In the pantheon of deliberately petulant policies from red-state leaders eager to show the base how recklessly they will resist pandemic safety measures, one stands out: A handful of Republican-led states now offer unemployment benefits to workers who get fired for refusing to abide by their employers’ vaccine mandates. Other red states, including Missouri, may soon join them. It’s a pandering stunt that puts Republican politicians at odds not only with public health experts, but with the business community they supposedly revere.
As we wrote in early November, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s consideration of such a policy would effectively reward those who selfishly risk spreading the coronavirus to co-workers and customers, while sticking their employers with the bill. That’s because it’s the employers who pay into the unemployment pool that those workers would draw from.
Normally, only workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own qualify for unemployment. What Parson has pondered, and what at least five other states have done, according to a recent Washington Post roundup, is to change those rules so that workers fired for deliberately violating their employers’ workplace rules regarding vaccination can collect unemployment — which the employers ultimately pay for.
