We are living in a situation where everything in the world should, by all rights, be falling apart. Anything that isn’t currently in the process of disintegrating is only being held together by the exhausted toil of workers whom we have only recently crowned “essential.” The intrinsic value of this workforce was well in evidence before the pandemic—anyone with a comfortable life in America gets to live this way because truck drivers ferry their high-thread-count bed linens across the country, grocery store workers lift heavy boxes of 16 kinds of flour, and Seamless drivers appear on demand bearing pad thai.

Now that everyone doing a real job is at higher risk of the same illness that has also kept the rich stuck at home, instead of just the myriad other health problems that result from a life of too-hard work, maybe we will come out of the other side of this with a greater appreciation for the desperate economic situation of people who earn less than the median income. Or, maybe not: The past few days have seen a rash of high-profile media outlets demonstrating that they are not intellectually equipped to take measure of this moment.

A recent story on NPR’s Morning Edition told the sad tale of a café owner who can no longer compel her employees to endanger themselves, because the CARES Act supposedly provides too-generous unemployment benefits that make it a better deal for them to stay home and not catch the deadly virus that’s killed almost 50,000 Americans. The story lamented the way the generous $600 unemployment insurance benefit shut down Sky Marietta’s coffee shop in Kentucky since, she said, “her former employees can make more money staying home than they did on the job.” If she says so! There’s probably no need to check those claims before broadcasting a story about them. They are just too good to verify.



Generally speaking, however, workers can’t just obtain unemployment insurance if they quit without “good cause.” The CARES Act included a provision allowing workers to collect unemployment if they leave their jobs if remaining puts them in danger of contracting the coronavirus. That’s certainly plausible for coffee shop employees to claim, even if service is limited to takeout. But according to the Department of Labor, the law’s standards are strict. In fact, the department’s information page about the CARES Act addresses this specific situation:



I’m not sick, nor is anyone in my household sick. I do not have children or care for someone who cannot care for themselves. However, I’m afraid of getting coronavirus from customers coming to the store, so I quit and filed for unemployment.… Under the CARES Act, you may be eligible for benefits if you meet one of the circumstances listed in the Act, but none include the scenario described.

This is the exact scenario described by the NPR piece, but the segment made no effort to uncover or outline these rules. In general, the Labor Department says, workers are eligible for unemployment insurance “due to concerns about exposure to the coronavirus only if you have been advised by a healthcare provider to self-quarantine as a result of such concerns.” (It is very hard to square the general guidance from the government that we should avoid going out unnecessarily, even to the grocery store, with the law stating that those stores’ employees can’t consider themselves at risk until a doctor has told them they are.)

