Some employees won’t return to work despite Stanislaus reopening
Small business owners all over Stanislaus County need Christopher Voss, and right now. Without a man with his skills fighting for us, we’ll be paralyzed, understaffed, and outpaid by our own government.
Christopher Voss was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for decades, and we need his particular talents. All right — all I know is that he came up no. 1 when I googled “World’s Best Negotiator,” so Voss has to be our guy to lean on the Legislature to remove extended unemployment benefits from the CARES Act, today. The internet says he is the world champ, so Voss will have no trouble strong-arming Congress and brokering my employees’ return to work while helping me self-negotiate an end to this weird conservative guilt I’ve developed over taking government money.
To get my employees back to work, I did not use negotiation techniques Mr. Voss favors, like “practice tactical empathy.” I just called them up and said, “I’ve got some hours for you,” and each replied with a variation of, “Meh.”
My business is in-home early autism treatment and we drive from house to house. With that giant potential to infect, I furloughed everyone March 22. Mothers of the children we work with have been calling the past couple weeks screaming for therapy to restart, but my reply is brutally simple: nobody will go back to work when they’re making that much money from the government.
The CARES Act famously pays laid-off workers an additional $600 a week on top of their regular unemployment insurance through July. Through July. I’ll be out of business if Christopher Voss, or somebody like him, doesn’t get that money cut off by mid-June.
Now, the people who work for me are necessarily good, loving, caring people not usually interested in handouts. But these are strange times, and no one goes out of the house unless they really need beer or are promised a pile of money.
Yes, I could call the Employment Development Department and rat them out: “I offered her hours, she wouldn’t take them.” But this would shove a serious spike in our relationship and I love the people I work with. You’d be a fool to leave your young children at home and work for less, and I don’t hire fools.
Conservatives like me always said this would happen, that government money would rob even good people of our motivation.
Thing is, I applied for the Paycheck Protection Program, and if it ever gets here, plan to pay myself with some of that money. I can’t help but think of that line from “All the King’s Men” when Willie Stark said, “There is a passel of poor folks living in it, but the state isn’t poor. It is just a question of who has got his front feet in the trough when slopping time comes. And I aim to do me some shoving and thump me some snouts.”
Can I get government money for my business and still believe in small government? When do I cross the line into hypocrisy?
I threw that question to Marie Roberson, whom I call the Oracle of Conservatism in Stanislaus County. Today, she’s coordinator for Stanislaus Concerned Citizens for the State of Jefferson (motto: “Fiscal Responsibility, Limited Government, Free Markets”). She said, “If you listen to Trump, he said he agreed to do this stimulus because it was the people’s money, so I have not issue with (a conservative taking government money). I do have an issue with the fact that not everyone got it and that some on welfare or who have never worked got a check, or the fact that fathers or mothers that owe child support got to keep their checks. All the money helped people pay bills.”
Paying bills, that’s all any of us hope to do. Cutting your money and mine in about two weeks might be the best way to do that.
This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.