President Joe Biden calls on the Department of Labor to make it clear: workers are entitled to refuse jobs that endanger their health, without sacrificing unemployment benefits.
The issue is state-by-state different, and millions of Americans are faced with the choice of toil at the forefront of a deadly pandemic or lose their ability to put food on the table.
Among a series of executive orders that Mr. Biden signed during his first 48 hours in office, the president instructed the Labor Department on Friday to explain that ’employees have a federal right to refuse work that would endanger their health, and if they do, they still qualify for unemployment insurance. ‘
In unveiling the order, the White House cited a 2019 Gallup poll in which 43% of U.S. households reported having at least one member with pre-existing conditions making them more vulnerable to serious illness or death if they COVID- 19 would rise. “President Biden believes that workers should have the right to a safe working environment and that no one should have to choose between their livelihood and their own or their families’ health,” the White House said.
Many of the employees affected are among the lowest paid, including those in nursing homes, meat processing plants and grocery stores, for whom working during a pandemic can be a daunting experience for which few people have signed up. As Michelle Gonzalez, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, in the Bronx, told CBS MoneyWatch end of March: “I have family members at home who are older, and that puts my family in danger.”
Instead of setting a national standard, the Trump administration left it to states to interpret the rules, according to Andrew Stettner, an unemployment expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank in New York City.
In Iowa, for example, the rules were quickly set in favor of businesses that needed labor. “If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, it’s a voluntary stop,” said Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, in April declared. “Therefore, they will not be eligible for the unemployment benefits.”
Fear of safety ends in sadness
The limited options have in heartbreaking ways, with one daughter pronouncing her after the death of her father to COVID-19 barely a month after returning to work as a security guard in Chandler, Arizona. “My father called me on May 16 for fear of his safety,” Lina Washington said tweeted mid-June. “He said no one had a social distance and that few wore masks.”
Her 68-year-old father, Robert Washington, had diabetes and was recovering from prostate cancer – conditions that made him vulnerable to infection. But he decided to return when the casino that hired him reopened, as he needed the health benefits and a salary to cover the cost of insulin, rent and life insurance. Her father’s other options were to take an unpaid career or quit.
“This is a big problem,” affecting hundreds of thousands of workers, Stettner said. Since the second quarter of 2020, about 500,000 requests for unemployment benefits have been denied by the countries, but it is not clear how many cases are related to COVID-19, he said.
“The issue on which this executive order is being trained is more than 40 million people joining the pandemic after unemployment benefits,” Stettner said. The usual rule that you should look for work to receive unemployment benefits was basically suspended, as it was not a safe time to work, especially if you worked in a high-risk job, he explained.
Emergency standard was never set by DOL
Every state needs basic health and safety as a condition of service, but the Centers for Disease Control over working conditions during the pandemic were issued and then repealed, and the Department of Labor never set an emergency standard dealing with COVID-19, Stettner recalls .
“Then people started being called back to work, or offered jobs, so there was no guidance on this question. It was really left to the states to determine what that meant,” Stettner said. Now he added: “the president says ‘we need to find out a policy on this’.”
Biden’s order comes one day after another order ordered by the Department of Labor to review health and safety guidance within two weeks.