Double Indemnity
Are Democrats preparing to join Republicans in shielding employers from the consequences of indifferent (or nonexistent) worker protections against Covid?
Perhaps you heard last month about the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Isidro Fernandez, a worker at the Tyson pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa. Fernandez died from Covid after contracting it at the plant. More than 1,000 employees were infected there. After three Democratic lawmakers in the state filed a complaint, Iowa’s workplace safety agency concluded in June that there were no health and safety violations. According to an amended complaint in the wrongful death lawsuit, while the county sheriff was pleading with Tyson to shut the plant down, the plant manager “organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for Covid-19.”
A separate lawsuit brought on behalf of three of the other five plant workers at the Waterloo plant who died of Covid said that around the same time that same plant manager (now suspended) told interpreters hired to communicate with the plant’s largely Latino workforce not to discuss Covid at all except to say that there were “no confirmed cases” of Covid and that the county health department had signed off on the plant, neither of which was true.
These are two of the supposedly frivolous lawsuits that Senate Republicans are trying to throw out of court as a condition of passing a Covid stimulus bill. And while it’s difficult to understand exactly what it is that Democrats are proposing in their “compromise” language on Covid liability (“short term Federal protection from Coronavirus related lawsuits with the purpose of giving states time to develop their own response”), it sure looks as though, in their desperation to pass a Covid stimulus—any Covid stimulus—they might be willing to throw these lawsuits out of court as well. My efforts to learn more from Democratic congressional aides about the precise contours of the liability shield that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are contemplating have yielded a lot of awkward silences, which can’t be a good sign. The latest piece of paper says, enigmatically:
Liability
Agreement in principle as the basis for good faith negotiations.
Meanwhile, the American Prospect is reporting that three moderate Democrats are ready to sign onto the GOP’s much more draconian language, which would suspend not only Covid lawsuits but also OSHA enforcement actions concerning Covid and, just for grins, enforcement of wage and hour laws, too.
My latest column for the New Republic is about all this.