February’s unprecedented winter freeze swept across Southeast Texas, affecting everything from agriculture to zoos. Citrus growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where the best Ruby Reds are produced, took an especially hard hit. As a result, this season’s yield of saleable Ruby Reds is lower than expected, and Texas grapefruit are in short supply. Consumers, however, are just as hungry for their favorite fruit. In order to meet their demand, Texas is relying more heavily on imported grapefruit from places like Mexico or South Africa. What does this mean for the grapefruit growers of Texas? Here’s the pulp.
Read moreTexas House Passes Bill to Open Two New Public Law Schools
“Eight hundred miles to El Paso from the state line…”
The El Paso area and the Rio Grande Valley are both underserved legal markets where aspiring lawyers face geographic barriers to earning a relatively affordable JD.
Read moreTexas Legislative Authority for Executive Actions by Governor in Emergencies
Image by JoeSchmoYaKnow from Pixabay
A synopsis of the statutory authority for the Texas governor’s ability to take executive actions during emergencies and a summary of what those actions have entailed related to COVID-19.
Read moreCOVID Vaccine Roll-Out in Harris County, Texas, and the United States
This morning, the first COVID vaccine dose was administered in the United States, on live television, to a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center named Sandra Lindsay. Around the same time, doses of the vaccine began arriving in Texas by air freight. MD Anderson was the first hospital in Houston to receive a shipment and will start administering the vaccine to its frontline employees on Wednesday.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the vaccine will be free for the vast majority of recipients. Almost 20,000 doses are already here in Houston, and 75,000 more will arrive in town tomorrow. Since each vaccine requires two doses, that is enough to vaccinate roughly 47,000 of the more than 4 million people living in Harris County. While that number seems small, it is over 42% of the 224,250 doses arriving in all of Texas this week.
Of course, more doses will be coming, but the roll out will be too slow to allow even more immediate inoculation of all hospital workers who risk exposure on a daily basis. The limited number of doses in Harris County will be prioritized for certain healthcare workers, and residents of the sorts of long-term care facilities that have been ravaged by the virus nationwide.
This tracks with the statewide plan for Texas, which is to prioritize the vaccination of healthcare workers.
On the national level, the FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one currently being distributed and administered, and is the agency is expected to approve the Moderna vaccine by the end of this week. Though there are some differences, both vaccines require two doses to reach full efficacy, and both vaccines work through the use of messenger RNA, which you may remember from high school biology.
It is impossible to contract the coronavirus from either vaccine, though some patients will experience side effects.
Some confusion may stem from the fact that social distancing, mask-wearing, good hand hygiene, and limited contact with others will have to continue until a large enough swath of the nation is vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci anticipates this will take until next fall, though some epidemiologists have estimated it could even take through early 2022. There are a few reasons for this.
One reason is that the vaccine will protect vaccinated people from becoming gravely ill with Covid, but may not entirely stop vaccinated people from becoming sick.
Another reason is that even if an infected person has been vaccinated and does not become ill, they will probably still be contagious.
Additionally, it is still unclear how long immunity from the vaccine will last.
As they say, every journey begins with a single step. Today, the United States took a giant step towards a return to a world where we can once again hug our families and friends.
Lone Star Labor Day
Texas is well known as a Right to Work state with a long and successful history of anti-union activity, but the Lone Star state has a parallel history of organized labor that has improved worker conditions stemming back to the Republic of Texas.
As Anglo settlers began to stream into the territory on the heels of the Texas Revolution, they brought significant knowledge of the labor organization occuring in their home states and territories. Texas’ first strike occurred in the fall of 1838, when the Texas Typographical Association won a 25% wage increase only a few months after forming.
Still, Texas did not experience widespread labor organization until the Philadelphia-based Knights of Labor managed to recruit not only farm workers, but over half of the state’s non-farm workers, by the middle of the 1880s. Per capita, this was the peak of union participation in Texas. By late 1886, however, the Knights of Labor found itself irrevocably damaged by its connection to the Haymarket riot in Chicago, and this impacted its influence in Texas as much as anywhere else, and the demise of the Knights likely contributed to the inability of Texas organized labor to stop the use of anti-union labor to build the state house in Austin.
In January of 1900, years of attempts to form a statewide union finally came to fruition when the Texas State Federation of Labor formed in Cleburne. However, Texas employers also organized through the Open Shop movement, and proved a formidable match for organized labor throughout the state. Texas workers additionally found themselves outmatched by the national influence and strength of the railroad tycoons who provided so many of the Lonse Star state’s jobs.
World War I brought a proliferartion of manufacturing jobs and other types of labor-based work to Texas, and while this resulted in some relatively improved conditions, Texas workers were unable to match the success of workers in other states. For example, in 1917, offshore workers in California successfully used strikes to negotiate $4, 8 hour days. Faced with extreme anti-labor tactics, however, Texas offshore workers were unable to hold a strike long enough to be effective, and could not improve upon a $2, 12 hour day.
As a result of changed national leadership, as well as a shift in Texas labor leadership, unions once again began to experience some success during the Franklin Roosevelt presidency. This notably included Mexican-American agricultural workers organizing for the first time. Still, Texans in this time period could not match the fervor and efficacy of Texas worker organization 50 years prior under the Knights of Labor.
In fact, Texas workers had been organizing for more than a century before they finally managed a major demonstration of political power in 1957 when pro-union Ralph Yarborough was sent to Washington DC to serve as Senator from Texas. That same year, the Texas State Federation of Labor merged with the Texas State CIO Counsel, consolidating union power in the state.
We at the Harris County Law Library wish you a great and safe Lone Star Labor Day! Here is some further reading to fill your holiday weekend:
The Labor Movement in Texas Collection: 1845-1954, at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at UT
Labor Organizations Handbook at the Texas State Historical Association
Walking the Line: The Diverse History of Organized Labor in Texas, at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections
