Trump/GOP Seriously Weaken The Coronavirus Bill

A couple of days ago, 223 Democrats and 140 Republicans voted to pass the Coronavirus bill in the House of Representatives. The bill now will go to the Senate.

It is a decent bill that does some necessary things, but it could and should have been much better. In order to get GOP and White House support for the bill, Democratic leadership let the Republicans insert too many restrictions in it -- restrictions that will hurt many low-wage workers.

Here is some of what the editorial board of The New York Times had to say about the bill:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday night celebrated the coronavirus legislation that passed early Saturday as providing paid sick leave to American workers affected by the pandemic.

She neglected to mention the fine print.

In fact, the bill guarantees sick leave only to about 20 percent of workers. Big employers like McDonald’s and Amazon are not required to provide any paid sick leave, while companies with fewer than 50 employees can seek hardship exemptions from the Trump administration.

“If you are sick, stay home,” Vice President Mike Pence said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “You’re not going to miss a pay check.”

But that’s simply not true. Sick workers should stay home, but there is no guarantee in the emergency legislation that most of them will get paid.

The White House and congressional Republicans, who insisted on the exemptions as the price of bipartisan support for the legislation, bear the primary responsibility for the indefensible decision to prioritize corporate profits in the midst of a public health emergency. . . .

But House Democrats also failed to act in the public interest. Paying sick workers to stay at home is both good policy and good politics. Why not pass a bill that required all employers to provide paid sick leave and then force Republicans to explain their objections to the public?

The bill does require some employers to provide full-time workers with up to 10 days of paid leave. But the requirement does not apply to the nation’s largest employers — companies with 500 or more workers, who together employ roughly 54 percent of all workers. . . .

The legislation also provides some compensation for workers who need to take longer leaves under the Family and Medical Leave Act — but this too excludes workers at big companies.

And the bill allows the Labor Department to grant hardship exemptions to businesses with fewer than 50 employees. That category includes another 26 percent of the work force, meaning that fully 80 percent of workers may not be able to cash in on Ms. Pelosi’s rhetoric.

Democrats began this process in the right place. The first draft of the coronavirus legislation included a permanent change requiring employers to allow every worker to earn up to seven days of paid sick leave, and a temporary change allowing any worker to take up to 10 days of sick leave during a public health emergency. The final draft includes only a pale shadow of those sensible requirements. The paid sick leave requirement is narrowly focused on the coronavirus; it does not even require paid sick leave during future pandemics — a contemptible signal that political leaders are already committed to not learning the lessons of this one. . . .

Roughly 86 percent of workers at big companies get some kind of paid sick leave, according to federal statistics. But few workers in the United States are eligible to take 10 days of paid sick leave. And the low-wage workers who can least afford to stay home without paid leave are precisely the workers who are least likely to qualify for those standard corporate benefits.

Companies should be required to provide paid sick leave to every worker as a standard cost of doing business, and they certainly should be required to do so in the midst of a pandemic.

The House’s failure to require universal paid sick leave is an embarrassment that endangers the health of workers, consumers and the broader American public.