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Average Workers Can’t Bear Any More Risk

The GOP push to give businesses immunity from coronavirus liability is part of a long, ugly trend.

Jacob S. Hacker - Professor of political science at Yale University

May 31, 2020

As economies reopen across the United States, tens of millions of Americans who can’t work remotely have become armchair actuaries, forced to figure out for themselves just how risky clocking in to their jobs might be. Of course, for many, the calculation is largely hypothetical. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that declared virus-plagued meatpacking plants “essential infrastructure,” pressuring employees to return to work. The president also promised that his order would “solve any liability problems” plants might face.

The legal grounds for the president’s order are shaky. Yet it encapsulates the grim bargain more and more Americans will face. Whether deemed essential or not, workers are being pushed by public policy and financial necessity back into restaurants, bars, stores, offices, warehouses, work sites, and factories. Expanded unemployment benefits are set to end well before the threat of COVID-19 does, and many states are poised to cut off benefits for workers whose employers are operating, no matter how dangerous those operations might be. And if workers get sick? Well, that’s not their employer’s problem—at least not if elected officials heed corporate lobbyists’ call for immunity from legal claims related to on-the-job infections.

Liability relief has become the Republicans’ “red line,” according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—the one thing he’s “going to insist” on as a condition of additional federal assistance, including aid to battered states and localities. The president has said much the same, and White House officials have even suggested they could indemnify companies without congressional action (legal experts say otherwise). If corporate America gets what it wants, not only will employees who become sick lose a means of legal recourse, but employers will also have less incentive to make workplaces safe. A huge set of life-or-death risks will fall on workers and their families, rather than being shared more broadly across our society.

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