Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Remington Gregg about corporate immunity for the June 12, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Intercept (5/26/20)
Janine Jackson: The US now has more than 2 million confirmed coronavirus cases; health officials will tell you the real number is doubtless much higher. At least 113,000 people have died. The pandemic is far from under control. But that isn’t stopping the White House, and many states, from pushing to fully reopen, even as we see places that have reopened reporting increases in hospitalizations.
But wait, there’s more. As millions try to weigh the safety risk of returning to work with the economic cost of not doing so, there’s a push, led in Congress by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to grant corporations legal immunity from liability for any harms workers may suffer from being forced back into workplaces that are unsafe.
We’re joined now by Remington Gregg, counsel for civil justice and consumer rights at Public Citizen. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Remington Gregg.
Remington Gregg: Thank you. Good to be here.
JJ: Well, I want to ask: Are they serious? But we know they are. Are we missing something? Or is it that basic: that if a person’s job requires them, for example, to work in close quarters with other people, or doesn’t provide masks or sanitizer, and that person gets sick with Covid-19, there’d be no way for them to get accountability from the employer?
RG: That’s the long and short of the proposal. Now, that’s with the caveat that there is nothing on paper. So we just have to go with what Mitch McConnell and others are saying, and they are saying that they want to immunize businesses from liability for coronavirus-related lawsuits. It’s not just workers and consumers who would get the shaft, but it could conceivably extend to other types of claims. For example, civil rights claims or environmental claims. You claim that the business has been polluting and not following the proper regulations. And they can say, “Well, I’m sorry. You can’t sue us, because this is coronavirus-related.” So it is a sweeping proposal, both in the breadth of what it would do, but also in the sense that it would paper over the laws of all 50 states.
JJ: Wow. Well, if the notion is that we should just trust companies to do what’s right, don’t we already have evidence that that doesn’t work?
RG: Exactly. Just this week, we’ve seen data that infection rates are increasing in meatpacking plants. We now know that almost 40% of all coronavirus deaths are from nursing home residents and workers in those spaces. So a lot of businesses are not doing what they need to do to take reasonable precautions to protect workers and consumers, and that’s why we need strong laws on the books. The problem is that we don’t, right?
JJ: Yeah.
RG: The Trump administration has flat-out refused to issue any sort of standards they would require businesses to follow as they reopen. So they’re refusing to issue those because, you know, the Trump administration doesn’t believe in regulation, so why would they start now? If you then take away people’s right to go to court as well, then there’s absolutely no way to hold bad actors accountable.
JJ: We’ve seen a bunch of deregulatory moves recently, and the line seems to be, “Well, companies can’t be bothered to follow regulations now, because that’s holding back the reopening.” Well, call me cynical, but it seems like the pandemic is just being used as cover to bring out a wish list that they’ve had for some time now.
RG: You couldn’t have put it better. I mean, the US Chamber of Commerce has been seeking this for years, if not decades. It’s really sad that such a powerful organization would use a pandemic simply to get something on their wish list, but here we are. And that’s why we have to fight incredibly hard against these proposals, against any action by McConnell and Senate Republicans, and we have to make it clear to House Democrats, Speaker Pelosi, to Senate Democrat leader Schumer, that people won’t stand by and have their rights taken away in a pandemic.
JJ: And corporations are pretty protected already, aren’t they? I mean, so many have forced arbitration, where you can’t really sue them anyway. It seems like it’s not even really necessary, frankly.
RG: Well, that’s right. It isn’t necessary, but just because it isn’t necessary, doesn’t mean that they won’t fight for it, because that would mean that they would be completely immunized. You know, workers have a difficult time bringing claims because of, as you said, forced arbitration. But also, almost every state has worker compensation laws, which means that if you get sick on the job, you have to go to workers comp, you cannot sue an employer. And so you have those barriers that stop you in your tracks, basically, from being able to sue your employer.
And then the final piece is—for everyone, employers and consumers—it would be almost impossible, it’d be incredibly difficult, for you to prove that you contracted coronavirus, say, in a store, a hair salon, dry cleaners or restaurant. Why? Because under the law, you have to prove causation. You have to prove that this place took unreasonable actions, and you can follow the line from those unreasonable actions to you getting coronavirus. But if states are opening up, as we see, opening up too fast and too soon, people are going to swimming pools, they’re going to dry cleaners and restaurants and movie theaters. There’s no way to prove that you got it at the, say, movie theater versus the dry cleaners.
JJ: Right.
RG: Or even that you got it in the workplace versus on the bus to work. So this idea that they need this is just this Chicken Little notion that they have that the sky is falling, when, in fact, if anything, it’s anything but.
Public Citizen (6/11/20)
JJ: You have just come from a presser, a telepresser, I should say, on this issue, with Sen. Sherrod Brown; Public Citizen has a new report. But tell us how that press conference went. What are reporters wanting to know about?
RG: Well, they want to know how serious Republicans are about this, or is this “chest thumping.” And we say that, again, the Chamber of Commerce has been pushing this for 30 years, so they’re just pushing every lever and every button to do this, and we walk through, step by step, the reasons why this is unnecessary, and why it would be harmful to workers and consumers.
One reporter said that she asked Sen. John Cornyn, who was the second-in-command in the Republican leadership in the Senate, what he wanted to see. And he said that he’s for immunizing businesses, so long as a business chooses to abide by some sort of health guideline.
Now, when you say that, if you just say it off the cuff, you go, “OK, I guess.” But when you know anything about employment law, or public health, or any sort of law, you see how absolutely ridiculous this is. He’s saying, No. 1, as long as you choose some sort of guidelines. Well, No. 1, there are no federal guidelines.
And then, No. 2, what are you going to choose, state guidelines or local guidelines? Basically, he wants companies to be able to choose the least robust and the least enforceable guidelines that are out there.
And then he says, well, “guidelines.” And we have to be very clear: There’s a difference between regulations and guidelines. The Trump administration has put out a lot of guidelines, saying you may do this or you should do that. But they haven’t put out anything that says you must, as workers are going back to work, as we push, especially, black and brown workers, low-income workers, back to work without protections. It’s laughable that Senate Republicans are saying we don’t need any sort of government standards in place to force businesses to do what’s right. We’re just going to allow them to do whatever they kind of, sort of want to do, if they have a moment to take away time from building up their profit.
JJ: So if people go back into workplaces that aren’t safe and they get sick, besides the harm that’s done to them, won’t that ultimately slow the economic recovery that this is all supposedly aiming for?
Remington Gregg: “Guess what won’t instill consumer confidence? A law that immunizes businesses if they don’t do what’s right to keep people safe.”
RG: That’s the reason why this is just so ludicrous when you scratch the surface. Consumer confidence is at an all-time low, and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said a week or two ago that he’s convinced that the economy will not get back up and running until there’s consumer confidence. Well, guess what won’t instill consumer confidence? A law that immunizes businesses if they don’t do what’s right to keep people safe. Why, in Heaven’s name, would I decide to go back to restaurants and movie theaters if they have no incentive to do the right thing to keep me safe?
JJ: We already have seen workers who complain about health risks or unsafe workplaces being punished for that by their employers. So you wonder how you can turn around and say, but we should still trust those same employers to protect workers without the possibility of any legal pushback.
RG: Right. We’ve seen workers try to say something; it’s easier when you have a union. People who don’t, they submit whistleblower complaints, and sometimes those are successful and sometimes they’re not. We’ve seen some workers in local unions go out on wildcat strikes, which are strikes that aren’t authorized by the union itself, to protest some unsafe conditions. And again, we’ve seen a lot of these localized unions are mainly black and brown people, recent immigrants, and they don’t have as big of a bully pulpit. Make no mistake: people are complaining, people are shouting, people are trying to sound the alarm. But the question is, are we going to listen to them? And are we going to stand up for the people who have essentially been keeping our economy running while we have all been staying home?
JJ: And I keep saying “workers,” but colleges want immunity, nursing homes have immunity, which is already an issue. So it really is everyone that is ultimately affected by this.
RG: This is a societal issue. Obviously, we think first and foremost about workers and consumers. But soon, I mean, we already are starting to think about what this means for students going back. Just think about it, a dorm is like a cruise ship on land, right? And if you’re not willing to go on a cruise right now, we need to think really carefully about what that means for our dorms. And so for schools to be saying, we want to immunize ourselves for not taking the reasonable precautions we should be taking, is crazy.
You know, ensuring that we protect our seniors and others living in long-term care facilities. Remember, long-term care facilities are not just for seniors, but they’re for people living with disabilities and others. Make no mistake about it, the nursing home lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies in this country. And they have been systematically going from state to state to immunize themselves.
And they’ve been successful, but they’ve also hit some roadblocks. New York recently gave them immunity, but now there’s pushback, and some legislators are thinking about how they’re able to roll that back, because they’re seeing how much is happening in nursing homes: 40% of all deaths, from residents and workers. Why should they be immune from accountability?
So stay tuned. There’s a lot going on both on the federal level, but because the Chamber of Commerce is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful lobby in this country, and they have a massive amount of resources. And they are going from state to state, if they possibly can, to try to get their wish for immunity.
NBC News (5/17/20)
JJ: We will stay tuned. Let me just ask you, finally, I was disturbed to read Nancy Pelosi not saying a strong no on this, at least back in May. “We have no red lines,” she said. The public unsurprisingly hates the idea, polling shows, of corporate immunity. But if it winds up being part of a stimulus bill that has other things that people want, it might get horse-traded into reality, or couldn’t it?
RG: We are continuing to talk about how important it is to ensure accountability for all people. Look, right now, we don’t have much accountability when it comes to the stimulus money; there’s very little oversight being done there. We have no oversight of the Executive Branch; the Congress is trying, but the administration is flouting everything. So the best way that we the people right now are able to hold people accountable is through the justice system. And so removing that would be incredibly harmful to everyday people.
Right now we should be—and this is the message that we will continue to talk about—we have to save our economy from another Great Depression. We need to provide for first responders and teachers. We need to ensure that our unemployment insurance is extended. We need to ensure that everyday people can provide for their families.
We shouldn’t be talking about immunity. This shouldn’t be part of the conversation.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Remington Gregg of Public Citizen. Their new report is called Corporate Accountability: The Next Coronavirus Casualty? You can find that and lots of other work on their website, citizen.org. Remington Gregg, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
RG: Thanks for having me.
CounterSpin | Radio Free (2020-06-16T22:00:05+00:00) ‘Immunity Shouldn’t Be Part of the Conversation’ – CounterSpin interview with Remington Gregg on corporate immunity. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/16/immunity-shouldnt-be-part-of-the-conversation-counterspin-interview-with-remington-gregg-on-corporate-immunity/
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