Businesses seek shield from virus liabilities
WASHINGTON — Business lobbyists and executives are pushing the Trump administration and Congress to shield U.S. companies from a wide range of potential lawsuits related to reopening the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, opening a new legal and political fight over how the nation deals with the fallout from COVID19.
Government officials are beginning the slow process of lifting restrictions on economic activity in states and local areas across the country. But lobbyists say retailers, manufacturers, restaurants and other businesses will struggle to start back up if lawmakers do not place temporary limits on legal liability in areas including worker privacy, employment discrimination and product manufacturing.
The biggest push, business groups say, is to give companies enhanced protection against lawsuits by customers or employees who contract the virus and accuse the business of being the source of the infection.
The effort highlights a core tension for as the economy begins to reopen: how to give businesses the confidence they need to restart operations amid swirling uncertainty over the virus and its effects, while also protecting workers and customers from unsafe practices that could raise the chances of infection.
Administration officials have said they are examining how they could create some of those shields via regulation or executive order. But lobbyists and lawmakers agree that the most consequential changes would need to come from Congress — where the effort has run into partisan divisions that could complicate lawmakers’ ability to pass another stimulus package.
Republicans are pushing for the liability limitations as a way of stopping what they say are overzealous trial lawyers and giving business owners the certainty they need to reopen. Democratic leaders say they oppose any moves to undermine worker protections.
Leaders of labor unions say limiting business
liability will reward companies that are not taking adequate steps to ensure the safety of their workers and consumers.
In announcing that the Senate’s Monday return, Sen. Mitch McConnell, RKy., the majority leader, said there is an “urgent need” to enact legislation to shield businesses from pandemic-related legal liability if they reopen, citing the risk of “years of endless lawsuits” arising from “a massive tangle of federal and state laws.”
“The trial lawyers are sharpening their pencils to come after health care providers and businesses, arguing that somehow the decision they made with regard to reopening adversely affected the health of someone else,” McConnell said in an interview Monday on Fox News Radio.
McConnell suggested that the liability issue would need to be resolved before Congress provided any additional financial relief to states, teeing up a big fight over the next aid package. Negotiations on that bill will heat up next week, with Democrats pushing for hundreds of billions of dollars to help state and local governments fill a crisisinduced shortfall in tax revenues. They are also seeking aid for the U.S. Postal Service and federal “hazard pay” for workers on the front lines of the pandemic.
McConnell indicated that Republicans would require a tradeoff and that Democrats would have to bend on liability protections for business in order to get more stimulus aid.
“So before we start sending additional money down to states and localities, I want to make sure that we protect the people we’ve already sent assistance to, who are going to be set up for an avalanche of lawsuits if we don’t act,” he said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DSan Francisco, rejected McConnell’s call.
“I don’t think that at this time, with coronavirus, that there’s any interest in having any less protection for our workers,” Pelosi said Tuesday.
Business groups say they have been stressing to lawmakers that the liability limits would be temporary and contained to the crisis.
“As long as we are not overreaching in what we’re asking for, and we’re being thoughtful and measured, there’s a real chance we can get these protections for our members,” said Linda Kelly, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers, which is pushing lawmakers to make a targeted set of changes in the next economic rescue package.
“We have some work to do with Democrats,” Kelly said. “I don’t think we can do it without that support.”
The manufacturers’ proposals include raising the legal bar for customers or employees to prove a business is at fault if they claim they contracted the virus there, protecting employers from some privacy suits in the event that they disclose a worker’s infection to other workers for safety reasons and giving added legal protections to companies that manufacture items during the crisis that are new to them — like personal protective equipment. Congress included a version of that liability limitation for manufacturers of masks in the rescue bill it passed last month.
A longer list circulated two weeks ago by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce includes some things the administration could do on its own — like Department of Labor guidance about mask requirements and the steps it will deem sufficient to meet Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. Others include steps only Congress could enact, like passing a law taking away people’s right to file lawsuits in state courts over allegations that a business was negligent in taking pandemic precautions. A range of legal specialists in lawsuits over claimed injuries and labor law said the business lobby’s requests include both sensible ideas that could be put in place quickly and politically implausible stretches. The risk, they said, is that if the lobby asks for too much, it could get bogged down, forestalling the changes needed for the eventual recovery.
Labor leaders reject the effort entirely. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, said employers were still sometimes failing to provide personal protective equipment to workers, and she called the liabilitylimitation push “inhumane.”
“This is a discussion from corporations and employers that are shirking their employees on the front lines of the pandemic,” Henry said. “They’re now going to try, as they infect people, to shirk any legal responsibility for it?”