The Biden administration concludes a 90-day intelligence review regarding the origins of the virus.

And new research shows that type 2 diabetes and childhood doubled between 2001 and 2017.

This is America Dissective. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul Alsehi.

Imagine going to work every day in a factory, averaging over 100 degrees with thousands of other people, knowing that 14,000 people a year died in circumstances just like the ones you're walking into.

And 2 million more got injured.

That was the state of American manufacturing in the years after World War II. Production was at an all-time high as Pittsburgh turned out steel to feed Detroit which turned it into cars, Boston which turned it into ships, and which the tall which turned it into planes.

At that time though, injured and dying workers were seen as necessary costs of America's industrial might, meanwhile corporations made billions without being forced to spend a dime to keep their workers safe.

That's not the case anymore. Today we have a robust occupational safety and health administration, otherwise known as OSHA, designed specifically to guarantee a safe and health workplace.

A worker who worries that their workplace is unsafe has the right to report to OSHA and to be involved in the OSHA investigation.

Workplaces are required to spend money to solve safety challenges.

OSHA didn't just happen on its own. Its creation in 1970 was the direct result of decades of deep organizing and hard effort from labor organizations representing workers who are the most likely to be injured.

Child labor law, worker compensation, workers health care, all of these have been the result of the labor movement and hard union organizing.

Now let's fast forward 50 years.

South Carolina Department of Education says it will enforce a mask mandate on school buses starting on Monday. In neighboring to Cab County and the city of Atlanta, the school districts there taking a stricter stance requiring masks for everyone.

As labor has changed, so has the nature of labor organizing. As more of our national workforce is engaged in the service sector, in schools, in clinics, hospitals, and nursing homes, worker safety is also meant advocating for consumer safety.

Protecting the health of nurses and hospital employees means protecting patient safety too. Protecting educators and educational support professionals in schools means protecting child safety too.

That connection was made for me when I was serving as health director in the city of Detroit.

Their school buildings had fallen into a state of profound disrepair as they crumbled under decades of disinvestment and quote unquote emergency management, a draconian policy that robbed communities of local control, putting it in the hands of a single governor appointed individual instead.

I remember walking into a first grade classroom in January. The students just five or six years old sat bundled up in their winter jackets because the school's boiler was broken.

I saw a dead mouse in a state of decay in the corner of that room. And as I walked past the gym, I could smell the mold coming from underneath the floorboards.

And who was leading the charge to fix it? The teachers union who had conducted a sick out to protest the state of the buildings in which they were trying to teach.

And those kids, they were trying to learn. I got to speak with several of the teachers and each and every one of them told me about the kids first. They were putting their jobs on the line for the kids, our kids, which brings us to this moment.

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