The US supreme court to Americans: tough luck if you get Covid at work | Robert Reich

The Republican-appointed majority court says the risk is one workers have to accept in order to get a paycheck

By a 6-3 vote, with liberal justices in dissent, the supreme court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers. (The court upheld a more modest mandate requiring vaccinations for healthcare workers who treat Medicare and Medicaid patients.)

The employer mandate would have required workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or to wear masks and be tested weekly (neither employees nor employers were required to pay for the testing). It applied to employers with at least 100 employees. This would include more than 84 million workers, about two-thirds of the American workforce.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com