Angry makes some good points here. Make sure you watch the whole thing. His take on the “Tito’s is not hand sanitizer” thing is Glorious.
I was talking to my boss about some of this last week. Specifically the two week self-quarantine thing. I jokingly asked her if we’d get paid if we had to do so. She laughed, as I expected.
Stacie and I are doing OK. If one of us had to go two weeks without a paycheck, things would suck, but we’d be relatively OK. We wouldn’t be homeless. The cats wouldn’t eat each other. We could get groceries delivered, probably a “pay online and we’ll leave Mama’s truck unlocked so the delivery person can stack it in there and not come into contact with us” deal.
If both of us lost a paycheck, it would suck a lot more, but we could still make it work. Add in our PTO and it gets pushed back another week or two before things start to get ugly. There’s also short-term and long-term disability which will kick in automatically if we miss enough work with a medical issue.
We also both work for places that understand things like “there’s a fuckin’ plague on the loose.” Stacie’s employer is already kicking around plans for non-essential employees to work from home.
Last year I had a raging infection in my leg of the “we’re going to shoot you up with antibiotics and have you pound the pills for a month, but if that doesn’t work we’re sharpening the good saw” variety. The response from my immediate supervisor on my third day out was “why don’t you just take the rest of the week off,” which I wound up doing. When I got back, the foreman asked how I was doing, and when I asked if I needed anything from the doctor he said he knew I wasn’t faking. That’s gorram rare these days, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t even consider other offers.
We’re also both highly-skilled professionals who have been at our current jobs long enough that we’ve got maxed out unemployment. Even if we were terminated for missing work because of Corona, we’d have new jobs long before it ran out. We also have plenty of skills suitable for freelancing. If anything, a plague might force me to ramp up my sidelines and never go back to work in a machine shop again.
So we’ll probably be OK. Our likely worst case (outside of plague doctors in corvid masks and people pushing corpse wagons screaming “bring out your dead”) is that we can’t take a week-long vacation in June and either have to push it back to September or October, or we just do a couple/few weekend trips instead because we won’t have a whole week of PTO available. We have it rough, I know.
Here’s the thing. We’re not everybody. Sure, two professionals with skills in high demand working for solid employers who think we’re the bong will do relatively well. What about the waiters or gas station attendants? How about the people I used to work with on assembly lines doing basic assembly? When you’re making $10/hour, you don’t have much of a margin even when everything is going well. Now rip out two weeks of pay and see what happens.
Or the people with good-paying jobs whose employers are assholes? I worked for a place a couple years back where the job was pitched as “four ten-hour days and optional OT on Fridays.” My second week there Stacie had a show and I needed to take Friday afternoon off to help her set up. The boss started giving me an attitude about “leaving early.” My second to last week there I needed to leave early on Thursday and take Friday off for my grandmother’s funeral. He threatened to fire me for taking Friday off. Just imagine this scumbag’s response to someone missing two weeks because they’re quarantined.
A lot of people are going to be absolutely screwed when this thing ramps up.
Forget the overall economy. This could be absolutely devastating to the regular people of the world.
True story