This commentary is by Eric Sorkin, co-owner of Runamok in Fairfax and a member of Main Street Alliance.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Runamok has done our best to position employee health and safety as a top priority. While we are in a much better place than we were in March of 2020, one of our most important tools has consistently been to try to exclude infectious people from our workplace.
On the ground, this comes down to asking employees to stay home if they test positive for Covid, have had a meaningful exposure to someone who has tested positive for Covid, or have symptoms of Covid.
Until this January, we were able to provide replacement pay to all impacted employees. Without replacement pay, the burden falls on employees to choose between lost wages, and potentially exposing others at work. That’s an unenviable position to be in.
The Families First Coronavirus Relief Act helped us to do this by reimbursing our company for a sizable portion of this expense. With that in mind, when the relief act funding ran out in September of 2021, we attempted to fund worker replacement pay on our own.
With the recent increase in infections, we have had to change our policy, as we are no longer able to manage the cost.
We are doing our best to make other adjustments and continue to hold employee health and safety as a top priority. All the same, the reality is that this change asks our employees to bear more of the cost of missed work.
This is disproportionately harder for any of our employees without significant personal savings.
If Vermont were to pass a Covid worker wage replacement program, it would allow us, and companies like ours, to reinstate our own program and further support our workers and their financial resiliency.
This would allow all working Vermonters to do what is most beneficial to the community without putting themselves in financial jeopardy.
