Congressman Mike Turner (OH-10) will introduce this week the Employer and Employee COVID Protection Act to eliminate barriers to reopening businesses, get Americans back to work, and empower employees to decide for themselves if they feel safe in their workplace. This legislation will provide all complying businesses with immunity from civil lawsuits if one of their employees contracts coronavirus after states permit businesses to reopen. It will also provide employees with heightened health concerns an opportunity to request special accommodations from their employer and allow them to maintain eligibility for unemployment benefits if they still feel their risk of contracting COVID in their workplace is too high.
Abe Gorelick has decades of marketing experience, an extensive contact list, an Ivy League undergraduate degree, a master’s in business from the University of Chicago, ideas about how to reach consumers young and old, experience working with businesses from start-ups to huge financial firms and an upbeat, effervescent way about him. What he does not have — and has not had for the last year — is a full-time job.
Five years since the recession ended, it is a story still shared by millions. Mr. Gorelick, 57, lost his position at a large marketing firm last March. As he searched, taking on freelance and consulting work, his family’s finances slowly frayed. He is now working three jobs, driving a cab and picking up shifts at Lord & Taylor and Whole Foods.
“I’m not in my basement, unshaven, unshowered, drinking a bottle of Scotch a day,” Mr. Gorelick said. “I’m out there working these jobs, meeting people and trying to make something happen. But it is exhausting. It is stressful. It is difficult.”
For people experiencing such long spells without appropriate work, it is a crisis. Often, it is also a conundrum: What should a worker who finds himself out of a job for six months or more do?
“There is this very pressing issue,” said Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “and there is this great gap in knowledge about what to do about it, both for policy...
