INDIANAPOLIS — Governor Holcomb has said businesses should expect new rules on how to protect workers and customers once they reopen. But they’ll still need to convince workers those rules are enough.

Workforce Development Commissioner Fred Payne says both unemployment law and the coronavirus relief bill are unambiguous: if your employer calls you back to work and you won’t go, you can’t turn around and collect unemployment. But Payne says there’s been discussion of how to apply that to coronavirus concerns.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has taken a hard line, announcing any worker who doesn’t go back when the workplace reopens will be considered to have quit, making them ineligible for benefits. Payne says the department will issue guidance before businesses get the green light to reopen:

Holcomb says the outbreak at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport is a case study. He says the state has worked with the company to test employees, and to implement physical barriers and social distancing rules before the plant reopens.

Holcomb says he has no quarrel with President Trump’s use of the Defense Production Act to order meat-packing plants to stay open as essential businesses — he notes he said the same thing weeks ago, saying it’s critical to keep grocery shelves stocked. But Holcomb and state health commissioner Kristina Box say keeping those plants up and running can’t be at the expense of worker safety. Box says that may mean production goes down because of limitations created by social distancing.

Meat-processing plants were exempt from Holcomb’s five-week-old order directing nonessential businesses to shut down. The Tyson plant didn’t close until last week, when it suspended operations to test its more than two-thousand employees for the virus.

 

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay