It's going great

Everybody fired. Everybody being more than previously reported.

Recent news analyses have sketched out a dire picture of the scope of the jobless crisis in Louisiana and the extent of the expected damage that the state’s economy as the federal boost to unemployment benefits lapses.

But the true picture is actually worse than some of those reports have outlined. For instance, a Sunday story in The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate noted that more than 313,000 laid-off Louisianans had filed for state unemployment benefits as of July 18, the most recent data for which the state provided complete data. But that figure didn’t include the thousands of freelancers, independent contractors and so-called “gig” workers thrown out of jobs by the coronavirus crisis.

That latter group includes more than 152,000 out-of-work Louisianans who, although not normally covered by the unemployment insurance system, have been able to file for jobless benefits under a special federal expansion of the program to address the massive job losses during the pandemic.

Oh boy.  That's just Louisiana, of course. But this story cites a Brookings report that says New Orleans will be the third "hardest hit" metro in the country by the looming benefits expiration. On the other hand, the rest of the country is... well, it's not going so great there either. 

The number of Americans filing new claims for state unemployment benefits totaled 1.43 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

It was the 19th straight week that the tally exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the coronavirus pandemic. And it was the second weekly increase in a row after nearly four months of declines, a sign of how the rebound in cases has undercut the economy’s nascent recovery. Claims for the previous week totaled 1.42 million.

For those of you who are among the ever-dwindling number of still employed persons, let's try an exercise.  Please raise your hand if you have been obligated out of fear or lack of options to keep going in to work during the pandemic while becoming more frightened and demoralized with news of each death or of the rate of spread.

Okay well if your hand is up, Mitch McConnell says your boss should sue you now. 

The most obnoxious provision of the GOP proposal is one that shifts the liability in COVID cases from the employer to employee. This provision allows employers to sue employees or their representatives for bringing a claim for a COVID infection and offering to settle out of court.

Most specifically, the measure mentions "demand letters." These are communications to a prospective defendant setting forth the facts of the claim, evidence assembled by the plaintiff, a reckoning of the potential damages and a statement of how much the plaintiff would accept to make the case go away. Here's a sample letter published by the San Francisco law firm Rouda Feder Tietjen & McGuinn.

These documents are often designed as an opening brief in a negotiation; since neither side in an injury case really wants to go to trial, they make sense. The GOP bill would make anyone offering to settle, either through a demand letter or otherwise, liable to be sued for damages if the case they're making is "meritless." That's another term that's undefined in the measure.

Unlike the limitation on damages elsewhere in the bill, by the way, the punitive damages that can be awarded to employers bringing these lawsuits aren't capped.

The measure also gives the attorney general the right to bring his own lawsuit in such cases. As a result, Kennerly observes, Atty. Gen. William Barr would get the right "to sue unions, labor activists, lawyers, doctors — everyone involved in coronavirus claims."

Congress is choosing to send millions of people off of a cliff right now because 1) Republicans are openly hostile to everyone except the bosses and millionaires and 2) Democrats are running an election campaign based on the hope that they can get away doing nothing if everyone is miserable enough, because they just might blame the Republicans for it.

The first of the month is coming. (There's one every month!) But this time we're going in while deliberately cutting off everyone's income. Also the federal evictions moratorium is expiring and the courts are open.. or are they?