Menendez Grills Trump Labor Secretary on Failure to Acknowledge, Address Impending Unemployment Crisis; Ensure Businesses Keep Employees Safe from COVID-19

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, today grilled Trump Administration Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia on the failure of the Administration to address the impending unemployment and economic crises facing working families as federal unemployment benefits provided in the CARES Act near expiration on July 31^st.

“These rosy expectations that everybody will be able to go back to work are just not going to be realized by August 1^st. I live in a state with the second largest number of infections. It is going through a staged reopening. That means that many businesses still won’t be open by then or will be opened with less capacity – which means they will require less workers,” Sen. Menendez said to Scalia. “When we have an unemployment rate of 13%; when unemployment rates of African Americans is even higher – 16.8%; when unemployment among Latinos is even higher – 17.6%: What is the Administration’s plan for August 1^st?”

Sen. Menendez also pressed Secretary Scalia for failure to issue critical protections to keep workers safe from contracting COVID-19 when on the job, forcing the Secretary to publicly acknowledge that OSHA – the agency charged with ensuring worker safety and investigating failures by businesses to do so – has received thousands of COVID-19-related complaints but has issued only one citation.

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