Gov. Steve Sisolak has gone off half cocked again.
He has said that some of the businesses he ordered closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus may reopen Saturday, but what if some workers fear for their health and that of their families? Will they no longer be eligible for unemployment benefits if they refuse to return to work? Will they have to take a pay cut?
According to the morning paper, Sisolak doesn’t yet have an answer:
As for employees concerned about being required to go back to work, Sisolak said that “is a very difficult situation.”
“If they’re offered their job back, and they don’t take their job back, their eligibility for unemployment comes into question,” Sisolak said, adding that the administration was working with Nevada’s federal delegation and the Labor Department on a fix.
“I want people to feel safe when they go back to work,” he said. At the same time, “a lot of people are going to go back to work and make less than the thousand dollars a week that they’re making now, and you can say, ‘Why am I gonna go back to work?’ Those are difficult situations that we’re going to be facing in the future.”
As for the high-minded life-is-more-important-than-profit stance Sisolak and other Democrats have taken, columnist Victor Joecks takes the current hypocrisy apart: