Nantiya Ruan, director of the University of Denver’s workplace law program and a part-time attorney at Outten & Golden, where she represents employees in class action cases, said that labor and employment and labor law has always intersected with public health, the study of population-level health. However, Ruan explained, public health’s impact on employment law was never at the scale currently seen. That really changed the whole frame of reference for how public health can affect workplace law and workplace rights. “