, Hyatt’s head of labor relations for the Americas, told AP, “We are disappointed that UNITE HERE has chosen to strike while Hyatt remains willing to negotiate.” The AP also reported that a Hilton spokesperson said that the chain was “committed to negotiating in good faith.” 

The Covid pandemic all but halted the hospitality industry, as occupancy rates hit historic lows. The union says that the industry has largely rebounded, with gross profits in 2022 surpassing those from 2019. But, the union found that staffing has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, which they say creates a higher burden for those who remain in the industry. And while responsibilities have increased, many workers say that wages have not kept up with rising costs.  

Edwin Solis, who works in the housekeeping department at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, said that life in the Bay Area has become increasingly expensive. “Everything goes to groceries and gas,” Solis said. Over the weekend, Solis was among hundreds of union members who were demonstrating downtown, some of whom wore signs that read “respect our work” and “one job should be enough.” Solis told Mother Jones that to make ends meet many of his coworkers have taken on second jobs. He was frustrated that the industry’s increased profits have not translated to higher wages for employees. 

The industry trade organization, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, said that a May survey of hoteliers revealed that 86 percent of respondents had increased wages over the past six months—though they did not specify by how much—and 67 percent said they were experiencing staffing shortages. 

As the cost of living has surged in the aftermath of the pandemic, higher pay has become a top priority for UNITE HERE. Josh Stanley, a union leader in Connecticut, explained that “while wages have grown somewhat, in terms of real buying power, they are lower than they were in 2020.” The union’s Hawaii chapter said that a survey of nearly 4,000 members found that 76 percent could not afford an unexpected bill of $500. 

The “decentralized” hospitality industry poses a unique challenge for labor unions because each hotel negotiates its own contract with workers, according to Richard Hurd, a professor emeritus at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In recent decades, UNITE HERE has made an effort to coordinate contracts across all the unionized hotels in each city. This has also given the union a leg up, Hurd said, as several contracts negotiated before the pandemic have ended around the same time. “Now they have a critical mass of cities where contracts had expired, where they believe they can use some leverage by staging strikes,” Hurd says.

“Now they have a critical mass of cities where contracts had expired, where they believe they can use some leverage by staging strikes.”

Hurd also noted that UNITE HERE, in line with the hospitality industry at large, has a high proportion of women and immigrant members, which has been reflected in the union’s leadership and priorities. Mills, the union’s first female president, noted in a statement about the strikes, “Hospitality work overall is undervalued, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s disproportionately women and people of color doing the work.”

In Honolulu, about 5,000 workers from seven hotels went on a three-day strike, from Sunday to Tuesday. Nerissa Acdal, who has been a housekeeper at the Westin Moana Surfrider for nine years, was among them. She said that she regularly works “exhausting” ten-hour shifts, cleaning sixteen rooms in a day. Acdal told Mother Jones that mandatory overtime has become commonplace after the pandemic, and she often skips lunch to finish her work on time.  

During the pandemic, many hotel guests chose to opt out of daily room cleaning—a practice that continues today. In fact, union members say several days without housekeeping creates even more work when a guest checks out, but managers often don’t offer staff additional time to finish the job. “We don’t have any choice,” Acdal says. “We have to rush.” 

UNITE HERE has pointed out that the pressure to compensate for inadequate staffing can result in worker injuries. Francisco Tobin, who runs banquet events, has spent thirty years working at the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich, Connecticut. He went on strike with around 125 of his coworkers this past weekend. He told Mother Jones that his responsibilities expanded after the pandemic because he needed to cover for positions, like those who bring food to waitstaff, that had been eliminated. Two years ago, he slipped and fell while delivering food from the kitchen, and tore his quadriceps tendon, which required surgery. 

The impact of the strikes on contract negotiations is still unclear, but members like Solis, the housekeeper in San Francisco, are optimistic about returning to the bargaining table soon. Members hope that hotel chains can meet their demands for higher wages and better workloads. If they don’t, Solis says, “we are ready” to return to the picket line. 

Around 10,000 hotel workers went on strike over Labor Day weekend, picketing for better pay and working conditions in 25 hotels across nine cities, including Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu. UNITE HERE, the country’s largest hospitality union, had conducted several months of unsuccessful contract negotiations with leading hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt before escalating the dispute. The strikes, which lasted between one and three days, took place over the last holiday weekend of the summer and involved housekeepers, front desk attendants, bellhops, restaurant staff, and other hotel workers.

At issue, union officials say, is that while the hospitality industry’s profits have recovered from the extreme downturn during the pandemic, it has maintained the service and staffing reductions from that period. As a result, workloads for employees have increased while pay has stagnated. 

“Many [workers] can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to, and painful workloads are breaking their bodies,” Gwen Mills, the international UNITE HERE president, said in a statement. “We won’t accept a ‘new normal’ where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers.”

The weekend strikes could herald more to come—potentially also in New Haven, Providence, and Oakland—if contract negotiations continue to be difficult to resolve. In press releases, UNITE HERE highlighted last summer’s rolling strikes that impacted 65 hotels in Los Angeles, during which the union conducted brief work stoppages around the city over several months. Eventually, workers won wage increases of up to $10 more per hour over the five-year contract.  

As the Labor Day weekend strike unfolded, Michael D’Angelo, Hyatt’s head of labor relations for the Americas, told AP, “We are disappointed that UNITE HERE has chosen to strike while Hyatt remains willing to negotiate.” The AP also reported that a Hilton spokesperson said that the chain was “committed to negotiating in good faith.” 

The Covid pandemic all but halted the hospitality industry, as occupancy rates hit historic lows. The union says that the industry has largely rebounded, with gross profits in 2022 surpassing those from 2019. But, the union found that staffing has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, which they say creates a higher burden for those who remain in the industry. And while responsibilities have increased, many workers say that wages have not kept up with rising costs.  

Edwin Solis, who works in the housekeeping department at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, said that life in the Bay Area has become increasingly expensive. “Everything goes to groceries and gas,” Solis said. Over the weekend, Solis was among hundreds of union members who were demonstrating downtown, some of whom wore signs that read “respect our work” and “one job should be enough.” Solis told Mother Jones that to make ends meet many of his coworkers have taken on second jobs. He was frustrated that the industry’s increased profits have not translated to higher wages for employees. 

The industry trade organization, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, said that a May survey of hoteliers revealed that 86 percent of respondents had increased wages over the past six months—though they did not specify by how much—and 67 percent said they were experiencing staffing shortages. 

As the cost of living has surged in the aftermath of the pandemic, higher pay has become a top priority for UNITE HERE. Josh Stanley, a union leader in Connecticut, explained that “while wages have grown somewhat, in terms of real buying power, they are lower than they were in 2020.” The union’s Hawaii chapter said that a survey of nearly 4,000 members found that 76 percent could not afford an unexpected bill of $500. 

The “decentralized” hospitality industry poses a unique challenge for labor unions because each hotel negotiates its own contract with workers, according to Richard Hurd, a professor emeritus at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In recent decades, UNITE HERE has made an effort to coordinate contracts across all the unionized hotels in each city. This has also given the union a leg up, Hurd said, as several contracts negotiated before the pandemic have ended around the same time. “Now they have a critical mass of cities where contracts had expired, where they believe they can use some leverage by staging strikes,” Hurd says.

“Now they have a critical mass of cities where contracts had expired, where they believe they can use some leverage by staging strikes.”

Hurd also noted that UNITE HERE, in line with the hospitality industry at large, has a high proportion of women and immigrant members, which has been reflected in the union’s leadership and priorities. Mills, the union’s first female president, noted in a statement about the strikes, “Hospitality work overall is undervalued, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s disproportionately women and people of color doing the work.”

In Honolulu, about 5,000 workers from seven hotels went on a three-day strike, from Sunday to Tuesday. Nerissa Acdal, who has been a housekeeper at the Westin Moana Surfrider for nine years, was among them. She said that she regularly works “exhausting” ten-hour shifts, cleaning sixteen rooms in a day. Acdal told Mother Jones that mandatory overtime has become commonplace after the pandemic, and she often skips lunch to finish her work on time.  

During the pandemic, many hotel guests chose to opt out of daily room cleaning—a practice that continues today. In fact, union members say several days without housekeeping creates even more work when a guest checks out, but managers often don’t offer staff additional time to finish the job. “We don’t have any choice,” Acdal says. “We have to rush.” 

UNITE HERE has pointed out that the pressure to compensate for inadequate staffing can result in worker injuries. Francisco Tobin, who runs banquet events, has spent thirty years working at the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich, Connecticut. He went on strike with around 125 of his coworkers this past weekend. He told Mother Jones that his responsibilities expanded after the pandemic because he needed to cover for positions, like those who bring food to waitstaff, that had been eliminated. Two years ago, he slipped and fell while delivering food from the kitchen, and tore his quadriceps tendon, which required surgery. 

The impact of the strikes on contract negotiations is still unclear, but members like Solis, the housekeeper in San Francisco, are optimistic about returning to the bargaining table soon. Members hope that hotel chains can meet their demands for higher wages and better workloads. If they don’t, Solis says, “we are ready” to return to the picket line. 

A year after a union contract won “historic heat protections” for UPS drivers, the Teamsters are still pushing the company to do more to protect workers in vehicles that can reach up to 120 degrees. Multiple employees told Mother Jones their vehicles are still hot—and dangerous.

For Jeff Schenfeld, a UPS driver working outside of Dallas, a typical shift requires more than 200 stops, sometimes involving multiple packages—entering and exiting the truck at least 400 times a day. “You’re back and forth, back and forth,” he said. In July and August, when the average high temperature in Dallas is 96 degrees, Schenfeld dreads rummaging for packages in the back of his truck. 

Because of climate change, summer temperatures have risen significantly across the country. A recent study found that heat waves are hotter, last longer, and cover larger areas than they did 40 years ago. 

Last August, a 57-year-old UPS driver named Chris Begley collapsed during his shift in McKinney, Texas, and died at a hospital four days later. An OSHA investigation summary said that he died of heat stress, a description that a UPS spokesperson claimed was inaccurate. But regardless of the official cause of Begley’s death, it underscored the potential dangers of working in extreme heat for many union members.  

The Biden administration recently announced an OSHA rule proposal to set a national heat safety standard for both indoor and outdoor workers. Delivery drivers, like workers in construction and agriculture, are uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat. A Politico analysis of OSHA data from 2015 to 2022 found that after construction workers, delivery and mail workers had the second-highest rates of heat-related illness. Drivers for Amazon and FedEx contractors have raised concerns about working in the heat, and lawmakers recently urged the US Postal Service to expand heat protections. 

Last summer, the Teamsters union, which represents more than 340,000 UPS workers, made heat a centerpiece of prolonged contract negotiations with the shipping company. The agreement, which averted what could have been an economically devastating strike, promised to raise full-time pay to $170,000 by the end of the five-year agreement. The company promised to increase airflow and lower temperatures in their iconic brown package trucks and ensure that all vehicles purchased after January 1 of this year would have air conditioning. UPS also vowed to replace 28,000 existing trucks with air conditioned ones—though the prospect was once described by a company spokesperson as unfeasible because of frequent stops. Today, only a small portion of the existing fleet has air conditioning. 

“Workers across industries and in virtually every geography are saying [heat] is a new danger that we are confronted with more and more days of the year,” Anastasia Christman, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, said. The UPS agreement is likely the first private-sector contract to explicitly include heat protections, she said, calling it “first in class.” 

But promising change and implementing it are two different things, and one year later, some UPS employees say that ratifying the contract has not improved their working conditions in summer temperatures. Many workers who spoke to Mother Jones described feeling pressure to keep up the pace and take fewer breaks, even in extreme heat. 

While the company has made good progress on installing more fans, heat shields, and induction systems in trucks, air conditioning appears to be the most intractable change. Teamsters spokesperson Kara Deniz says the company’s lag in replacing trucks with air conditioned ones is “unacceptable.” 

“The safety of our employees is our top priority,” Genneviev Bowman, a UPS spokesperson, told Mother Jones. The company said that managers “are monitoring to make sure they take their breaks, particularly in hot weather. We’re confident that our policies are followed by an overwhelming majority of our drivers and management. And we take corrective action when we become aware that a policy is not being followed.”

UPS spokesperson Jim Mayer said that the company will also “continue to purchase and deploy new vehicles with AC as quickly as possible.” UPS said that some trucks with air conditioning had been purchased this year—though the company would not say how many. In late June, CNN had reported that no new vans had been purchased. 

The union contract also required that the company conduct heat safety training and allow workers to follow best practices. The company suggested that I speak with Jeff Wigglesworth, a driver in Phoenix, Arizona, where average summer temperatures are above 100 degrees. Wigglesworth is a member of the safety committee at his center and told me that supervisors are attentive to employee wellbeing—providing ice and fresh fruit, and conducting “lunch box checks” to see if people are eating properly. Still, even he said there are limitations. “We can educate all we want,” he said. “But it’s their body. They know their body better than I would.” 

Doing strenuous activity in extreme heat can be dangerous. “If you combine heavy levels of exertion with exposure to high heat, then the body can rapidly overheat,” said Robert Harrison, an occupational health specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Harrison said it’s particularly a risk for outdoor workers.

Multiple employees told Mother Jones that their supervisors keep a close eye on productivity metrics like the number of stops made per “on-road” hour. Kyle Burroughs, a driver outside of Denver, described being chastised by a manager for slowing his pace on a hot day. Burroughs said that experiences like that “discourage people from being safe” and get in the way of following advice laid out by the company’s own training, such as taking additional breaks when overheated. 

Dallas-area UPS driver Reginald Lewis said that delivery loads often increase during the summer, which, combined with the heat, makes it difficult for drivers to complete their routes on time. Lewis said requests for help often go unmet. “There is a pressure to get the job done,” he said. “We’re told, ‘We don’t have that many people on hand. You gotta go out there and try to do it on your own.’” 

Mayer, the UPS spokesperson, said that “package volumes go up and down for a variety of reasons, many beyond our control, and we do our best to manage workloads.”

Nathan Morris, a physiology professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, explained that the heat will inevitably affect worker productivity: “If you try to keep the same work rate and stress the body out, it’s going to put a huge strain on the heart. At a certain point, people just can’t work as fast.” And workers who aren’t given scheduled breaks will likely take unplanned ones, as one study of occupational heat stress Morris worked on found. “You’re losing that worker efficiency anyway,” Morris said. 

In interviews, employees emphasized the gap between contract language and the day-to-day reality of the workplace—which the union is working to close. Organizers said many UPS workers don’t know the full extent of the protections guaranteed by last year’s agreement. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the organization’s progressive wing, has distributed wallet heat safety cards to drivers around the country, reminding them that the contract “protects your right to protect yourself from heat illness.” 

Asserting those rights can be difficult for some employees because enforcement of those rights happens through the potentially risky process of filing grievances with the union. After the complaint travels through a formal adjudication process between the union and the company, it can result in a monetary payout. Burroughs, the driver in Colorado, said that employees are often afraid that filing a grievance will negatively affect their career.

Isolated in their own trucks, some delivery drivers might feel that they are “experiencing the heat alone,” said Beth Breslaw, an organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. When heat-related illness is framed by management as an issue of “personal responsibility,” said Breslaw, it is easy to overlook that workplace safety is the result of companywide policy. Organizers have been holding parking lot meetings, before or after shifts, to talk about heat-related issues, hoping to show workers that extreme heat is a collective problem—with a collective solution. 

As global temperatures continue their perilous climb, it’s likely that extreme heat will increasingly become the subject of labor disputes. Christman, from the National Employment Law Project, said that climate change is challenging the preexisting framework of workplace safety. Traditionally, workers have organized around “specific safety issues”—like a dangerous piece of equipment—but extreme heat is a pervasive, external problem, unconfined to a single workplace or geographic area. 

Extreme heat is likely to reshape all workplaces, and it will bring with it what Christman called an “ideological challenge” on a new scale. Soon—sooner than we may think—workplaces will not be able to continue with business as usual. “There’s going to come a point where those packages aren’t going to get delivered and those trucks aren’t going to be rolling out, because there’s not going to be any workers healthy enough to do it,” Christman said. “If workers aren’t kept safe, companies won’t be able to continue to function.”

Correction, August 27: This article has been updated to clarify that UPS has promised trucks will be replaced with air-conditioned ones.

Only some 40 percent of disabled people are employed. But even that low figure is buoyed by federal laws against employment discrimination—a target of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a right-wing transformation of government by a second Trump White House.

A key institution for the just treatment of disabled workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal bans on workplace discrimination. Viewed with distaste by many on the right since its founding through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the EEOC obtained nearly $4 million in 2023 for disabled workers subjected to employment discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Discrimination plays a significant role, according to Stetson University College of Law professor Robyn Powell, in unemployment among disabled people, who experience it at a rate about double that of people without disabilities.

In response to substantiated complaints, the EEOC can sue companies for discrimination on the basis of disability—among other categories, including race, gender, and age—and may reach a consent decree, where companies agree to changes in policy and practice, sometimes with financial settlements to the affected workers.

“Consent decrees are really critical in any kind of civil rights monitoring or systemic action.”

“Consent decrees occur when there is a big employer where we’re seeing systematic examples of discrimination,” Powell said. “If we can open up employment opportunities by tackling discrimination, it helps everyone.”

The decrees are quicker, cheaper, and sometimes more effective than lawsuits in combating workplace prejudice. But they have a notable enemy in the Heritage Foundation’s pet project.

Jonathan Berry, who was the chief counsel of Trump’s 2016 transition team and held multiple jobs in his administration, writes in Project 2025 that EEOC “should disclaim power to enter into consent decrees that require employer actions” not already explicitly required by law. Back in 2012, during the Obama administration, a Heritage Foundation employee testified before Congress that federal agencies habitually abuse consent decrees—a viewpoint still clear in Project 2025. 

“When we look at [Project 2025’s] specifics around the EEOC and consent decrees,” Powell told Mother Jones, “we can see that they really are trying to attack and decimate disability rights.” 

The EEOC and DOJ “have really been critical in protecting the rights of people with disabilities,” says Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior director of legal advocacy at The Arc, which serves people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. “Consent decrees are really critical in any kind of civil rights monitoring or systemic action.”

Anti-discrimination consent decrees tend to emphasize reform and accountability, with modest settlements compared to potential legal damages. In one representative case, a government contractor that did not provide accommodations to Deaf and hard-of-hearing employees, and that fired workers on medical leave, agreed to a $1 million settlement with updates to policies on medical leave, reasonable accommodation, and managerial training on the Americans with Disabilities Act, including five years’ monitoring for compliance.

Other types of Justice Department consent decrees also come under attack in Project 2025. Wakschlag says that’s very concerning for disability rights—federal consent decrees are used to fight the continuing institutionalization of disabled people, which violates both the ADA and the Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling. 

Conservative attacks on consent decrees are not exactly new. “We’ve certainly seen pushes to either limit, restrict or get rid of consent decrees in agencies in prior administrations,” Wakschlag says. The Trump administration, notably, put a near ban in place on consent decrees between the Department of Justice and police departments that aimed to address police brutality.

If the EEOC’s ability to give consent decrees was diminished or ended, federal anti-discrimination legislation would be dramatically weakened. The agency could still provide technical assistance—such as instruction on how the ADA protects employees and applicants with visual disabilities, diabetes, or epilepsy—but losing the power to push companies to commit to treat disabled workers better, and monitor their progress, will harm disabled workers and strip them of remedies.

“We would see a huge shift in power dynamics,” Powell said, “where we would see that it would really tilt the balance of power more towards employers in these disability discrimination cases.”

When a man with painful cystic acne came to dermatologist Eva Rawlings Parker for help in a Nashville clinic, she couldn’t prescribe him doxycycline or minocycline, two medications she’d typically use to treat this condition. This is because the man was a roofer, says Parker, and these medications would have impacted his ability to tolerate heat. 

Parker’s patient was far from alone. Other common medications for physical health, like beta blockers, can impact people’s ability to handle heat. Many medications for mental health do, too.

Conventional wisdom tells people with conditions that make them unusually vulnerable to the sun, like the autoimmune disorder lupus, or are on medications that lead to heat sensitivity, to avoid staying outside when the sun is at its strongest.

“We know that workers have been dying because of chronic conditions that accumulate through heat stress over many years and decades that lead to shorter life spans.”

But for the one-third of US workers who must spend regular time outdoors, that advice bursts into flames. For some, such as farmworkers, hours and hours of heat exposure, with minimal or no reprieve, are just part of the job. Increasing heat waves and more frequent wildfires point to the need to find real solutions for outdoor workers—and highlight how labor and climate change are intertwined. 

Alongside heat waves getting worse and longer, which can trigger mental health episodes, more and more people are taking antipsychotic medications or antidepressants like SSRIs. Even before the toll of the Covid pandemic, the CDC estimated that more than one in eight adults took antidepressants. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, SSRI prescriptions for adolescents and young adults has increased by 63 percent.

Edward Flores, faculty director of the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced, specializes in the conditions of low-wage and immigrant workers in California. He says the need for heat safety policy reform is acute. “We know that workers have been dying,” Flores says, “because of chronic conditions that accumulate through heat stress over many years and decades that lead to shorter life spans.”

Parker, the dermatologist, is acutely aware of how heat can trigger or worsen skin problems. She is co-chair of the American Academy of Dermatology’s group on climate change and environmental issues, and was an author of a 2023 review on the ways climate change can contribute to dermatological issues, including triggering flares of conditions like hidradenitis suppurativa—which causes painful lumps deep in a person’s skin—and skin cancer.

“The skin is really probably our most climate-sensitive organ, also a very large and complex organ, and it’s really the major interface to the environment,” says Parker, who is also a Vanderbilt University Medical Center professor. Her experience with patients, many of whom are low-income and migrant workers, lets her see firsthand just how challenging giving practical health advice can be in a warming world. 

People’s core temperature can rise much more quickly on SSRIs, for instance, putting them at increased risk of heat stroke. And there’s the challenge, says Rupa Basu, a heat epidemiologist with the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment: “It’s really hard to monitor core body temperature.” 

Workers do have some legal rights to breaks and water, depending on the locale. California, Oregon, and Washington are the only states that mandate those breaks. And roughly half of crop farmworkers have no legal work authorization. That lack of legal status, and the threat of deportation, gives many workers reason to fear complaining about working conditions.

In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed a new set of rules which would help protect more than 36 million workers from heat-related illness or death. The proposed OSHA rules would require employers to monitor their workers for heat exhaustion symptoms, provide adequate water and shade, designate break areas, and provide mandatory rest breaks, among other things. 

In one landmark 2022 farmworker health study that Flores, of the University of California, worked on, nearly half of workers interviewed said their employer had no heat-illness prevention plan—such plans are required by state law, and may soon be required federally—and one in six did not receive state-mandated rest breaks. When that lack of respite causes illness, many farmworkers are unlikely to see a doctor: 23 percent of those interviewed had not had a doctor’s visit in the past year, even at clinics tailored towards migrants.

23 percent of those interviewed had not had a doctor’s visit in the past year, even at clinics tailored towards migrants.

But enforcement, if the rules are implemented, will be a challenge. For one thing, as Flores explained, California has very few Spanish-speaking OSHA inspectors—and none that he’s aware of in the Central Valley, which supplies 8 percent of America’s total agricultural output. (89 percent of California agricultural workers speak Spanish as their primary language.) Nationwide, many accounts exist of inspectors arriving at a workplace without being able to speak workers’ main language.

Summers, meanwhile, are only going to get hotter. Without adequate regulation and enforcement, workers will keep dying in the heat. As Bill Field, director of AgrAbility, a Department of Agriculture program for disabled farmers, put it: “If you go to the racetrack, all the horses have multiple fans blowing on them…Why? Because we care more about the horses than we do the people.”

The adversity brought on by the climate crisis, Flores said, makes it “all the more important to safeguard workers’, outdoor workers’, health and well-being with improved standards and enforcement.”

Whether or not it is legally required, there are steps that employers can already take—but seldom do—to make outdoor working environments safer. “It could be things like increasing water breaks,” Basu said, “or putting up structures to increase shade.”

When the sun beats down on workers, clothes that protect against ultraviolet light can be a useful tool. Research suggests that UV-protective clothing is more effective in preventing skin damage, blocking 96 to 98 percent of the sun’s radiation—by comparison, a cotton shirt will only block around 80 percent. But these garments also tend to be more expensive—protective long-sleeve shirts can easily cost $50 or more. Field believes that employers should cover the cost of UV-protective clothing for exposed workers.

“If I’m a legitimate apple grower or a peach grower in New Jersey, and I’ve got to hire people,” Field said, “I need to be able to budget for them to all have hats and water bottles and things that are going to protect them while they’re in the field.” 

Those changes wouldn’t just benefit workers who are chronically ill—prolonged heat can disable and kill anyone. “When we’re thinking about public health messaging,” Basu adds, “it’s so important to say it’s not just people who you would think would be at high risk.” 

In late April, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers finalized a $233 billion budget for the next fiscal year. One item in its 144-page official summary has sparked fear among disability advocates: dramatic changes to a vital home health aid program that may push more people into nursing homes.

A quarter of a million New Yorkers currently use CDPAP, a widely popular program launched in 1995, which facilitates Medicaid funding for home carers chosen by patients themselves at hours they arrange. Participants spoke to Mother Jones about how the program allows them to remain in their communities, rather than being institutionalized—a cause central to disability rights activism. Without access to workers who understand their needs, like assisting people with spinal cord injuries with toileting, those participants risk hospitalization, placement in restrictive long-term care, or both.

The program is run through “fiscal intermediaries,” which provide financial and administrative oversight; some specialize in helping certain groups, such as the Bengali immigrant community. Hochul’s plan would make the program an administrative monopoly: by October, one middleman—potentially an out-of-state, for-profit firm—will hold a $40 billion contract covering all 250,000 participants in the state. Currently, those intermediaries are subject to oversight by New York’s chief fiscal officer; under Hochul’s system, the new middleman wouldn’t be. In late July, some current intermediaries sued New York’s Department of Health over the changes.

Hochul has been incredibly critical of CDPAP, calling it a “racket.”

“This was a backroom deal that happened days before the budget was finalized,” said Kendra Scalia, a disabled public policy analyst and board president of the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Association of New York State, which supports both CDPAP providers and recipients. “It was never discussed with disabled communities.”

Hochul has been incredibly critical of CDPAP, calling it a “racket” and “one of the most abused programs in the entire history of the state of New York.” But 2022 audits by the state’s Medicaid Inspector General reviewed $37 million in claims—and found that 99 percent were accurate. Of $46,000 in documented overpayments, $41,000 was recollected. Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for evidence that the program has been abused.

It can already be difficult to get care through CDPAP. For Laura Mauldin, a graduate student when she applied in 2010, it took nine months—and an initial rejection—to get her partner, who had been sick with cancer for four years, approved for support.

“There was not an option to check for CDPAP” in home care applications at the time, said Mauldin. The request for around-the-clock care was eventually approved—allowing Mauldin to leave her apartment, with her partner in a worker’s care—but so late that Mauldin’s partner was only able to use it for three months before passing away.

Critics like Hochul see the potential for corruption in the fact that disabled people can hire family members—something Kendra Scalia first did by hiring her sister when she was in college.

“I felt really vulnerable to hiring strangers or welcoming strangers into my dorm room where there’s no oversight,” Scalia said. Her brother now has worked as her assistant for the past decade.

Some care workers feel they’ve been left in limbo on how Hochul’s changes will impact them. For the past 25 years, Tara Murphy has worked as a home care provider through CDPAP, after working as a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home. As a home carer, Murphy felt she’d be able to serve people better.

“I saw all the horrendous things and lack of care and neglect that were happening,” said Murphy, who is based in Troy, New York. “I knew I couldn’t change it, and I didn’t want to be part of the medical mafia.”

Now, Murphy is panicked over the impending changes to the program that helps employ her. She doesn’t know whether she’d be hired under the new monopoly, or whether her pay will be cut. “I’m sitting here every day,” Murphy said, “like, ‘Am I going to have a place to live? Am I going to be able to eat?’ 

1199SEIU, New York’s main health care workers’ union, has been critical of for-profits’ growing role in the program. Helen Schaub, the union’s interim political director, said that administrative costs have ballooned since a 2012 jump in the number of for-profit intermediaries. One of New York’s largest home care intermediaries, Schaub points out, is being run by embattled insurance giant Anthem.

Some users of the program who spoke with Mother Jones also expressed concerns that pay cuts could force their aides to look elsewhere for work, leaving both patients and workers in a difficult position. 

Lacey Tompkins, who works in advertising in New York City, says that CDPAP makes it possible for her to maintain a partly remote job as a disabled worker, with help getting to work despite hours that can change from week to week. “I can make my decisions and not [have] a standard set of hours,” Tompkins said.

Advocates with differing views agree on one thing: Hochul’s six-month timeline to transform the program is unreasonable and impractical. “Any serious company who is bidding on the work also believes that, because it’s a very daunting task,” said Schaub, of SEIU. “Privately, people in the [Hochul] administration have said, ‘We know that it can’t happen on that scale.’”

Update, August 13: This article has been updated to detail the current and proposed roles of the New York State Comptroller in reviewing the state’s CDPAP program.

When Veronica Fraley posted on X last week that she couldn’t afford her rent, the American discus star got help from a notable source. “I gotchu,” replied Flavor Flav, a founding member of the hip-hop group Public Enemy. “DM me and I’ll send payment TODAY so you don’t have to worry bout it TOMORROW,,, and imma be rooting for ya tomorrow LETZ GO,!!!”

Ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Flavor Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal with the US women’s and men’s water polo teams. And when it came to supporting Fraley as she competed for her country, he was joined by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Meanwhile, other athletes have turned to fundraising platforms like GoFundMe to make it to Paris and beyond. 

Many viewers tune in to the Olympics for these wholesome stories—an individual fighting through adversity to pull themself up onto the medal podium. But should we consider why these arduous journeys are needed in the first place? 

There are some athlete groups that have been questioning this idea. Global Athlete, which describes itself as “an international athlete-led movement,” is among them. According to the organization’s website, its members are “collectively addressing the imbalance of power between athletes and administrators” by pushing for better pay and working conditions, as well as rights like freedom of expression. 

Rob Koehler, the director general at Global Athlete, said in an interview that most of the problems the group is confronting come from the “outdated model” used by the International Olympic Committee, the non-governmental sports organization in charge of organizing the Summer, Winter, and Youth Olympic Games. 

“The majority of athletes can barely pay rent. The facade of when you become an Olympian, you’re set for life is so far from the truth,” he said. “They’ve invested 15, sometimes 20 years of their lives, putting school aside, putting jobs aside, and committing to the goal of going to the Olympics. And when they’ve finished, they sit in their bed lying awake at night, wondering, ‘What am I going to do next?’ There’s no career path for them afterward. That’s the reality.”

“It’s time to put the most important stakeholder first, which are the athletes, and start distributing to everyone.”

When asked about athlete pay, the IOC’s media relations team pointed to a news release in which its executive board “expressed its full support for fair financial reward for athletes.” 

According to public financial information posted on the IOC’s website, the committee—a privately funded non-profit association—earned $7.6 billion from 2017 to 2021. The IOC says that 90 percent of that revenue goes toward the Olympic Games, athlete development, and the Olympic Movement, which encompasses the IOC, the International Sports Federations, and the National Olympic Committees.

The same IOC release explains that the purpose of the national committees is “to develop the athletes, give them the best possible training and competition conditions, and support them in education and their daily life with regard to their profession.” Each of the 206 national committees choose the athletes to represent their country through a qualification process. 

The document referred to a statement from IOC Athletes’ Commission Chair Emma Terho: “Rewarding athletes financially for their achievements at the Games is commonplace for many National Olympic Committees and governments, while International Federations help to develop their sport worldwide and close the development gap between the haves and the have-nots. Each role is important for the athletes, and for sport overall, because without this work, the disparities between athletes around the world would be much wider than they are today.”

But Global Athlete sees the situation differently. “They use rhetoric to say that the National Olympic Committees pay for gold medals. Not every country does, but that’s not the point here,” Koehler said. “Every single athlete attending the Games should be able to earn from the revenues.” 

Koehler highlighted a study his group published in April 2020 in partnership with Ryerson University and the Ted Rogers School of Management that found that athletes only receive 4.1 percent of the Olympic Movement’s revenues via scholarships, grants, and achievement awards. In addition, just 0.5 percent of IOC funds go directly toward athletes, according to the study. Athletes are not allowed to negotiate these numbers. 

Meanwhile, the five largest professional sports leagues in the world—the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and English Premier League—distribute between 40 and 60 percent of their revenue to athletes. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the IOC updated the Olympic Charter’s Rule 40, which, according to the Global Athlete study, had previously prohibited competitors from profiting from their association with the Olympic Games through unapproved, non-Olympic corporate sponsors. But the April 2020 study suggested that the relaxation of the international by-law had been largely ineffective, since less than 10 national committees had actually implemented the change. 

The IOC did not respond to a question about the study’s findings.

Koehler emphasized that athlete pay is not the only issue. He cited incidents at the Tokyo Games, specifically, where athletes were not permitted to breastfeed their babies while competing due to rules restricting bringing family and friends during the Covid pandemic. 

“We worked with leading breastfeeding organizations, the athletes spoke up, and they were forced to change the rules,” Koehler recounted. 

He also recalled the organization’s work with other athlete organizing groups to pressure the IOC to weaken Rule 50, which had stated, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

Groups like Global Athlete and the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that sets international labor standards, stress that collective bargaining is essential to improve athlete rights. 

While progress has been made, Koehler says that the IOC has blocked various pathways for athletes to engage in this bargaining. “The IOC Athletes Commission is required to sign the Olympic oath, which is a condition where you have to support all decisions of the IOC. You’ve lost your independence right away,” he stated. Because of this, athletes “sign away all their rights” when they attend the Games. 

Koehler noted that the athlete agreement required for Paris competitors mandates that they waive rights like the ability to “bring any claim, arbitration or litigation, or seek any other form of relief, including request for provisional measures, in any…court or tribunal [other than the Court of Arbitration of Sport], unless otherwise agreed in writing by the IOC.” 

Koehler argues that the IOC would actually benefit from negotiations with athletes, saying that in most cases, sports leagues with organized work forces have thrived due to increased buy-in from athletes. “If you look at the NCAA and what happened there, I think that’s the future for the IOC,” he said. 

In May 2024, the NCAA, its five major Division I conferences, and legal representatives for athletes arranged to settle three lawsuits about the ways schools compensate their athletes. The deal determines how former athletes will share the $2.78 billion in damages that the NCAA will pay and builds a new system for revenue sharing.  

That’s the future Koehler wants for the Olympics. “It’s time to put the most important stakeholder first, which are the athletes, and start distributing to everyone,” he said.

As this year’s temperatures continue to break records, farmworkers who toil in the heat remain one of the groups most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. But another element of their jobs is making extreme heat even more dangerous: pesticide drift.

When it is hotter outside, pesticides tend to evaporate faster, explains Nicole Deziel, an environmental health scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. This, in turn, impacts how much of the pesticide actually reaches the crop. Any that doesn’t usually sticks around in the air—and can travel miles offsite. Pesticide drift means that the toxic chemicals spread further than ever intended, affecting farmworkers and adjacent communities.

Once airborne, those pesticides can linger in surrounding air for as long as five days, according to reports authored by the Pesticide Action Network, an advocacy coalition that opposes their pervasive use in industrial agriculture. Pesticide drift is a common problem that affects nearly every farming community in the US—whether crops are sprayed by hand, through fumigation, or via planes.

Now, the federal government is finally trying to tackle the issue. In mid-July, the Environmental Protection Agency announced rules that would incorporate pesticide drift into its guidelines for approving new products and active ingredients: it plans to assess drift-related health risks “earlier in the agency’s review process,” the EPA said in a press release. While the release didn’t directly mention climate change or extreme heat, the agency did tell Mother Jones that environmental justice was a key factor in the guideline change.

“With this change, the agency is furthering protections to bystanders wherever pesticide spray drift may occur, and thereby strengthening protections associated with the use of pesticide products,” said EPA spokesperson Tim Carroll.

The EPA’s new rules are intended to protect people from the effects of drift. But Jeannie Economos, a pesticide health and safety officer for the Farmworker Association of Florida, is skeptical that they will be effective, particularly because the guidelines only outline drift as a concern for mostly new products. The only existing products to get reviewed will be pesticides that manufacturers are trying to apply for a purpose not previously approved. (The EPA does periodically review pesticides that it has already approved, and on Tuesday banned one, Dacthal, because of the reproductive health risks it posed to pregnant people.)

The tendency of pesticides to evaporate under heat is so well documented that multiple agricultural agencies and university departments have put out specific guidelines asking farmers and growers to be mindful of the temperature in order to reduce potential drift. A study published last year in the journal Nature found that hotter and more humid conditions brought about specifically by climate change made pesticides evaporate more quickly.

But one important part of understanding pesticide drift on a hotter planet is that we don’t know exactly how every pesticide will react to extreme heat—information that could be vital to understanding how long they’ll stick around post-application, and how far they’ll travel, according to Emily Marquez, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network. “Now that it’s getting hotter, there’s maybe more potential for things to change, or be less predictable,” says Marquez.

That makes farm work more dangerous in a number of ways, says Yale’s Deziel. “If it is hot, workers may be less likely to wear full, personal protective equipment—they may have more skin exposed,” she says.  

Even if workers do wear personal protective equipment, like gloves, heat can actually increase the amount of pesticides that penetrate safety gear, according to research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2019.

Deziel, who has been studying pesticides for more than a decade, points out that the health risks are not negligible: everything from nausea, skin irritation, or headaches in after short-term exposure to problems to cancer, reproductive problems, and neurological effects after long-term exposure.

Economos has been working on the issue for decades, and has worked with the EPA and other agencies to try to ensure that proposed rules or guidelines put farmworkers first. Often, she says, even after rules change, there’s more work to be done.

“We fought for 20 years and we won in 2015 to get better protections for workers [from pesticides],” she said. “So it took only 20 years to do that. But then you have the problem of compliance and enforcement.”

Another complicating factor, she says, is that a huge portion of farmworkers endangered by pesticide drift are immigrants. Most US farmworkers are foreign-born, and many take part in a seasonal immigration program, the H-2A visa, which means they are authorized to come into the country to assist growers with different aspects of the growing season, particularly harvesting, and must then return to their country of origin. In 2022, over 350,000 people came into the US through the H-2A program. 

A large, temporary, nonresident workforce means that for any exposures that happen, a large portion of people won’t be in the US long enough for longer-term or chronic illnesses from pesticide exposure to appear, according to Economos. An untold number of workers cycle in and out of the program, she says—and might never return, because people with health conditions are often not accepted in following years. If a short-term illness arises, workers are disincentivized from complaining, since their employer controls access to their immigration status and housing.

The EPA did not respond in time to questions about farmworkers’ employment or immigration conditions being used to suppress reports of pesticide exposure.

A 2024 Univision investigation found that after a worker in North Carolina, José Soria, was exposed to an herbicide based on the toxic compound paraquat, in 2020, his employer discouraged him from seeking medical care for painful blisters that developed on the left side of his body. He eventually required surgery to reconstruct the skin that was exposed. 

In Economos’ eyes, simply regulating pesticides is too small a step given the scale of harm they cause—instead, she says, we should be thinking about ways of farming that reduce or eliminate pesticide use.

“If they really wanted to protect farmworkers, then they wouldn’t be approving these horrible formulations,” she says.