Lesbian Jamie McLeod-Skinner Wins Congressional Primary in Oregon

McLeod-Skinner, who beat a seven-term incumbent in the Democratic primary, would be the first out member of Oregon's congressional delegation.

BY TRUDY RING

THE ADVOCATE 

MAY 27 2022 

Oregon could have its first member of Congress from the LGBTQ+ community with lesbian Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s victory over incumbent Kurt Schrader in the state’s Fifth Congressional District.

The Associated Press and the state’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian, both called the race for McLeod-Skinner Friday. Problems with counting ballots had delayed the call in the May 17 primary.

McLeod-Skinner will face Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer in November’s general election. The Fifth District leans Democratic and extends from Oregon’s central coast through the southern suburbs of Portland and then farther inland. McLeod-Skinner had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. House from the Second District in 2018; Oregon’s congressional districts have since been redrawn.

She challenged Schrader from the left, portraying him as too moderate and too close to big-money interests such as pharmaceutical companies. He was endorsed by President Joe Biden, even though he had opposed some aspects of Biden’s legislative program. McLeod-Skinner was endorsed by some other high-profile Democrats, such as U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Schrader, a farmer and veterinarian, is in his seventh term in the House. McLeod-Skinner is a lawyer, small-business owner, and emergency response coordinator. She has worked in refugee resettlement and helped repair schools and hospitals in Bosnia and Kosovo, has served on several local boards, and was interim city manager of the Oregon town of Talent.

“This is a David and Goliath moment,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, of which McLeod-Skinner is a member, told The Washington Post. “This win proves that voters are hungry for leaders who will fight for working families, not billionaires and Big Pharma.”

McLeod tweeted that her victory is for all Oregonians.

The LGBTQ Victory Fund had endorsed McLeod-Skinner and hailed her win. “For years, Jamie has been committed to addressing the climate crisis and its impacts, helping working families, safeguarding abortion and access to reproductive health care and defending our democracy,” Victory Fund President and CEO Annise Parker said in a press release. “Her success is a direct result of her steadfast commitment to community organizing and grassroots advocacy. Oregonians are clearly enthusiastic about her vision for our future. For far too long, Oregon’s LGBTQ community has not had a voice in Congress. By shattering this lavender ceiling, Jamie is one step closer to changing that. With anti-LGBTQ attacks spreading like wildfire and lawmakers in Congress bent on outlawing abortion and reproductive health care, her election could not come at a more critical moment in our nation’s history.”

LPAC, which is dedicated to electing women from the LGBTQ+ community to office, also had endorsed McLeod-Skinner and issued a statement upon her victory. “LPAC supports good candidates who run good campaigns. Jamie ran a competitive race challenging a longtime member of Congress,” said LPAC Executive Director Lisa Turner. “After spending time talking to Jamie McLeod-Skinner and her team we saw that she was the right candidate for Central Oregon, and that institutional support and investments could help her win this race. We are proud to be the first LGBTQ organization to endorse and contribute to her campaign. We look forward to continuing to work with Jamie as she takes the fight to the general election in November.”

She is not the only lesbian poised to make history in Oregon. Tina Kotek won the Democratic primary for governor, and if she wins in November, she would be the state’s first lesbian chief executive.

Progressive challenger topples Kurt Schrader in Oregon

Biden-backed ‘Blue Dog’ loses primary to attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner

"Blue Dog" Rep. Kurt Schrader lost his bid for an eighth term after

 a tough Democratic primary in Oregon's 5th District. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)

By Kate Ackley

ROLL CALL

Posted May 27, 2022 

Rep. Kurt Schrader, a seven-term Democrat from Oregon’s 5th District, lost his renomination bid to attorney and emergency response coordinator Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who had the backing of local party officials and progressive groups.

McLeod-Skinner had 57 percent of the vote to Schrader's 43 percent when The Associated Press called the race at 11:55 a.m. Eastern time Friday. The primary, held May 17, took more than a week to call because of vote-counting delays attributed to ballot-printing problems in Schrader's home county of Clackamas.

President Joe Biden and House Democrats’ campaign arm tried to come to Schrader’s defense, and the incumbent held a strong campaign cash advantage. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the dual headwinds of redistricting and a Democratic primary electorate that has become more liberal.

Republicans were already targeting the district, which Biden won in 2020 by 9 points, for November. GOP operatives now view it as a better pickup opportunity because no one will have the benefit of incumbency and because McLeod-Skinner leans more liberal than Schrader. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales moved the rating for the race this week from Likey to Lean Democratic.

In the general election, she will face Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Happy Valley mayor who held $135,000 cash on hand as of April 27.

Schrader had $1.3 million in the bank to McLeod-Skinner’s $110,000 as of April 27. He also benefited from more outside spending, with $1.3 million spent supporting him and another $845,000 spent against McLeod-Skinner. Conversely, just $235,000 in outside spending was spent supporting her and only $35,000 spent against Schrader.

McLeod-Skinner portrayed Schrader as distant from his constituents, and progressive activists said that, as a fiscally conservative Democrat, he was out of step with the party and had sided too often with business interests. During his career in the House, Schrader voted with his party, on votes that split Republicans and Democrats, 85.6 percent of the time, according to CQ Vote Watch.

Schrader is the fourth incumbent to lose a primary this year. The others are Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia and Republicans Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and David B. McKinley of West Virginia.
Endangered species?

Schrader is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats who have been dwindling in number.

Schrader, who was first sworn into the House on the cusp of the Obama presidency, once told Portland-based newspaper The Oregonian that the Blue Dog group is “a balance to the Elizabeth Warrens of the world,” a reference to the progressive Massachusetts senator. Warren endorsed McLeod-Skinner in the primary.

“She will fight for prescription drug coverage for seniors, tackle the climate crisis, and stand shoulder to shoulder with working families,” Warren said in her endorsement of the challenger.

Local liberal activists were “furious” with Schrader for voting against some key components of the Democrats’ agenda, including a vote he took in a House committee to thwart a bill that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, according to Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible. They also blame him, in part, for being part of a small group of House members who successfully pushed to de-link a bipartisan infrastructure measure from the broader tax and climate policy package known as the “Build Back Better” bill, Greenberg added.

“We don’t always agree, but when it has mattered most, Kurt has been there for me,” Biden said in a statement about the endorsement.

Redistricting also muted the incumbent’s advantages, with about half the voters from the district he won in 2020 now part of the new 6th District that the state received through reapportionment.
Congressional career

On Capitol Hill, Schrader served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. A licensed veterinarian and co-chairman of the Veterinary Medicine Caucus, he pushed through several bills related to animals, including one to expand regulations designed to combat horse soring — using chemicals, pressure or devices to cause pain to horses’ front feet so they pick them up higher and faster than they naturally would.

“Horse soring still runs rampant even though laws have been on the books for decades banning this cruel practice,” he said after the House voted to pass the bill in July 2019.

Schrader is also part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

He has, at times, challenged his party’s leadership in the House. He was one of 63 Democrats who voted for Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who is running for Senate this year, in a November 2016 challenge to then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. He again opposed Pelosi’s leadership bid in the 116th Congress as Democrats took control of the chamber in January 2019. Schrader was one of 15 Democrats who didn’t vote for her election as House speaker.

Schrader’s political career began in the Oregon House of Representatives in 1996. He was first elected to Congress in 2008 after a 30-plus year career as a veterinarian and farmer, replacing six-term Democratic Rep. Darlene Hooley, who retired.

PRISON NATION USA

Rikers Island Has Made Us All Prisoners

New York City’s infamous jail on Rikers Island is one of the most brutal institutions of incarceration in America. Its conditions are the product not just of “tough-on-crime” policies but also of the best intentions of liberal criminal-justice reformers.

Prisoners sit handcuffed on the ground along the hallway after riots at Rikers Island on November 25, 1975. (Leonard Jackson / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

LONG READ


BY SCOTT W. STERN

JACOBIN
05.27.2022

Review of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage by Jarrod Shanahan (Verso, 2022)

In 2014, a young man named Jarrod Shanahan arrived at Rikers Island, the infamous spit of land that houses New York’s primary jail complex. Shanahan had been arrested during a violent state crackdown on anti-police uprisings that characterized the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. For the next several weeks, he “beheld and experienced the degrading treatment to which tens of thousands of New Yorkers are subjected each year by guards who answer to nobody,” he later reflected.

The guards harassed, intimidated, and outright assaulted prisoners and visitors alike; they ignored prisoners’ medical emergencies and sought to bait them into fights; boredom characterized the hours that were free of violence. It was frightening, demoralizing. Yet Shanahan also began to hear talk of a campaign to close down the penal complex, an organizing effort that a year later would expand greatly following the suicide of Kalief Browder, who had spent three wretched years at Rikers (half that time in solitary confinement) despite not having been convicted of a crime.

Over the course of his forty-five-day sentence, Shanahan decided to learn more about the institution in which he was caged. Five years later, his research had become a doctoral dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center; three years after that, it has become his first book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. It is a vivid, vital, and terrifying volume.

Jails and prisons have long been popular case studies for academics, but in recent years, several historians have seized on new archives and original oral histories to reframe these accounts along expressly abolitionist lines. Last year, Jessica Ordaz told the remarkable, decades-long story of an immigration detention center at El Centro, California. Last month, Hugh Ryan published his brilliant “queer history” of the Women’s House of Detention, which stood for half a century in Greenwich Village. Shanahan’s book joins these efforts, unearthing the history of one of the most famous — and notorious — jails in the world (its notoriety due in part to its location in New York City, but probably in larger part because of the unending series of stomach-turning scandals in which the penal island has been embroiled).

For generations, “Rikers” has been a byword for official impunity, state-sanctioned violence, racialized mass incarceration, and the criminalization of the poor. In 2019, the New York City Council finally voted to close Rikers by 2026, a plan Eric Adams claimed to support while running to be the city’s mayor last year. For now, though, the facility remains open — and an absolute nightmare. With more than a third of the guards playing hooky every day, with routine deprivations of food, water, and medicine, and with stabbings, assaults, and even murders a routine affair, the federal government has recently threatened to take over the jail complex entirely.

According to Shanahan, the history of Rikers contains “the story of the postwar struggle for who would run New York City” — and by extension, cities across the United States. Shanahan frames New York’s governance as defined by two increasingly polarized camps: reformist liberals on the one side, and the “forces of brute repression,” of “law and order,” on the other.

But “make no mistake,” he writes: “both camps swore allegiance to the capitalist order and believed in the ultimate legitimacy of whatever means were necessary to protect it.” Captives tells a story about the inherent limitations of liberal reform: about how every effort to make human caging more humane only served to expand incarceration, to make it more profitable for a small elite, and to render it more necessary to the administration of American cities.

It has always been a vile place. “Rikers Island is a patch of reeking landfill plopped into the East River between LaGuardia Airport in Queens and Hunts Point in the Bronx,” Shanahan writes, with evident disgust. The name traces back to a seventeenth-century Dutch landowner, Abraham Rycken, although the most famous of his descendants, Richard Riker, was a key player in the nineteenth-century Kidnapping Club, in which corrupt, wealthy New Yorkers would kidnap free and fugitive black people and sell them south into slavery.

Two decades after the end of the Civil War, New York officials purchased Rikers Island “to build a bigger jail” (as the New York Times approvingly wrote) and set to work shoring up its unstable soil. At first, Rikers was just a miserable daytime worksite for inmates of the overcrowded jail on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), with the disproportionately poor and black prisoners literally laying the groundwork for the future penal colony. In the early 1930s, a new jail opened on the island, and progressive penologists rejoiced. It had a large library, a state-of-the-art hospital, and offered an array of “rehabilitative programming.”

The fantasy was not to last for long. Insufficient budgets and overzealous policing soon led to a corrupt, overcrowded jail system. By the time Anna Moscowitz Kross took over as New York’s commissioner of correction in 1954, Rikers was cluttered with beds, running short on clothing, disproportionately packed with poor people and New Yorkers of color, and individual guards were responsible for more than two hundred prisoners at a time.

Kross, though, had a vision for Rikers, as well as the city’s other jails and prisons. It is because of that vision — and her decades at the head of the Department of Corrections (DOC) — that she emerges as perhaps Shanahan’s main character, a well-meaning, deeply harmful protagonist. (She is also profiled at length in Ryan’s aforementioned The Women’s House of Detention; at long last, Kross is having a moment.)

The working-class daughter of Russian Jewish refugees, Kross sped through public schools, Columbia’s Teachers College, and New York University’s law school all before the age of nineteen. As a teenage law student, she had become interested in the plight of poor women (many of them accused sex workers) appearing in New York’s “night court.” In the years that followed, as she rose through the ranks of Tammany Hall, eventually becoming a judge, Kross never lost her determination to reform the city’s penal system. She believed that, with compassion and expert guidance, the courts and the prisons could become “a site of potential social good.” In seeking to realize this vision, Shanahan argues, she “significantly expanded the role of the courts in the lives of working people.”

Kross was appointed DOC commissioner amid a brutal police crackdown on black and brown New Yorkers. Just a month after she took office, the number of incarcerated people in the city reached a fifteen-year high. In response, Kross sought to increase the DOC’s reliance on civilian experts, well-credentialed social scientists with a particular focus on supposedly reformable women and children. She created educational programs and introduced classificatory schemes, seeking to “make carceral facilities more easily governable.” She also brought in private charities and nonprofit and religious organizations to offer benevolent services to incarcerated individuals.

Such policies no doubt improved the lives of some prisoners, but they also served to enmesh liberal actors in the prison-industrial complex, leading the nonprofits and the charities to defend the prison system and their own roles within it.

“As interested citizens and volunteers, we have worked thousands of hours yearly in every corner of this institution,” read one letter to every city newspaper, signed by a who’s who of New York’s nonprofit establishment. “We have been appalled by the exaggerated and distorted descriptions [of jails] given by news media. . . . We are qualified to set the record straight!”


At every turn, however, Kross ran into resistance from the New York Police Department — especially from the legions of guards that patrolled the city’s jails and prisons. She strove valiantly to keep the guards on her side, offering higher wages, greater benefits, and more jobs, but this did little to control the guards’ violence. When she sought to institute a policy with which they disagreed, many guards simply ignored her.

And conditions only grew worse. At the Women’s House of Detention, the incarcerated were subjected to violent medical searches, filthy blankets and mattresses, rats and roaches everywhere, toothpaste and soap nowhere, rampant sexual abuse, and consistent racist treatment. Facilities like this one (located in the heart of Manhattan) were “a great shame” for New York; pissed-off prisoners were within shouting distance of the streets below. Kross and her colleagues at DOC decided that it would be better to relocate incarcerated people away from the city proper, from the old jails and workhouses of Brooklyn and the Bronx and onto far-off islands.

Throughout the 1960s, therefore, Kross led a massive infrastructure expansion on Rikers Island, unveiling new, “modern” penal facilities. The “final piece of the puzzle,” Shanahan writes, was replacing the ferry to the island with a bridge, so greater quantities of supplies and humans could be shipped to Rikers more easily. “With the best of intentions, Anna M. Kross had paved the road, quite literally, to the Rikers Island of today.”

Kross served as DOC commissioner for well over a decade, but her tenure did not last long enough for her to oversee the modern monstrosity that Rikers became. By the time Mayor John Lindsay — another liberal reformer — officially opened the bridge to Rikers in 1966, he had replaced Kross with a new commissioner, albeit one whom Kross praised as “rehabilitation minded.”

In 1967, DOC broke ground on a new facility for women at Rikers. By 1968, all adolescent prisoners were housed there as well. In large part, these expansions were motivated by a continued surge in arrests across New York City during these years. Throughout the 1960s, the DOC population had shifted from majority-white to majority-nonwhite. This shift reflected a widening economic gap between the white and nonwhite segments of the labor force, itself reflective of postwar municipal policies that favored white workers.

Rikers Island, New York, New York. 

(Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

The shift was also attributable to a violent backlash to the civil rights movement and urban uprisings, which led the NYPD to step up arrests of black and brown people across the city. As working-class white New Yorkers moved to the right and as a significant number of working-class people of color embraced revolutionary movements, the police became more and more violent. Explicitly embracing white supremacy and Klan-like tactics, the cops relentlessly (and often illegally) targeted the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Rikers was needed to house all of the people that the cops were hauling off the streets.

Kross’s successor strove to maintain her reform-minded policies, continuing the partnerships with private nonprofits like the Ford Foundation, busing in social science graduate students, and even constructing the new penal facilities according to modern design principles. The DOC began working closely with the newly founded Vera Institute of Justice, another organization that sincerely sought to improve prisoners’ lives but ended up providing the city with detailed plans for how penal facilities could be used as essentially a counterinsurgent mechanism to quell black and brown revolt.The guards never stopped pushing for their own interests. And they enjoyed considerably greater success than the prisoners.

And Rikers remained a horrendous place, overcrowded, violent, rife with suicides. “It was as if Kross had never come along at all,” Shanahan comments dryly, “except for the bridge, the new jails, and plans for still more jail expansion.” An increasing proportion of the prisoners were black and brown, an increasing share of these having been arrested not for “crimes” but for activism.

In response to the rash of arrests, the rising rates of incarceration, the police violence, and the atrocious conditions within, rebellions flared inside the city’s jails and prisons. In 1970, a hunger strike erupted at one of Rikers’s facilities for male inmates, followed by a work stoppage at the Tombs in solidarity. Other uprisings soon followed at the Brooklyn House of Detention, multiple houses of detention in Queens, the Adolescent Reformatory at Rikers, and the Tombs (again). Almost invariably, these rebellions led to vicious reactions from the guards and NYPD, wielding clubs, blasting music, setting fires, indiscriminately spraying teargas, and beating prisoners almost to death.

In the aftermath of the unrest, the guards embraced a newfound “militancy,” Shanahan notes. The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA), the guards’ main union, demanded more power to “clean up our institutions” — that is, virtually unchecked impunity to assault and torture inmates — and won greater pay, benefits, and new riot gear for its members by threatening to quit en masse. The guards imposed twenty-four-hour lockdowns, blocked prisoner communication with the outside world, and denied access to medical care. Prisoners returned to find their cells “completely wrecked and all their belongings destroyed by guards.”

Never again would New York City prisoner resistance reach the widespread levels that it did in 1970, but struggle continued at a smaller scale, violently contested by guards yet ultimately ineradicable. Prisoners smuggled in revolutionary literature, organized for better conditions, escaped in droves, and occasionally set up barricades. They and their allies won some reforms, including the abolition of the “bread and water” disciplinary diet and the introduction of methadone; and the rise of litigation challenging unconstitutionally dire conditions within prisons also led to some changes, including the closure of the Tombs.

Yet the guards never stopped pushing for their own interests, either. And they enjoyed considerably greater success.

Indeed, the second half of Captives is a demoralizing, twinned narrative about brutal economic austerity on the part of the city and militant labor organizing on the part of the guards. The two forces functioned in tandem. Economic troubles in New York led to overcrowding behind bars, which led to conditions that the guards used to demand greater authority and control, which led to more prisoner maltreatment; austerity governance cut programs that benefited the poor, which led to more crime, more arrests, and more people in jail, which led to still greater construction at Rikers; tightening city budgets led to greater reliance on private organizations, which led incarceration to become even less accountable to the public; layoffs in the wake of the financial crisis led the guards to protest, which led those in power to classify the guards as “essential” and “special,” effectively immunizing them from future layoffs.

Over time, COBA became more and more confrontational. Aware of its increasing centrality to New York’s new order, it staged repeated wildcat actions, belligerently marched on city hall, and conspicuously displayed guns and knives. It violently resisted each concession or reform that the prisoners won. COBA opposed the searches of its members for contraband, despite evidence that guards were smuggling drugs into Rikers, promoting more invasive searches of prisoners instead.

“In short, COBA members’ carte blanche remained the organization’s bottom line,” Shanahan notes, “for which it was willing to trade away not only the dignity and well-being of the city’s prisoners, but also the safety of its own members.”

In the 1980s, the municipal government (led first by Mayor Ed Koch and then by Mayor David Dinkins) turned away from liberalism and toward tough-on-crime policies and the “war on drugs.” (Ironically, and fittingly, Koch’s deputy mayor was the founder of the Vera Institute.) Rikers expanded and then expanded again; one new facility on the island was named after Anna Kross. To those in power, enhanced policing and imprisoning also suited the imperatives of austerity (even as the DOC’s budget increased 3,000 percent).

“In the end, policing and jails were a less expensive, and thoroughly disempowering, alternative to welfare state spending,” Shanahan writes, echoing Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other abolitionist scholars. “Human costs notwithstanding, jails were politically expedient, and a good investment to boot.”

Shanahan largely concludes his story in the summer of 1990, with a massive protest in which hundreds of guards blocked access to the bridge to Rikers. Armed and drunk, the guards picketed for hours (at one point assaulting EMTs who were trying to get to Rikers to assist a prisoner having a seizure). COBA made more than thirty demands, including greater hiring, harsher penalties for prisoners that assaulted guards, and — most significantly — “an end to stringent oversight of how and when they chose to inflict violence.” The action ended with a nonbinding agreement, although COBA’s president told the rank-and-file via bullhorn that the oversight protocol had been eliminated.The book’s titular captives are not just the individuals incarcerated in Rikers. This book is about how Rikers — and the politics of surveillance, policing, and carceral punishment — made captives of us all.

Meanwhile, a meltdown in humanitarian conditions within Rikers as a result of the blockade led the prisoners to rise up, which the guards brutally repressed. In the end, no guards faced any criminal charges. The city would not hold them accountable at all. They had proved a bloody point.

In one sense, Captives is mistitled. It tells the story of the captors, not the captives. It is not a people’s history; it the guards’ history. Their struggles, their budgets, their internecine disputes, even the racially disparate violence meted out by a majority-black workforce — this is the focus of Shanahan’s book. Such an approach is highly revelatory, although it stands in contrast with the approach of, say, Hugh Ryan or Heather Ann Thompson (acclaimed historian of the Attica prison uprising), who largely looked past the guards in their penal histories, instead lavishing attention on the prisoners, both the famous and the unknown.

This is not a criticism of Shanahan, however. In a review published more than twenty years ago, the historian Nell Irvin Painter critiqued Diane McWhorter for failing to sustain a “clear-eyed focus on white supremacy’s power structure” across her epic, 700-page account of the struggle over civil rights in mid-century Birmingham. McWhorter began her book by carefully tracing the connections among the white supremacist “country clubbers,” the Klansmen, and all levels of law enforcement. But in her quest to also track black resistance and give her book a “happy ending,” Painter writes, McWhorter lost sight of her most significant intervention.

The same cannot be said of Shanahan. He never loses track of the racist and capitalist power structure that is his book’s primary focus. He never lets the guards out of his sight.

In another sense, Captives is perfectly titled. Looking to its subtitle, it’s clear that its titular captives are not just the individuals incarcerated in Rikers. Rather, this book is about how Rikers — and the politics of surveillance, policing, and carceral punishment—made captives of us all. We are all at the mercy of the system it emblematizes — not equally at risk, to be sure, but captives to its inexorable logic, nonetheless.

In the aftermath of the 1990 uprising, Shanahan argues, the modern status quo prevailed. “Built by jail reformers to be a world-renowned hub of penal welfarism,” he writes, “Rikers Island was now the domain of a violent custodial force that demanded — and won — almost-untrammeled city recognition of their freedom to dispose of the city’s prisoners however they saw fit.” Rikers overflowed with prisoners structurally consigned to poverty, “the vast majority of whom had not been convicted of any crime.

Indeed, the authorities warehoused so many people at Rikers that it became famous for its ad hoc structure (tents, modules) meant to facilitate ever more rapid expansion; so many prisoners filed civil rights suits that DOC constructed its own courthouse on the island. The number of captives has grown over the last thirty years, but the violence of their captors has not relented.

Shanahan closes the book, however, with one last look at liberal reformers (a different set of captors). Nonprofit organizations, he writes, have remained “highly specialized partners to the administration of punishment and surveillance.” In the aftermath of Kalief Browder’s death, a powerful abolitionist movement rose up, wielding a simple demand: “Shut Down Rikers” and replace it with nothing. “To this demand, however, emissaries of the city’s nonprofit sector” — including the Ford Foundation, the Vera Institute, and others, Shanahan notes — “would add another. The city should shut down Rikers, they argued, and replace it with new, state-of-the-art penal welfarist jails. . . . This time around, they assured the public, the city would get it right.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott W. Stern is a lawyer and the author of The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.

USA

Pay transparency laws raise women’s salaries — and slightly lower men’s

Posted May 27, 2022

Elaine S. Povich

Stateline

The bestselling 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” later adapted into a popular film, told the story of Black female mathematicians who played an essential role in the U.S. space program in the 1950s and 1960s, but who faced racial discrimination and were paid less than their male counterparts.

The gender pay gap existed before the era portrayed in the book and film, and it persists today, though it has narrowed in recent years. In 2019, the national median salary for women working full time was $43,394, compared with $53,544 for men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The sponsor of a West Virginia bill that aimed to close that gap there named it for two of the mathematicians featured in the book and film, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, both of whom were born in the state. The bill, which has been introduced for several sessions but has failed to pass, would require employers to publish salaries when advertising jobs and would prohibit companies from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with colleagues.

Studies show that salary transparency—coupled with laws prohibiting companies from asking an applicant about their current or previous pay—can narrow the gender pay gap. If companies must advertise salaries for open positions, and current employees can freely discuss pay, applicants are less likely to receive or accept lowball offers. Studies show that women and minority candidates are most likely to receive such offers.

But research also shows that salary transparency tends to lower men’s salaries even as it raises those of women—and might lower salaries overall. Multistate companies have found ways to circumvent the laws by refusing to accept applications from job seekers who live in states that require transparency. And critics say salary transparency laws might persuade companies to hire fewer employees, and could foment conflict in the workplace.

State Rep. Barbara Evans Fleischauer, the Democratic sponsor of the West Virginia bill, said it has foundered against opposition from Republicans and business interests. “One member said: ‘I don’t want my secretary talking to others about what they make,’” she recalled.

But 17 states already have similar pay transparency laws. In March, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation requiring employers with 15 or more workers to post salary ranges beginning in 2023. A similar Rhode Island law is scheduled to take effect next year.

There are no readily available studies on whether state transparency laws have helped close the pay gap, since the first of the laws took effect just a few years ago, in 2018.

But a 2019 study of Canadian universities, which have similar requirements, found the laws “reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 20-40 percent.”

“It’s very hard to lowball some new potential employee if the new potential employee is capable of looking at a range of salaries,” said Cornell economics assistant professor Thomas Jungbauer. “This can have a positive effect on wage gaps because of gender or color. Employers might offer lower wages to certain types of applicants. This makes it harder.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median earnings for women in the 2016-2020 period, the most recent period for which samples were taken, showed women making 81% of what men earn as a median salary. That’s better than the 59 cents on the dollar earned by women during the “Hidden Figures” era, but still well short of equal.

The 2019 census data also shows that the gender pay gap varies significantly from state to state. The District of Columbia, Utah and Wyoming all had gaps that exceeded $15,000, while the gap was less than $10,000 in states including Arizona, California, Florida, New York and North Carolina.

New York debate

New York City’s pay transparency law was scheduled to take effect this month, but the City Council in April voted to postpone implementation until November because of business concerns about a lack of flexibility and worries that the law had been approved too quickly, according to Beverly Neufeld, president and founder of PowHer NY, a network of gender and racial justice organizations.

The new law will require that employers get a warning and 30 days to fix their first violation before facing fines. It also eliminated the right to sue an employer for not posting salary ranges unless you are employed there.

The Staten Island Chamber of Commerce was one organization that argued against the law, saying that it would disadvantage New York companies. Forcing them to publicize salaries for open jobs, the chamber argued, would push prospective employees to look elsewhere for higher compensation.

“The city’s [minority- and women-owned business] firms are generally at a disadvantage in competing for scarce talent and are likely to be outbid if a majority competitor has access to their salary offering,” the chamber said in a statement.

New York state is considering a similar bill. State Rep. Latoya Joyner, a Democrat and primary sponsor of the bill, said in an email to Stateline that while the state has taken a significant step toward closing the salary gap by prohibiting companies from asking interviewees about their salary history, it will go even further with this legislation.

Overall, the pay gap between men and women in New York state in 2019 was $8,821, with women making 85.5% of what men make, but that gap differed by race and ethnicity. For White workers the gap was $12,000 (83%), while it was $3,500 for Hispanic workers (92%) and $2,900 for Black workers (94%). There was no gender pay gap for Asian workers.

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“Workers—especially women—still face a very daunting work environment when it comes to compensation, and we need to do more to create a level playing field in the workplace when it comes to salaries,” Joyner said.

The bill is awaiting action in both the Senate and the Assembly, and Joyner said she was hopeful it would pass in June.

Limited effectiveness?

Colorado’s transparency law went into effect last year, but an investigation by television station 9News in Denver found at least 10 companies in May 2021―including Nike, Johnson & Johnson and Lincoln Financial―saying in their ads that no Coloradans need apply for their openings. A subsequent Colorado Department of Labor ruling underscored the regulation and said that no company is exempt, even if the jobs are for remote work.

Meanwhile, a study in 2021 by Harvard Business School assistant professor Zoe Cullen showed that making pay scales public reduces “the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages.” The study found the wages went down by 2%, mostly by lowering men’s pay. The study used salary data from the American Community Survey and compared overall salaries in states where pay transparency exists to those where it doesn’t. It modeled future effects based on those statistics.

“Both the empirical work and that model showed that when employers catch wind of the fact that there’s greater transparency and have time to adjust pay setting practices, they do so by bargaining more aggressively,” she said in a phone interview. “They know that by raising your wage, it weakens their negotiations. The upshot is that average wages are overall lower.”


Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.

- 30 -

Could the U.S. Be Doing More to Free Brittney Griner?
By A. Sherrod Blakely
| May 27, 2022

Image: Mike Mattina/Getty Images.
Brittney Griner, a two-time Olympian and WNBA star has been detained near Moscow for allegedly having hashish oil in her luggage. Would she still be detained if she were an NBA star versus being a WNBA star?

You could feel the pain in Cherelle Griner’s voice as she spoke publicly for the first time about her spouse, WNBA star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia on Feb. 17.

As EBONY previously reported, Griner was detained at Sheremetyevo International Airport near Moscow for allegedly having vape cartridges in her luggage that contained hashish oil, an illegal substance in Russia.

If convicted, the Phoenix Mercury center could be facing up to 10 years in prison.

Cherelle Griner responded eloquently to all the questions thrown her way, doing her best to mask the hurt and pain that she and so many of us are feeling right now.

And like so many of us, Cherelle is anxious to see Brittney back home in the United States which is complicated for far too many reasons to fully address in one column.

But as the days continue to pass with little to no signs of Brittney being released, lots of questions continue to be raised about whether the United States Government is operating with a heightened sense of urgency to bring the two-time Olympian home.

And if not, folks have publicly wondered how different would all this play out if it were LeBron James or maybe another less-renowned, Olympic-caliber talent like Paul George of the Los Angeles Clippers or Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks, stuck in a Russian detention center.

If any of the aforementioned players were being detained overseas, the questions we would be asking now wouldn’t be focused on when they were coming home, but more about what their next move will be now that they are back in the United States.

Sadly, Griner isn’t the first American arrested in a foreign country deemed by the United States government as being “wrongfully detained.”

The cost of her freedom will surely be high.

But if the government plans to stick to its word, it’s a price they should be vigorous in their willingness to pay.

“You (U.S. Government) say she’s top priority, but I wanna see it, and I feel like to see it would be me seeing BG on U.S. soil,” Cherelle Griner told Robin Roberts during an episode of Good Morning America this week.

We have seen several Americans in recent years detained overseas, with many being imprisoned for years before being released.

So the idea of it taking longer than most would prefer, should come as no surprise.

But never has there been an American athlete arrested and detained with the kind of big-name notoriety and stature of the 6-foot-9 Griner.

In addition to being a two-time Olympic gold-medal winner, Griner won an NBA championship with the Phoenix Mercury in 2014.

She’s also a seven-time WNBA All-Star in addition to being a two-time scoring champion.

Griner has also been among the most dominant players overseas, a three-time National Russian League champion with UMMC Ekaterinburg; a four-time Euroleague champion; not to mention all the accolades acquired at Baylor where Griner won a national championship and was named the AP College Player of the Year (2012) and then the No. 1 overall pick in 2013 by the Phoenix Mercury.

The Russian rules of law have always been tricky for non-Russians, with a judicial system that is no stranger to using American citizens as a political pawn to bargain for the release of Russian citizens jailed in the United States.

When the U.S. Government determined Brittney was “wrongfully detained” by Russia, that’s often the catalyst for the United States to engage in discussion about a potential swap.

But actual movement on that front has been slow; certainly slower than Cherelle or Brittney’s legion of fans and fellow WNBAers would want to see.

Yes, the often-chilly relationship between the United States and Russia doesn’t help matters.

Ditto for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine which occurred about a week after Griner’s detainment.

How much has that played into Griner’s detainment? No one knows for sure.

But the idea that this process might be fast-tracked if it were an NBA player rather than a WNBA player, isn’t that far-fetched.

 New Zealand and California ink deal to cooperate on climate

Luke Malpass in San Francisco

 May 28 2022

New Zealand and California have signed a deal to cooperate on climate change.

The deal, which is a memorandum of understanding, was signed by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and California Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco on Saturday morning New Zealand time.

The deal will facilitate the sharing of information, emissions-reducing research and a collaboration of climate-related projects.

“Taking action on climate will secure our environment and our economy, so it makes sense to partner with allies in this shared problem,” Jacinda Ardern said.

READ MORE:
* Why the Ardern-Biden White House meeting comes at crucial time for the Asia-Pacific
* Jacinda Ardern uses Harvard speech to lash 'keyboard warriors', attack disinformation
* Jacinda Ardern gets pulled into US gun debate, but it's no bad thing

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meets with California Governor Gavin Newsom.

New Zealand and California both have plans to hit net-zero emissions by the middle of the century, but there are few concrete details at this point of how this new deal will work.

The signing event took place in the New Zealand section of the San Francisco Botanical Garden where Ardern and the silver-haired Newsom both took to the stage, having met earlier in the morning.

“We both aim to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century. This agreement means we’ll work together to share expertise and experience and collaborate on projects that help meet each other’s targets,” she said.

“As the fifth largest economy in the world, California will be a significant player in the global low-emissions transition and an important partner in our efforts.

“As a result we both have ambitious policies for zero-emission transportation on land and sea, energy innovation, clean power generation, nature-based solutions and zero waste initiatives.

“The agreement provides a framework for cooperation across a range of sectors including on zero emissions vehicles, energy storage and smart grids, emissions trading schemes, and climate smart agriculture.”

At the same event, New Zealand company The New Zealand Merino Company inked a deal between its regenerative wool platform, ZQRX and Silicon Valley technology platform, Actual.

It is a deal to build a platform that will help New Zealand Merino farmers track their emissions, and emissions performance across the farm.

“The finalisation of our partnership with Actual is the culmination of a decade-long journey, with market impact at the heart of our efforts to reimagine the future of conscious consumerism, and create products that are ‘made for good’,” said John Brackenridge, CEO of Merino New Zealand, who is part of the business delegation on the trip.

“This signing marks the significance of the progress that we have made thus far, and a new beginning that will transform agricultural practices across the globe,” he said.

Kids Ask 'Am I Next?' In Wrenching Protest Outside NRA Convention

Video shows children lined up across the street from the convention with pictures of Uvalde shooting victims hanging around their necks.

By David Moye

HUFFPOST
May. 27, 2022

Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has brought nationwide awareness of this weekend’s National Rifle Association convention in Houston ― as well as a lot of protesters.

Many people came out to protest the gun lobbying organization for helping to make America the uncontested world leader in mass shootings, with 288 school shootings between 2009 and 2018. The No. 2 country, Mexico, had only eight school shootings in that time.

One particularly heart-wrenching protest featured a group of kids with pictures of Uvalde shooting victims hanging around their necks.

Other protest photos and videos from outside the convention:

PATRICK T. FALLON VIA GETTY IMAGES


PATRICK T. FALLON VIA GETTY IMAGES


CECILE CLOCHERET VIA GETTY IMAGES

RELATED...

The NRA Convention Begins Today. You Can’t Bring Your Gun.

Abbott Drops In-Person Appearance At NRA Convention, Will Still Speak Via Video

Trump Says He's Still Speaking At NRA Convention Following Texas Shooting

Anti-gun protesters gather outside NRA convention after school massacre

A group of protesters angered over the shooting deaths of Texas elementary school students converged Friday outside the gun-lobby National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston.© Patrick T. Fallon, AFP

The protesters held crosses with photos of shooting victims and shouted, "NRA go away," and "Shame, it could be your kids today," as hundreds of members of the nation's biggest gun lobby arrived at the conventional hall.

Tuesday's fatal shooting of 19 Uvalde, Texas, students and two teachers by an 18-year-old gunman equipped with an AR-15 style semiautomatic assault rife is expected to limit attendance at the group's first convention in three years.

Uvalde is about 280 miles (450 km) west of Houston.

Former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, are scheduled to deliver addresses on Friday afternoon. Two other speakers, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, dropped out of in-person remarks.

Abbott plans to deliver a pre-recorded address and will travel to Uvalde later in the day. Patrick said he withdrew to not "bring any additional pain or grief to the families and all those suffering in Uvalde."

Inside the massive convention center in downtown Houston, attendees shopped for NRA-themed T-shirts and caps, whose sales help finance the group's programs. The hall had hundreds of exhibits by gun manufacturers, showing off handguns, hunting rifles and assault rifles.

Tim Hickey, a Marine Corps veteran attending the event, dismissed the protests. “These people are puppets and sheep to the media. They are not changing anyone’s mind,” he said.

Kevin Kimbell, a Houston-area resident and lifetime member of the NRA, who joined the group in college at 20, said he expects fewer members than usual due to the Uvalde shooting.

As small groups of protesters arrived and a van promoting gun control circled outside the hall, Kimbell said, "I worry about something crazy happening. I was quite concerned about it last night, but I’m still here."

Protestor Johnny Mata called on the NRA to halt the convention and hold a memorial service for the victims.

“They have the audacity not to cancel in respect of these families, said Mata, who represented advocacy group Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. The NRA should "quit being a part of the assassination of children in American schools.”

The NRA's decision to proceed with its largest annual gathering is part of a decades-long strategy of standing up to pressure for gun control that dates to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado.

The weekend convention is the five million-member group's first annual get together after two prior cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Reuters)

POGG; PEACE,ORDER AND GOOD GOVERNMENT

Wangersky: Consider carefully how 'freedom' is defined by advocates

© Provided by Leader Post

A protester holds up a freedom sign during a ceremony at the National War Memorial during the Rolling Thunder Convoy on April 30, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada.

Russell Wangersky - Yesterday 

POSTMEDIA

Where does personal freedom begin and end in a community?

I wonder about that as I listen to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership campaign promises to “make Canada the freest country on Earth,” and while, on Saturdays, honking convoys of flag-bedecked cars still occasionally freely trundle around streets in this province, bemoaning the lack of appropriate freedom.

So, how much freedom is too much?

Perhaps there are those amongst us who would argue that personal freedom should be absolute.

But what happens when your freedom collides with someone else’s, or with society’s as a whole?

A good quick analysis is the one put forward by American John B. Finch, who put it this way: “I stand alone upon a platform. I am a tall man with long arms which I may use at my pleasure. I may even double my fist and gesticulate at my own sweet will.

“But if another shall step upon the platform, and in the exercise of my personal liberty I bring my fist against his face, I very soon find that my personal liberty ends where that man’s nose begins.”

So, where, in societal terms, does that nose actually start?

Well, for argument’s sake, when there’s demonstrable harm to others in the community as a result of your actions.

You can, for example, argue that you should have the personal freedom to flout pandemic public health rules that you don’t like or agree with.

But if those who disagree with rules get sick and take up hospital beds others need, then one person’s “freedom” has intruded into others’ lives, and there has to be more to the debate than “I want what I want for me, and I should have a right to it.”

I might want the freedom to line up empty beer cans on the fence between the neighbour’s yard and my own, and then shoot the cans with a .22, but, just as much, my neighbour might want to enjoy his yard without bullets passing through it.

(That example is extreme to the point of ridiculousness, but it’s a risk you run when the only part of the freedom equation is what you want the freedom to do, ignoring anyone else.)

That’s why there are basic societal and community rules that affect the freedom of just doing whatever you want.

As Finch put it in 1882, “Here civil government comes in to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes.”

“Adjust rights.” It is not that hard a concept to understand. There can be competing rights, and balancing them doesn’t mean all freedom is lost — unless your definition of freedom is the four-year-old’s simple mantra of “me — me — me — me.”

There are extremely few times in the past few decades that, in this supposedly freedom-challenged country, anyone has come up to me and said, “You can’t do that here.” And, frankly, not even one where a clear and straightforward explanation for the restrictions on my behaviour didn’t make sense to me.

I’ve always recognized the need for my personal rights to be balanced against the needs and rights of other people in my community, and I’ve always known that my rights don’t supersede theirs, just because there’s some particular thing I want for myself.

In other words, I don’t think of myself as more important than others, or believe my rights are naturally more important than others, just because they are mine.

I know my need for a new set of bookshelves is not so great that I should have the freedom to run the table saw in my backyard at 3 a.m.

So, some people in this country feel we’re not free — and some politicians want to campaign on the “freedom” ticket. So, what does this “more free” Canada look like?

To me, it looks like an unregulated punch in the nose — but only from the point of view of the person throwing the punch.

Russell Wangersky is the editor in chief of the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. 

He can be reached at rwangersky@postmedia.com.

Peace, order, and good government - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace,_order,_and_good_governme

In many Commonwealth jurisdictions, the phrase "peace, order, and good government" (POGG) is an expression used in law to express the legitimate objects of legislative powers conferred by statute. The phrase appears in many Imperial Acts of Parliament and Letters Patent, most notably the constitutions of Barbados, Canada, Australia and formerly New Zealand and South Africa.

It is often contrasted with "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", a spiritually analogous

.

A GLOBAL ISSUE

Emergency medical staff report high levels of burnout amid COVID-19

Filed Under: 

COVID-19

Mary Van Beusekom | News Writer | CIDRAP News

  | 

May 27, 2022

paramedics_in_full_ppe_in_ambulance.jpg

gorodenkoff / iStock

Two-plus years into the pandemic, an online survey of emergency-medicine professionals in 89 countries reveals that 62% reported one or more symptoms of COVID-19–related burnout syndrome, and 31% reported two.

In a study published today in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine, the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM) surveyed 1,925 emergency-medicine physicians (84%), nurses (12%), and paramedics (2%) in January and February 2022.

Sixty-two percent of all responders reported burnout, with high levels of depersonalization (47%) and emotional exhaustion (46%), but they also reported feelings of personal accomplishment (48%). Women reported more burnout than men (64% vs 59%), as did nurses versus doctors (73% vs 60%).

Younger professionals with less work experience reported more burnout, with 74% of those with less than 5 years in the field expressing distress, compared with 60% of those with 10 years of experience. High levels of burnout were tied to frequent understaffing (70% vs 37% of those with adequate staffing) and a higher risk of wanting to leave their workplace (87% vs 40% of those who didn't want to leave). Only 41% of respondents said they had access to support programs.

The study authors said that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated long-term problems with understaffing, limited resources, hospital overcrowding, and lack of recognition. And it has led to fear of infection and the need to frequently don and doff personal protective equipment.

Need for professional support

"The level of burnout found means that these healthcare workers deserve professional clinical evaluation and support," EUSEM President Abdo Khoury, MD, of Besancon University Hospital in France, who was not a study author, said in a EUSEM news release. "Worryingly, less than half of responders to the survey (41.4%) reported having access to such psychological support, either face to face or at a distance."

Burned-out healthcare professionals may turn to alcohol and drugs or develop posttraumatic stress disorder and are susceptible to suicide, Khoury said. He added that an exodus of large numbers of these essential workers will lead to even more understaffing, worsening the situation for those remaining in the field.

"An EM [emergency medicine] worker who is overworked under stress will have a negative effect on patients too," he said. "Burnout can show itself in a distant or indifferent attitude to work, as well as reducing productivity and efficiency. It can lead to lower-quality care and an increase in medical errors."

In an editorial in the same journal, Khoury writes, "The need to wear personal protective equipment and the resulting fear of being infected themselves has been a supplementary burden that may still be insufficiently recognised."

He concludes, "We still have no idea whether we are seeing the beginning of the end of the pandemic, or just a temporary lull. But whatever happens next, one thing is quite clear: EM specialists have shouldered a particularly heavy burden and are suffering as a result. Urgent measures to reduce burnout and, therefore, to encourage those thinking of leaving the profession to reconsider are needed."

Burnout in emergency medicine workers hits a new high: Action is needed urgently

Peer-Reviewed Publication

EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR EMERGENCY MEDICINE

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a prolonged increase in workload and stress among specialists in many healthcare sectors, but this has been particularly noticeable in emergency medicine (EM). A survey carried out by the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM) among EM professionals in 89 countries showed that 62% of the responders had at least one symptom of burnout syndrome1, and 31.2% had two. Results from the survey are published today in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine2.

The paper shows that the chronic problems faced by EM specialists, such as understaffing, limited resources, overcrowding, and lack of recognition have been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The level of burnout found means that these healthcare workers deserve professional clinical evaluation and support. Worryingly, less than half of responders to the survey (41.4%) reported having access to such psychological support, either face to face or at a distance,” said EUSEM President Dr Abdo Khoury, from the Department of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care, Besançon University Hospital, Besançon, France.

 “Burnout in healthcare professionals may lead to alcohol and drug abuse, and even suicide. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is another common manifestation of burnout, and this can have devastating long-term consequences for the individual.”

Also disturbing is the finding that many of those affected by burnout were thinking of a career change and that this was more prevalent among younger professionals than those who were older and more experienced. This would necessarily lead to understaffing, at least in the short term, and would only make matters worse for those who remain

“An EM worker who is overworked under stress will have a negative effect on patients too,” said Dr Khoury. “Burnout can show itself in a distant or indifferent attitude to work, as well as reducing productivity and efficiency. It can lead to lower-quality care and an increase in medical errors.”

EM specialists have been first-line responders during the pandemic, providing triage of patients in extremely difficult and pressurised circumstances where, additionally, the spread of infection must be prevented. The need to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) and the resulting fear of being infected themselves has been a supplementary burden that may still be insufficiently recognised.

“Healthcare authorities quite rightly put patient satisfaction and well-being at the top of their priority list. Yet the overwhelming evidence is that medical professionals have unmet needs too, and that these are growing exponentially. An important social determinant of health is the exposure - or the lack of it – to stressful living conditions. It would be difficult to find a group of people who were more subjected to stress during the pandemic than EM specialists,” say the paper’s authors.

“EM specialists have shouldered a particularly heavy burden and are suffering as a result. Urgent measures to reduce burnout and therefore to encourage those thinking of leaving the profession to reconsider are needed. Many interventions have been shown to be effective in decreasing burnout, and we were disappointed to see how few appear to be being implemented at present. The pandemic has shown how essential they are,” they conclude.

(ends)

1.Burnout syndrome is caused by unmanaged chronic workplace stress. It manifests itself in a lack of energy or exhaustion, increased mental distance from the job, and feelings of job-related negativity or cynicism.

---

JOURNAL

European Journal of Emergency Medicine

DOI

10.1097/MEJ.0000000000000952 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Burnout in emergency medicine professionals after 2years of the COVID-19 pandemic: a threat to the healthcare system?

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

27-May-2022