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US economy unexpectedly shed jobs in July

The Labor Department released the July 2026 jobs report, which showed the U.S. economy shed jobs unexpectedly last month amid uncertainty over inflation.

Aug 7 • 8:32 AM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Council Recognizes Community Resources Supporting Health and Well-Being Across Boston

Strong communities are built through access to resources that support residents’ health, connection, and quality of life. During this week's Council meeting, the Council adopted resolutions recognizing National Farmers Market Week and National Health Center Week, honoring the organizations, workers, and community partners who help support residents across Boston.

Aug 7 • 7:01 AM EDT • Health • boston.gov

Returning flames, fed-up health workers, skydiver’s delivery: Catch up on the day’s stories

CNN’s 5 Things PM brings you the stories you might have missed during your busy day.

Aug 6 • 5:00 PM EDT • Health • cnn.com

Pinellas schools, teachers union reach health insurance agreement

The deal sees increases in cost for workers covering employees and spouses.

Aug 6 • 12:57 PM EDT • Health • tampabay.com

IAM Union: Workers Deserve Protection from Deadly Heat

As record-breaking temperatures continue to put working people at risk across the country, the Trump Administration is pulling back protections for workers from one of the fastest-growing workplace hazards: extreme heat. Recent reports say the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has reduced the heat-focused inspections and enforcement efforts that were previously expanded under the

Aug 6 • 9:24 AM EDT • Politics • goiam.org

Ten Years In: How the Columbia Center for Community Health’s InTOuCH Program Became a National Model

A conversation with Dr. Janhavi Mallaiah, who has led Columbia's community health worker training program since its founding in 2016.

Aug 6 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • neighbors.columbia.edu

Dozens of health workers at epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak protest lack of payment

Dozens of health workers working at the epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak are protesting Thursday to demand payment for their wages.

Aug 6 • 4:59 AM EDT • Health • seattletimes.com

Health workers at epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak protest lack of payment

Health workers at the epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak are protesting over unpaid wages

Aug 6 • 4:57 AM EDT • Health • abcnews.com

Dozens of health workers at epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak protest lack of payment

Health workers at the epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak are protesting over unpaid wages.

Aug 6 • 4:57 AM EDT • Health • click2houston.com

Dozens of health workers at epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak protest lack of payment

Dozens of health workers working at the epicenter of Congo’s Ebola outbreak are protesting Thursday to demand payment for their wages.

Aug 6 • 4:57 AM EDT • Health • clickondetroit.com

Federal workers file class action lawsuit over transgender health coverage ban

Five federal workers filed a proposed class-action lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, alleging that a federal health insurance policy excluding gender-affirming care violates federal emp...

Aug 6 • 1:24 AM EDT • Health • jurist.org

Unpaid wages and deadly risk: Why health workers are threatening to abandon the Ebola response

Every day, Micheline Kayimpa pulls on layers of protective gear before stepping into an Ebola isolation ward. She’s among dozens who’ve protested over delays to pay.

Aug 6 • 12:01 AM EDT • Health • cnn.com

WHO chief: Ebola outbreak outpacing response as aid workers strike over pay

The world’s fastest-growing Ebola outbreak is spreading faster than efforts to fight it, the head of the World Health Organization said during a visit to Congo, where some health workers are striking over a lack of pay.

Aug 5 • 12:24 PM EDT • Health • latimes.com

Paychex reports steady small business hiring with more worker hours

Small businesses across the nation continued to maintain a stable hiring environment in July, with employers increasingly relying on existing workers to meet demand

Aug 5 • 11:09 AM EDT • Business • libn.com

Who were the Luddites? Their legacy ripples through politics, cultural commentary and literature

In the age of AI we are once again hearing about Luddites, the 19th-century textile workers who sought to protect their livelihoods in early industrial England.

Aug 5 • 9:52 AM EDT • Politics • theconversation.com

Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.

There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe

Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com

Paid Leave is helping workers — and businesses like mine

For small businesses like mine, the Paid Leave program saves me money while providing a safety net that my employees deserve.

Aug 5 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • minnesotareformer.com

‘Implementing terror’: Miami business owners feeling pain of losing TPS workers

. “People are paying for a service, and you have to render that service to the highest quality and standard.”

Aug 5 • 5:38 AM EDT • Business • miamiherald.com

OpenAI to pay $3.2 million to settle DOJ allegations it favored foreign workers over Americans

OpenAI allegedly failed to advertise PERM jobs on its careers website and required paper applications to discourage U.S. workers from applying

Aug 4 • 9:44 PM EDT • Business • foxbusiness.com

Longer careers may leave younger, disadvantaged workers spending more years in poor health

The average age of the German population is rising. Coupled with the growing labor shortage, these demographic trends pose major challenges for pension systems. According to proposals from the Pension ...

Aug 4 • 8:40 PM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Trump Is Making Another Big Mess With White House Helipad

He reportedly ordered workers to scrap some of their completed work on the multimillion-dollar project because he didn’t like how it looked.

Aug 4 • 4:55 PM EDT • Politics • nymag.com

OpenAI pays $3.2 million to settle US worker bias claim

OpenAI disputes the Justice Department's view, but said it wanted to move forward with a program to support employees "requiring immigration support."

Aug 4 • 4:36 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Paychex reports steady small business hiring with more worker hours

Paychex reports stable small business hiring in july with increased worker hours boosting earnings growth and manufacturing leading employment gains.

Aug 4 • 1:30 PM EDT • Business • rbj.net

U.S. Small Business Employment Landscape Remains Steady

Workers experience notable increases in weekly earnings and hours worked growth in JulyROCHESTER, N.Y., Aug. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the Paychex Small Business Employment Watch, the pace of U.S. small business job growth (99.23) in July remained steady and was slightly above average jobs index (99.20) for the first half of the year, signaling a steady employment environment among businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Although hourly earnings growth for small business workers

Aug 4 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Community Colleges Help Drive Workforce Development

Those workers got their training through the workforce development programs at Calhoun Community College, Drake State Technical & Community College and

Aug 4 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • huntsvillebusinessjournal.com

Gallatin College students get hands-on training, help reduce health care shortage

The state of Montana continues to face a shortage of health care workers, especially in rural communities.Now, students at Gallatin College Montana State Univer

Aug 3 • 7:41 PM EDT • Health • nbcmontana.com

Central Valley health officials monitoring farmworkers exposed to measles outbreak in Arizona

Health officials are monitoring a group of about 140 farmworkers who traveled from Arizona to the Central Valley after being exposed to measles during an ongoing outbreak in that state.

Aug 3 • 7:40 PM EDT • Health • abc30.com

Nurses deliver petition opposing CommonSpirit Health’s planned layoffs of frontline health care workers

RNs delivered a petition to their employer opposing CommonSpirit Health’s planned layoffs of more than 175 frontline health care workers signed by more than 5,000 nurses. The nurses held a rally and press conference to protest the proposed layoffs at 17 hospitals in California and their impact on patient safety. The nurses are demanding that CommonSpirit Health immediately rescind the layoffs.

Aug 3 • 3:54 PM EDT • Health • nationalnursesunited.org

If Not AOC, Then Who?

What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

Aug 3 • 12:50 PM EDT • Politics • laborpolitics.com

Trump administration sued for banning gender transition treatments in federal health plans

An arm of the Human Rights Campaign launched a class-action lawsuit on Monday challenging the Trump administration’s gender-affirming care coverage ban in federal workers’ health insurance plans.&n…

Aug 3 • 12:11 PM EDT • Health • thehill.com

SDSU leads international research collaboration to broaden understandi

The series was published in The Lancet Public Health and expands the evidence on sex workers' well-being and occupational safety.

Aug 3 • 11:25 AM EDT • Health • sdsu.edu

WHO Health Emergencies EPI-WIN webinar: Preparing for El Niño and climate-related health risks: global insights and country experiences

This EPI-WIN webinar will help communities by increasing awareness of the health risks associated with El Niño and providing practical, evidence-based actions that individuals, communities, health workers and local authorities can take to prepare for and reduce these risks.

Jul 31 • 10:02 AM EDT • Health • who.int

Mercer students provide behavioral healthcare to farmworkers

Earlier this summer, Mercer University School of Medicine (MUSM) faculty and Master of Family Therapy (MFT) students participated in the Georgia Farmworker Family Health Program.

Jul 31 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • den.mercer.edu

Tower Health plans to lay off more than 100 workers at Pottstown Hospital

Tower Health is planning to layoff more than one hundred workers, at Pottstown Hospital in Montgomery County.

Jul 30 • 9:47 PM EDT • Health • 6abc.com

Haitian business owners embrace for impact of TPS expiration

Business owners in South Florida’s Haitian community say they’re facing a growing economic crisis as customers disappear and workers become increasingly difficult to find. NBC6’s Hatzel Vela reports

Jul 30 • 6:21 PM EDT • Business • nbcmiami.com

Upper Merion Township proposes $200 million sports stadium

Officials in Upper Merion, Montgomery County, want to develop a stadium to host professional baseball and soccer teams, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. | KYW Newsradio

Jul 30 • 9:50 AM EDT • Entertainment • audacy.com

Family woodworking business moves out of garage into new location

"We’re building a table with the intentions of it being passed down to generations.” Meet the family of woodworkers expanding from the garage to a new location.

Jul 29 • 12:46 PM EDT • Business • siouxfalls.business

Wellstar Health System lays off 761 corporate, administrative staff

Wellstar Health System laid off 761 workers yesterday “following a comprehensive review of our organization,” the Georgia nonprofit confirmed to Fierce Healthcare. | The cuts translate to about 2% of the nonprofit system's headcount, and do not include frontline care roles.

Jul 29 • 12:30 PM EDT • Health • fiercehealthcare.com

Unilever agrees two-year worker protection after $65 billion McCormick merger, memo shows

Unilever has agreed to protect employment terms of workers in its European and British food business for two years after the planned 2027 completion of its $65 billion ​merger of the unit with U.S. spice maker McCormick , according to a memo seen by Reuters.

Jul 29 • 5:19 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Tower Health is laying off 160 workers at Pottstown Hospital while expanding emergency department, behavioral health

The job cuts amount to 22% of the Pottstown workforce and come seven months after Tower eliminated 131 jobs at the Montgomery County facility in an earlier round of layoffs.

Jul 28 • 1:27 PM EDT • Health • inquirer.com

AFSCME Leader Lee Saunders to Retire as Unions Face New Opposition

Lee Saunders has led the country’s top union for local public workers at a time of growing public support and official opposition.

Jul 28 • 10:12 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Four-paper series broadens sex workers' health focus beyond HIV prevention

A new four-paper series in The Lancet Public Health reflects a two-year collaboration among researchers at San Diego State University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Global ...

Jul 28 • 7:20 AM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Trump says he's done more for Michigan autoworkers than their parents

President Donald Trump told Michigan autoworkers he's done more for them than their own parents in a speech at a GM facility outside of Detroit.

Jul 27 • 7:05 PM EDT • Politics • usatoday.com

NJ panel punts vote on health insurance increases for school workers

The state panel that sets healthcare rates for school workers delayed a decision Monday in anticipation of input from the state Treasury.

Jul 27 • 4:22 PM EDT • Health • newjerseymonitor.com

Why harassing wall workers, local business and individuals kills resistance to the wall

I am writing this under circumstances I never imagined when I settled in Terlingua. As I prepare for an upcoming trial, the personal safety threats against me have become a daily reality. Local group chats and barroom gossip have boiled over into an ugly mob rage, condemning my property and my character to hell. The […]

Jul 27 • 9:54 AM EDT • Business • bigbendsentinel.com

Kendall Qualls' running mate, picked for business acumen, owes workers money

Brian Nicholson told his workers earlier this month at an Albertville manufacturer that he was doing everything in his power — and even seeking divine intervention — to strike one of five “Hail Mary” deals so he could pay them what they’re owed. “I’m praying on my knees every night before I go to bed […]

Jul 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • minnesotareformer.com

AARP Is Working to Change the Culture of Health Care Ageism

Ageism puts your health at risk. AARP is teaching health care workers to avoid it

Jul 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • aarp.org

PwC's US CEO has age-old advice about climbing the corporate ladder

Paul Griggs started his career at PwC nearly 30 years ago. He said the advice he gives junior workers hasn't changed.

Jul 27 • 5:54 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Business briefs, July 27

New CMS voting memo sparks concerns over resident assistance in nursing homes … Initial jobless claims decline 22K week over week, falling to a seasonally adjusted tally of 187K … House Energy and Commerce Committee passes package to streamline Medicare Advantage prior authorization … 1 in 4 US workers sticking with a job strictly for health insurance … Fitch Ratings affirms Greenwood Village South at BBB-; outlook stable

Jul 26 • 8:01 PM EDT • Business • mcknightsseniorliving.com

Following first year of behavioral healthcare pilot program for Copper Mountain workers, spearheading organizations consider returning for a second season

Last December, Copper Mountain Resort and Elevated Community Health introduced free behavioral health services for all Copper Mountain volunteers and employees through a work-based care center located at the EDGE, the mountain’s employee housing facility. ...

Jul 26 • 3:03 PM EDT • Health • summitdaily.com

AI devices that see, listen and record: Are we ready for the post-smartphone world?

Picture this: On a normal workday, you and your coworkers walk around the office with tiny recorders clipped to your clothes. The glasses on your face instantly identify what you see. Your bracelet records and analyzes all your conversations.

Jul 26 • 12:00 PM EDT • Technology • cnn.com

Nearly 1 in 4 workers staying in jobs to keep health insurance, poll finds

Nearly 23 million Americans say they’re staying in jobs they don’t like because they fear losing health insurance.

Jul 26 • 10:03 AM EDT • Health • newsnationnow.com

Yemen’s health workers race to halt latest outbreak of deadly dengue fever

Health workers are battling to contain the mosquito-borne disease amid growing concern over rising infections.

Jul 26 • 9:39 AM EDT • Health • aljazeera.com

Corporate America may be using AI to cut jobs, but small businesses are using it to keep them

Reports of wide-scale replacement of workers by AI are overblown. Small businesses use it to help workers

Jul 26 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • theguardian.com

CEOs and execs can't agree on what AI means for Gen Z workers

For young Gen Zers entering the workforce, the rise of generative artificial intelligence has brought no shortage of uncertainty.

Jul 26 • 6:03 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

More health workers strike as Ebola cases in Congo near 3,000, including over 1,300 deaths

Health workers at an Ebola treatment center in eastern Congo have gone on strike over payment issues, disrupting patient care.

Jul 25 • 10:39 PM EDT • Health • latimes.com

AI isn’t replacing workers. It’s creating bosses.

The boom of startups is good news for workers — and a challenge to labor laws written for another era.

Jul 25 • 11:21 AM EDT • Business • washingtonpost.com

Ebola cases in Congo near 3,000, health workers strike

The number of confirmed cases of Ebola in Congo has reached 2,973, including 1,309 deaths, according to government data.

Jul 25 • 7:21 AM EDT • Health • bostonglobe.com

More health workers strike as Ebola cases in Congo near 3,000, including over 1,300 deaths

Health workers at an Ebola treatment center in eastern Congo have gone on strike over payment issues, disrupting patient care.

Jul 25 • 5:22 AM EDT • Health • seattletimes.com

More workers strike as Ebola cases in Congo near 3,000, including over 1,300 deaths

Health workers at an Ebola treatment center in eastern Congo have gone on strike over payment issues, disrupting patient care

Jul 25 • 5:21 AM EDT • Health • abcnews.com

Adrienne Bohl joins Essentia Health-Jamestown Clinic to practice behavioral health

The Essentia Health-Jamestown Clinic is proud to welcome Adrienne Bohl, a licensed clinical social worker in behavioral health.

Jul 24 • 10:42 AM EDT • Health • essentiahealth.org

‘There’s no salary’: DRC health workers tell of hardship as Ebola spreads

Jul 23 • 10:13 PM EDT • Health • aljazeera.com

Business Roundtable: Foundational Workers, Child Care, and the U.S. Economy

The First Five Years Fund, Moms First's National Business Coalition for Child Care, and Etsy hosted a bipartisan roundtable discussion with more than a dozen business leaders from across the country.

Jul 23 • 7:46 PM EDT • Business • ffyf.org

Former Parkview Health employee says company 'shortchanged' workers of pay

The complaint says Parkview Health failed to pay some employees the required overtime rate because of a time-rounding policy that shortened their hours.

Jul 23 • 2:07 PM EDT • Health • theindianalawyer.com

About 1 in 4 workers keep unwanted jobs for health insurance, poll finds

A Gallup survey found an eight-percentage-point increase since 2021 in U.S. workers keeping jobs for health insurance.

Jul 23 • 1:12 PM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com

Coroner IDs worker shot 22 times, killed at Mason lumber business

Vincent Stoetzel was 29 years old, according to Warren County's coroner

Jul 23 • 9:52 AM EDT • Business • fox19.com

West Virginia women can't afford another barrier to basic healthcare

For decades, women in West Virginia have learned to make do with less. Less access to healthcare. Less access to specialists.

Jul 23 • 5:55 AM EDT • Health • westvirginiawatch.com

‘Unacceptable’: San Francisco Officials Question Kaiser’s Approach to AI in Mental Health

In a hearing, therapists decried Kaiser’s proposed contract terms during labor negotiations, which they argued would undermine mental health services. The largest health insurer for city employees said it remains focused on providing timely, high-quality mental health services.

Jul 22 • 7:20 PM EDT • Health • kqed.org

Why the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history is becoming more challenging

More than 1,000 people have died in eastern Congo’s latest rare Ebola virus outbreak.

Jul 22 • 2:17 PM EDT • Health • bostonherald.com

Angry Mobs Are Attacking Health Workers in Congo. It Will Only Make the Ebola Outbreak Worse

There have been dozens of attacks of health care providers amid an ongoing Ebola crisis in Congo. It’s expected to increase the death rate in what’s already one of the fastest-growing outbreaks.

Jul 22 • 2:11 PM EDT • Health • time.com

IAM Texas State Council Charts Course for Organizing and Political Action

Nearly 100 participants, including delegates, guests, speakers, and IAM leaders from industries across the Lone Star State, gathered in Austin for the 2026 IAM Texas State Council Meeting to discuss the issues facing working families, strengthen the union’s legislative and organizing efforts, and hear from labor and political leaders committed to advancing workers’ rights. Texas

Jul 22 • 2:05 PM EDT • Politics • goiam.org

Nearly 1,000 people dead from Ebola outbreak in Congo amid health worker strike

Healthcare workers in Congo have faced local resistance, unpaid labor, and physical assault during the declared fastest Ebola outbreak in history.

Jul 22 • 12:53 PM EDT • Health • fortune.com

Letter | Tom Tiffany is the pro-business candidate we need

Dear Editor: I recently read the letter to the editor titled, "Tom Tiffany's anti-worker, anti-business owner agenda," and as a Wisconsin small business owner, I felt compelled to respond.

Jul 22 • 8:45 AM EDT • Business • captimes.com

IAM Union Thanks Deirdre Hamilton for Distinguished Service, Warns Against Political Interference in Labor Boards

WASHINGTON, July 22, 2026 — The IAM Union (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers), which represents more than 100,000 workers across the airline and railroad industries, is thanking former National Mediation Board (NMB) Member Deirdre Hamilton for her service following her dismissal by the Trump Administration, a move made possible by a recent Supreme Court

Jul 22 • 8:14 AM EDT • Politics • goiam.org

Foxconn Ramps Up Hiring as iPhone 18 Pro Enters Mass Production

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models have entered mass production and are now in a production ramp-up phase, according to China Securities News. In a new report citing industry chain sources (via MyDrivers), Apple's main assembly partner Foxconn is said to have entered its peak recruitment period to prepare for large-scale production and stocking ahead of the fall launch. Hourly wages, base pay, and rehire bonuses have all been raised to attract workers amid the ramp-up.

Jul 22 • 7:16 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

West Virginia women can't afford another barrier to basic healthcare

For decades, women in West Virginia have learned to make do with less. Less access to healthcare. Less access to specialists.

Jul 22 • 5:55 AM EDT • Health • westvirginiawatch.com

Poland, Hungary's foreign worker curbs create headache for business

Facing a choice between upsetting businesses and a public opinion backlash, the Polish and Hungarian ruling centrists are opting ​for curbs on foreign labour — something economists warn may hurt the two countries' growth prospects.

Jul 22 • 2:04 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Poland, Hungary's Foreign Worker Curbs Create Headache for Business

By Gergely Szakacs, Canan Sevgili and Alan Charlish KISVARDA, Hungary/GDANSK, Poland, July 22 (Reuters) - Facing a choice between ⁠upsetting ⁠businesses and a public opinion backlash, the Polish and ⁠Hungarian ruling centrists are opting for curbs on foreign labour — something economists warn may ...

Jul 22 • 2:04 AM EDT • Business • usnews.com

More workers hate their jobs, but keep them for the health insurance

A new survey reveals 24% of U.S. workers stay in unwanted jobs to keep health insurance. Experts call it 'job lock.'

Jul 22 • 12:01 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com

Health worker being monitored for Ebola in London hospital after working in DRC

UK resident was evacuated from Democratic Republic of the Congo where there is an outbreak of the disease

Jul 21 • 6:39 PM EDT • Health • theguardian.com

Financial incentives, flexibility and safe living needed to retain remote health care workers

Appropriate housing and safety, adequate time off and financial incentives are among the key factors supporting primary health care workers in remote jobs across Australia, according to a new study by ...

Jul 21 • 11:40 AM EDT • Health • medicalxpress.com

Extreme heat is eroding health, productivity and incomes of Dhaka’s informal workers

DHAKA — On June 28, as the afternoon sun beat down on Bangladesh capital Dhaka’s sprawling Tejgaon neighborhood, Samiha Begum gathered her two school-aged children and headed for the shade of Hatirjheel Lake. Their narrow one-room home in a nearby slum had become unbearable. She said, “The room starts heating up as soon as the […]

Jul 21 • 9:11 AM EDT • Health • news.mongabay.com

Survey of business and tech leaders reveals persistent gap between corporate AI adoption and workforce readiness

/PRNewswire/ -- A large majority of workers use artificial intelligence (AI) tools regularly, but few consider themselves highly familiar with the technology,...

Jul 21 • 8:16 AM EDT • Business • prnewswire.com

MSF demands Israel release detained Palestinian healthcare workers

Jul 20 • 7:41 PM EDT • Health • aljazeera.com

Ebola death toll in Congo rises to at least 930, including dozens of health workers

At least 36 health workers infected with the virus have died.

Jul 20 • 4:04 PM EDT • Health • adn.com

WHO evacuated health workers from Ebola treatment center due to armed clashes

On July 15, gunfire erupted between armed groups near an Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) in Nyankunde (or Nyakunde), located 45 kilometers (28 miles) southwest of Bunia in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Following the fighting, medical personnel from the World Health Organization (WHO), Africa CDC and the NGO Samaritan’s Purse evacuated from Nyankunde, […]

Jul 20 • 2:43 PM EDT • Health • news.mongabay.com