This is what happens when the government starts giving away free stuff — people get mad if stuff stops being free and won’t vote politicians back into office.
Gov. Polis seems to think those COVID-19 unemployment benefits padded with an extra $600 a week are going to last forever.
Now he’s telling folks they don’t have to go back to work when their job reopens because coming soon, more free money!
Under Polis’s new proposal, unemployment checks would no longer be just for those without jobs, but for people who were temporarily let go and are too afraid to go back to work when their job restarts.
Here’s how the Denver Post says Polis’s Money for Nothing benefits will operate.
Polis, in an executive order Sunday, directed the labor department to draft emergency rules to ensure people, particularly those deemed “vulnerable individuals,” would not lose benefits if they refused to go back to work and their workplace had “COVID-19-related demonstrable, unsafe working conditions.”
The rules have not been finalized yet but a draft provided to The Denver Post on Monday lays out four criteria the state is likely to use when deciding if a worker can still collect benefits if they turn down an offer to return to work: the objective level of risk the person’s workplace; the normal level of risk that workplace would present without coronavirus; the worker’s coronavirus vulnerability as determined by professional medical standards; and, finally, the vulnerability of anyone the worker might live with.
Just exactly what those unsafe working conditions are is unclear. Unsafe as in operating a cash register at a grocery store and coming face-to-face with hundreds of people a day? Unsafe like being a paramedic or cop?
Is there such a thing as safe working environments when it comes to viruses, and are they hiring?
Polis’s actions will only compound the problem business owners already face — many employees are making more money with the padded unemployment checks and don’t want to go back to work.
And if businesses can’t get their workers to return to work, then they forfeit PPP federal government aid.
For so many businesses, that payment protection money is the only hope they have for getting through this shutdown.
But if employees can make up to $52,000 on unemployment, why work?
We sympathize with people who are afraid to return to work. We’re terrified to turn on the news for fear of seeing the horror that is our death if we ever dare open the front door without wearing gloves and armed with Lysol.
We appreciate the government’s financial help through a temporary shutdown, because they’re the ones who shut us down.
But now it’s time to get back to normal, and not this new normal of fear and living off the government dole.