They have made $800 total in the last eight weeks. Both were rejected for unemployment compensation, probably because they lack the skills to fill out the online forms in a way that benefits them. No one can survive in Connecticut on $100 a week.
Shutting down cities, counties and states by executive order deprives those who are forced out of work of any sort of due process. At least if it was done by state legislatures there would be debate and accountability. Go to those out of work and ask them if they are proud that for every 30 who have lost their livelihoods, one life has been saved. Ask them if they wouldn’t have volunteered to be unemployed knowing that would be the result. See what they answer.
Show me one person who hasn’t made a dime in two months who wasn’t already wealthy and is happy that their loss is saving lives.
Of course they're not happy. They're being shafted by a system that was built to sustain the wealthy at their expense already. The virus is accelerating that process steeply. They're damn right to be unhappy.
Ask them, though, if they'd rather work and have no right to claim unemployment, and risk death. Every interaction increases that risk. Even if they say yes today, once there's a spike in deaths, their answer will, correctly, change.
What's mystifying to me is that you see all this economic injustice, and want to layer on an unjust threat to their lives on top, because the very people hurt worst economically from this lockdown will be at most risk of contracting the virus if the economy opens up.
In the face of this, you have the option of reassessing your view of good government as the great bane of people and the economy. You have the option to push even the current government to do more, whether to increase the number of test kits and PPE to aid opening the economy, or in disbursing relief more broadly to those who are deserving of it, like your sister-in-law and her husband. Or both, as most sane countries in the world have been doing.
So why aren't you?
