Senator McMorrow’s second statement is as follows:
I rise in my support of the Hertel amendment to break the tie-bar to these bills, and I’m happy to discuss them. We reviewed these bills in the Economic and Small Business Development Committee and did not vote them out. I think one of the things that’s really important is that we grapple with the reality of the situation.
As of September 1, nationwide, there were about 4,600 lawsuits that had been filed with businesses related to COVID-19. Nine of them—nine—across the entire country were employees filing lawsuits against their employer related to protections or lack thereof related to COVID-19. A majority of those lawsuits were related to insurance disputes, which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here, but what this says is that we are granting blanket liability protections to employers at a time when all of the employers that I talk to say their biggest issue right now is getting employees to come back to work. Many of those employees are scared. They want to come back to work. They don’t want to receive unemployment. They want to get back to their jobs. They want their kids to go back to school. They want things to go back to normal.
But they’re not going to go to a workplace that they see has no responsibility for them as an employee, that has blanket liability protections, that if they get sick at work, that their employer is not responsible for that. We’ve already seen some of our farm workers and the groups representing farm workers come out in opposition to these bills for that exact reason. That we want to make sure there are worker protections. We want to make sure that everybody is doing the right thing and that we don’t create a space where employers who are not doing the right thing, who are not encouraging their employees to wear masks or social distance or wash their hands or do the things that we all know need to be done for us to open and re-open and stay open safely, that we’re not creating a space where they are not responsible for those basic protections with their employees.
The unintended consequence considering these are bills in search of a problem given that we have not seen litigation at the scale that many of the business groups say we are, is that it might scare people from going back to work. When I talk to every single employer, that is the biggest issue—how do we get people back to work safely?
Senator Hertel’s second statement is as follows:
To my good friend from the 32nd District, I’m not talking about the merits of this issue at all. I think the bills you’re talking about have merit and I think they should go through the process and we should discuss them and we should negotiate them and figure it out. What I am saying is that the idea that you would say that before we do all that, before we have negotiations or discussions, that those bills have to be signed by the Governor before we give unemployment benefits that were taken away through no fault of people’s own, that they might owe thousands of dollars back to the state because of a lawsuit they’re not part of. And only one group decided to take those powers away from the Governor so that those consequences are there. Let’s work together and solve the immediate problem in front of us—the thousands of people in our own districts who lose unemployment based on a lawsuit—and let that be the first thing we work on without any other political nonsense. I ask that you vote “yes” on my amendment.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 911, entitled
A bill to amend 1943 PA 240, entitled “State employees’ retirement act,” by amending section 68c (MCL 38.68c), as amended by 2020 PA 18.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: