In an Livestream About Reopening, Libby Misses the Point(s)
On Wednesday, Kellen MacBeth, administrator of the Facebook group “Arlington Neighbors Helping Each Other Through COVID-19”, hosted Arlington County Board chair Libby Garvey on a livestream to discuss phase one of the reopening of Arlington.
Libby spent an hour answering pre-submitted questions with various levels of success. The overall theme was the typical Arlington County Board song and dance: We are being smart and doing the best we can with limited authority, we have so much empathy for everyone, and gee whiz, isn’t Arlington great?
The idea that the county board is acting “smart” was severely undermined by some of Libby’s answers.
First, Libby was asked why she thinks the Latino community in Arlington is getting hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19. “I don’t want to be insulting” she said, “It’s simple… it’s because of health and income disparities.” This is, of course, correct, but it did not seem to occur to Libby that the questioner wanted her to dig a layer deeper. So we will do it for you: Latinos in Arlington (and everywhere across the country) are poorer because of systemic racism and an economic system that has been making the rich richer and the poor poorer for the last 50 years. But this doesn’t jive with the official Libby Garvey ideology, which says racism isn’t a problem in Arlington and the best way to serve the public is to award massive subsidies to wealthy corporations and wait for the wealth to trickle down.
Even worse was when Libby was asked if a worker could be fired and lose unemployment benefits for refusing to return to a re-opened business out of fear of COVID-19 infection. “That is a good question, and I don’t know the answer to it” says Libby, before throwing in “I imagine he can be fired.”
The idea that Libby Garvey, who has a close relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and spent a huge portion of that very livestream boosting small business aid, does not understand how unemployment benefits work is hard to believe. But we will give her the benefit of the doubt. So Libby: yes, they can be fired, and yes, they will lose their unemployment.
In fact, workers losing unemployment benefits as a result of “reopening” has been written about extensively. Employers are incentivized to fire staff to reduce their unemployment tax rate and states save money since they don’t need to pay them unemployment anymore. A win for the state government and the employer, a loss for the person being fired. And of course, these kind of firings will mostly affect minority and low-income households while Arlington’s wealthy, white population can safely work from home.
So why is the Latino community bearing the brunt of COVID-19 in Arlington? A complex question, but we can give you part of the answer: because Libby Garvey doesn’t think it’s important to understand how unemployment benefits works.