On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called on Congress to include liability protections for businesses in the next coronavirus relief package as state leaders begin to reopen their economies.
The issue is gaining attention on Capitol Hill because businesses that reopen will likely be vulnerable to coronavirus-related lawsuits, and there are no guidelines for how they should be protected, said Harold Kim, president of legal reform at the Chamber.
“There is this hanging cloud of liability where a lot of questions are being asked … and given that there is really no playbook in terms of what could happen after reopening and what those risks are, these types of uncertainties are really starting to bubble up to the forefront,” Kim said.
To address the uncertainty, the Chamber said that businesses should be protected from exposure claims, product liability, medical claims, and also from investors who blame a drop in stock price on mismanagement and not the coronavirus.
“There are opportunistic, class-action security lawsuits that can claim that companies did take or did not take action in response to the pandemic which caused the stock to drop,” Kim said, adding that there was a surge in these types of lawsuits before the economic shutdown in March.
The Chamber is also opposed to Congress extending the $600 pandemic payment boost to unemployment benefits, said Neil Bradley, the organization’s executive vice president and chief policy officer.
“We very much believe that the $600 across-the-board bonus should not continue,” he said, adding that in some cases, the payment was so lucrative that it provided incentive for jobless workers not to look for employment.
“For a lot of individuals, we created an unemployment system that provided more income than their jobs and that becomes a disincentive, a barrier, to return to work,” he said.
Bradley said that the unemployment system should be designed in a way that encourages people to get back to work and stressed that policies can be enacted that provide additional relief to jobless workers without stopping them from returning to the workforce.
“There are a number of ways to do it, but it would be a mistake to simply continue what was enacted in the Cares Act,” he said.
The $600 payment was originally enacted in March as part of the CARES Act, and it is currently scheduled to expire on July 31. The House-passed HEROES Act, approved last week, extends the aid to Jan. 31, 2021, for most unemployed workers. The Senate is not expected to take up the HEROES Act.
The $600 payment has become a partisan issue. Democrats say the benefits are needed to keep laid-off workers afloat to prevent the pandemic from turning into a lasting economic catastrophe. Republicans, though, say the benefits lead the jobless to forgo returning to work, an incentive that will prevent labor market recovery.
