Our tone-deaf senate blocked paid sick leave that is crucial for sick employees in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Who would have guesssed that? The objective of governing bodies should be to keep the sick and infected out of work, off public transportation, and off the streets – to limit transmission and mass propagation. It’s not as if we have not seen this story played out repeatedly during this pandemic – sick employees infecting entire plants and subsequent mass propagation in communities.
A Tyson meat plant in the Dakotas comes to mind. Still, it is unfair to highlight this because those sick and infected with the coronavirus have been going to work all over America out of fear of losing their jobs, fear of not meeting the rent or mortgages, and from the obvious need to put food on the table. Unlike in Europe, there is little or no social safety net in America.
Now, in a surreal act of logic-defiance, the “corporate” Republican Senate and the “Trump-fatigued” House of Democrats have struck a stimulus deal that blocked paid sick leave for employees. Congress is letting the coronavirus paid leave guarantee expire at the end of the month without an extension. So just how exactly this supposed to work? How will people pay their bills?
In March, Congress had guaranteed workers up to two weeks of fully paid sick leave if they contract COVID-19 (barely enough time to recover). The program also mandated two weeks of paid leave for those caring for someone required to quarantine and ten weeks of emergency child care leave if schools or child care facilities are shut down – paid out at two-thirds of a worker’s regular salary. Employers got a refundable tax credit to cover the costs of paying out paid sick leave.
Republican Senate Blocked Paid Sick Leave Extension
But Republicans then blocked an extension to the mandate, so starting Jan. 1, employers will no longer have to give workers with COVID-19, or those taking care of someone with the virus, two weeks of paid leave. The $900 billion relief package Congress passed this week does extend tax credits for employers offering paid leave until March. That means the federal government will pay for paid sick leave for another three months, but businesses are no longer required to offer it.
Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at New America and expert in paid leave, tweeted this week that, “I worry that working people with employers who are unwilling to provide paid leave won’t be able to quarantine or care for their children when they need to. This approach puts all power in employers’ hands.” Power in employers’ hands is one thing; sick employees’ need to continue to work and thus propagate the virus is entirely another.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who had negotiated the existing policy with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in March, was amenable to the Democrats’ desire to extend the mandate for paid leave into the new year. But then “Lord Vader” – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his partner-in-crime, the retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), stepped in and kyboshed the extension, as Buzzfeed News had reported.
Given that the costs would effectively be “pass-through” costs for companies, Messrs. McConnell’s and Alexander’s opposition is incomprehensible when viewed at face value. But there is a snag in the program’s funding that might leave some state and local governments ineligible for reimbursement from the federal government – a financial burden Senator Alexander gave for his opposition. But this could be fixed by added funding.
The real source of their opposition seems to be ideological. Since its passage in March, GOP senators have criticized the paid leave mandate for being too burdensome on small businesses that would have to wait too long to receive their tax credits. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) then said in a statement that, “Although mandating that all employers must pay for sick leave might sound good, we need to consider the unintended consequences of this legislation. I fear that rather than offering a workable solution, the House bill will exacerbate the problem by forcing small businesses to pay wages they cannot afford and ‘helping’ them go further into debt.”
Additionally, according to someone with knowledge of the private negotiations, Mr. Mnuchin has reportedly told Ms. Pelosi that Republicans felt that renewing the mandate would put the policy on a path to permanency, which they wanted to block. One Democratic aide also added that “Republicans were generally reluctant toward any new mandates on business.”
As usual, the elephant steering the senators in the face is opaque: What happens when small businesses are wiped out over and over again by sick people who propagate the virus in the workplace and the broader communities because they have to work?
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the HELP committee, said, “Businesses can use these tax credits to provide paid sick days to their workers, and I hope they do—but it’s not nearly enough.” She vowed to fight for the provision once President-elect Joe Biden comes into office. “This crisis has made it clearer than ever why paid leave for every worker is so important to families, communities, and our economy as a whole.”
As it stands, the coronavirus paid leave mandate already excludes many workers, including those who work for companies with more than 500 employees – cutting out millions of front-line workers like those at big grocery store chains. Now, the program is getting even weaker as voluntary program employers can opt into until March. What are they likely to do?
Activists are rightfully up in arms. Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of Family Values @ Work – a grassroots group that advocates for paid leave, stated that “The reason it falls short: the Senate majority leader favored partisan politics and corporate meal deductions over working people’s lives and livelihood. Relying on the voluntary action of employers has left the U.S. as an outlier in the world and contributed to the disastrous spread of this pandemic.”
As Winston Churchill once said, America will eventually do the right thing, but only after she has tried all the wrong ones. In the year of Our Lord 2020, there is much cause to doubt Mr. Churchill’s optimism.
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