Mark Cuban says bailouts should include low-wage workers during coronavirus pandemic
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban urged the government to go ahead with a proposed plan to send out $1,000 checks to help stimulate the economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Cuban, speaking to Chris Cuomo on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” Wednesday night, said the cash would help give people in need some sense of control at a perilous moment.
“You want to give people a sense of control over their own lives because right now I think people feel like they just don’t know what’s next,” Cuban said via video phone. “We have such imperfect information and people are really scared.”
He also suggested making loans available to small and medium-sized businesses.
“The more we can do to help [employers] to keep paying the employees so they don’t have to lay them off and those employees don’t have to go through the process of finding a job in the future,” he said. “That’s also a big positive.”
The NBA was the first sports league to halt play because of the coronavirus outbreak on March 11.
Cuban has pledged to pay his American Airlines Center and team employees as if the Mavericks games were still played.
“What I love is our communities coming together, businesses helping each other,” he said. “It’s great to see people of all levels just stepping up and helping people that don’t have jobs and giving them jobs. There is a bright lining and hopefully it gets bigger.”
Cuban cautioned that bailouts offered to severely-hit industries should include help and incentives for the lowest-wage workers of those companies.
“Inevitably, we’ll bail out several industries and we can’t repeat the same mistakes we made before,” he said. “If the government is going to subsidize and support and basically de-risk various industries we have to make sure we stop things like stock buybacks or enrichment programs where we give bonuses and stock and options to CEOs but not give them to employees.
“This is an opportunity for the government when they get involved to level the playing field for all the employees in those organizations and say, ‘You know what, whatever you give to the CEO, you give to the person getting paid by the hour or the getting the least amount in salary’ so that everybody who works to get that company back shares in the upside.”
Cuban has initiated a program with the help of star players Luka Doncic and Dwight Powell, to pay the daycare costs for healthcare workers so they could continue working during the crisis.
He urged companies that are doing well during the crisis to hire more workers, especially those who have lost their jobs because of the economic struggles.
