President Joe Biden calls on the Department of Labor to make this clear: workers have the right to refuse a job that puts their health at risk, without sacrificing unemployment benefits.
The issue plays out differently from state to state, with millions of Americans faced with the choice of toiling on the front lines of a deadly pandemic or lose their ability to put food on the table.
Among a slew of executive orders signed by Mr. Biden during his first 48 hours in office, the president ordered the Labor Department on Friday to clarify that “ employees have a federally guaranteed right to refuse work that endangers their health and if they do so, they still qualify for unemployment insurance. “
In disclosing the warrant, the White House cited a 2019 Gallup poll in which 43% of US households reported having at least one member with pre-existing conditions that make them more vulnerable to serious illness or death if they contract COVID-19 . “President Biden believes that workers should have the right to a safe work environment and that no one should choose between their livelihoods and the health of themselves or their families,” the White House said.
Many of the affected workers are among the lowest paid, including those in nursing homes, meat processing companies and grocery stores, for those who go to work during a pandemic can be a frightening experience that few have signed up for. As Michelle Gonzalez, an intensive care nurse at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in New York City, told CBS MoneyWatch the end of March: “I have relatives at home who are older, so it puts my family at risk.”
According to Andrew Stettner, an unemployment expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York City think tank, the Trump administration left it to states to interpret the rules, rather than set a national standard.
In Iowa, for example, the rules were quickly enacted in favor of companies that needed labor. “If you’re an employer and you offer to get your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary stop,” said Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, in April. “That is why they would not be eligible for the unemployment benefit.”
Security fear ends in a broken heart
The limited options have been played out heartbreaking manners, with a daughter speaking up after her father’s death from COVID-19, barely a month after returning to his job as a security guard in Chandler, Arizona. “My father called me on May 16 for fear of his safety,” said Lina Washington tweeted mid-June. “He said no one was socially aloof and few wore masks.”
Her 68-year-old father, Robert Washington, had diabetes and was recovering from prostate cancer – conditions that left him vulnerable to infections. But he chose to return when the casino he was employed reopened because he needed the health benefits and a salary to cover the cost of insulin, rent and life insurance, she said. Her father’s other options were to take or quit unpaid leave.
“It’s a huge problem,” affecting hundreds of thousands of employees, Stettner said. As of the second quarter of 2020, about 500,000 claims for unemployment benefits have been declined by states, but it’s not clear how many of the cases were related to COVID-19, he said.
“The issue this executive has been trained on is the more than 40 million people who went to unemployment benefits after the pandemic,” said Stettner. The usual rule that you have to look for work to get unemployment benefits was basically shelved because it was not a safe time to work, especially if you had been in a high-risk job, he explained.
Emergency standard never set by DOL
Every state requires basic health and safety as a condition of employment, but Centers for Disease Control guidelines on working conditions during the pandemic were enacted and then repealed, and the Labor Department never set an emergency standard covering COVID-19, Stettner recalls.
“Then people started to be called back to work or offered a job, so there was no advice on this question. It was really left to the states to determine what that means,” Stettner said. Now he added, “the president says, ‘we need to come up with a policy for this.”
Biden’s order comes a day after another order ordering the Labor Department to review workers’ health and safety guidelines within two weeks.