Workers, advocates and labor unions are warning that the government support that helped workers through previous chapters of the pandemic — mandatory sick pay, paid time off to care for family members and substantial unemployment benefits for those who lost jobs — will be in short supply this time around, nearly two years into the public health crisis.

“What we’re going to see is how few lessons we’ve learned,” said Rebecca Kolins Givan, a labor expert at Rutgers University. “Because of everything from insufficient access to testing, to not enough available child care, workers are going to struggle in the same ways as they’ve struggled in the previous surges. We haven’t seen solutions to all of the systemic problems that workers faced the last time around. So the problems will still be there.”…

Lopez likes her job but said she worries that the safety protocols leave workers like her vulnerable. Staff are not required to be vaccinated, she said, and the hotel does a poor job enforcing its mask mandate for unvaccinated workers in the close quarters where staff gather when not in front of guests.

“When I go in the back, almost every single employee that is in the back, and it’s up to a dozen employees, they’re not wearing them at all,” she said.