Category: Human Resource

Were you heartbroken when your favorite restaurant closed, and then ecstatic when it reopened, only to be traumatized when it closed again? If that is how you feel, imagine what the owner behind the counter is going through. I didn’t understand myself until I met Chef Russell Jackson. 

This was back in March, in the early days of our new Zoom reality, and I was there to inform Jackson, the owner of the Harlem restaurant Reverence, that his business was one of the first recipients of Hello Alice’s $10,000 Covid-19 Business for All Emergency grant program to help small businesses through the pandemic. These calls are always emotional, but he seemed at a loss for words. Russell paused for a moment before turning to call his wife and son into the camera frame. “This is our motivation,” he told me, looking down at his child sitting in his lap.

While negotiations over a Phase 4 bill stalled in Congress, President Donald Trump moved to ameliorate some of the problems caused by the cessation of several relief programs.

On August 8, the president signed four executive orders that offer $400 in weekly federal assistance to unemployed workers–down from the $600 they were getting before the benefit phased out at the end of July–a continuation of student loan relief and a moratorium on evictions. Another ordered a payroll tax holiday for Americans making less than $100,000.

While none of those measures contains direct support for small businesses, they create a minefield of tax issues.

In particular: the order that defers the employee portion of payroll taxes for the rest of the year. That’s 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare for workers earning less than $100,000 a year. If workers forego the payroll tax, their incomes will