Business groups and trial lawyers are locked in a major battle over legislation to protect companies from coronavirus-related litigation.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said shielding business owners from coronavirus-related lawsuits is a “red line” in future spending negotiations with Democrats, saying that the economic recovery would “dramatically slow” without such protections.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, have said Democrats won’t support the business liability protections, with Pelosi saying last week that their priority is to “protect our workers and our patients in all of this.”
The Chamber of Commerce and its allies are in the trenches, lobbying Congress and the public, arguing it shouldn’t be easy for customers and workers to sue companies for giving them the virus. The American Association for Justice, which represents trial lawyers, comes at it from the other side, arguing that a “blanket liability immunity” would unfairly shield careless companies from bad behavior.
“We’re not asking for some type of immunity, we’re asking for a safe harbor,” Chamber Executive Vice President Neil Bradley said on Tuesday. “If a business is grossly negligent, or if they are willfully forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions, then they don’t have that liability protection,” Bradley added that most businesses that are trying to do the right thing shouldn’t be prosecuted later in court.
The Chamber said it was already tracking over 300 different coronavirus-related business lawsuits, as trial lawyers have filed suits against retailers for giving people the virus, nursing homes for negligence, emergency-supply manufacturers for false advertising, colleges for refusing to refund student fees, and governments for denying hazard pay. Walmart, for example, has already been hit with a wrongful death suit by the family of a Chicago-area worker who died from the virus in late March.
The trial lawyers association, in turn, argues that “as Leader McConnell and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce push their decades-old agenda while American lives are on the line, the numbers show that the majority of people, across party lines, believe immunity won’t help fix the economy and in fact will just prolong the pandemic.”
Each side has put forth polls showing that the public agrees with them.
A poll released by the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform found that 84% of respondents are in support of preventing lawsuits against businesses that have remained open, such as grocery stores and pharmacies. Furthermore, 61% of those polled supported Congress, protecting “many businesses and types of companies from lawsuits related to the coronavirus.”
At the same time, an American Association for Justice poll found that almost two-thirds of voters said it was “a bad idea to give corporations and businesses guaranteed immunity from coronavirus lawsuits.” The poll also found that 3 in 5 voters believed that giving corporations and other businesses immunity in coronavirus cases would result in more people getting the disease.
Business litigation reform has split the two parties for many years now.
Republicans and their allies in the business world typically want more safeguards for companies in order to stop what they call frivolous lawsuits that don’t necessarily claim serious injury or reckless conduct, but instead, they say, blame businesses for problems outside of their control. Democrats, on the other hand, have historically been against such proposals, advocating for allowing workers and consumers to challenge businesses in court when necessary.
The Chamber is closely allied with the Republican Party and has given over 80% of its congressional contributions, or $270,000, to the GOP in the 2020 cycle, a small fraction of what it’s expected to spend during the entire election. It also spends more on lobbying than any other organization in the country and is one of the biggest lobbying spenders on tort law. The trial lawyers association, on the other hand, gave over $1.4 million, or almost 97%, of its 2020 congressional contributions to Democrats, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Republicans in Congress, as well as business groups like the Chamber, are eager to clarify that legal immunity is not what they seek but instead are asking for a higher bar for suits blaming businesses for transmission of the virus.
Earlier this week, McConnell said, “We are working on a narrowly crafted liability protection” bill that “will not protect somebody from gross negligence.”
