Workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) who received layoff notices will be reinstated, officials announced Wednesday.
“I’m just gonna have to tell you, I had tears running down my face,” said retired NIOSH employee Anita Wolfe.
Wolfe, who retired from the NIOSH facility in Morgantown, said she was overwhelmed with emotion for her friends and former coworkers.
“Immediately I got a call from a very close friend of mine that works in the Spokane facility, and she was crying so hard, she couldn’t even talk to me,” Wolfe said.
In April, several hundred employees at the Morgantown NIOSH facility were laid off as part of a nationwide restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Wolfe said she stood in solidarity with her former colleagues when the cuts were announced.
“I just more or less told them, you have to do whatever they’re telling you to do in the emails you’re getting,” Wolfe said. “But believe me, you’re not gonna go down without a fight.”
The Morgantown facility plays a key role in researching health risks and respiratory diseases linked to coal mining through the Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program, which Wolfe once led.
After the layoffs, attorney Sam Petsonk began working with miners who feared their health was at risk and represented them in a federal lawsuit against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services to restore the program.
“NIOSH provides several critical services to American coal miners first,” Petsonk said. “They provide medical testing and surveillance so that workers can track their lung function and determine if they’re getting silicosis or black lung. Those functions were jeopardized by these layoffs.”
Alongside the lawsuit, rallies and protests were held at the facility in the spring. U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito also pushed for employees to be reinstated, saying the work done by NIOSH is essential.
“We’ve been pressing them. They did bring some people back in the middle of the summer at our insistence, but we needed the full contingent because we realized that all the services were not being met,” Capito said. “I talked with Secretary Kennedy earlier in the week when he told me that everybody’s coming back. Great news.”