Professor Bisom-Rapp Published

Professor Susan Bisom-Rapp's latest book chapter has been published in a new anthology, Work Beyond the Pandemic (Tindara Addabbo, et al., eds., Palgrave MacMillan 2024). The chapter, Regulatory Choices and Legal Disputes in the Fight Against COVID-19 Infections in the Workplace, was co-authored with Professor Marco Peruzzi of the University of Verona (Italy). 

Professors Bisom-Rapp and Peruzzi examine the legal and policy actions taken to stem the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace, focusing specifically on Italy and the United States. Using the example of workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandates, their comparative study reveals the regulatory choices made, including the choice not to regulate, and the consequences for workers in both countries of those choices on the employment relationship. 

Additionally revealing are the legal grounds on which regulatory actions were challenged, and how courts balanced the interests -- public and workplace health versus individual bodily autonomy -- at stake. The debates surrounding the vaccine mandates further illuminate each country's national culture regarding workers' rights. In Italy, reference to constitutional principles and fundamental rights demonstrates that its jurisprudence is in harmony with that of other European Union member states and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The US, in contrast, revealed the extent to which that country relies on libertarian, free-market principles to set the conditions of work, and anti-discrimination law, increasingly the prohibition of religious discrimination, as an imperfect tool for limiting employers' prerogatives.

The book is an interdisciplinary, multi-national study of the socio-economic and regulatory impact of the COVID-19 global health emergency on the workplace. The book is available in ebook and hard copy formats: Work Beyond the Pandemic: Towards a Human-Centred Recovery