Coronavirus: Hobby Lobby billionaire keeps stores open after ‘God spoke to him’ – but won’t pay sick leave

Billionaire CEO told employees to ‘tighten their belts’

The US arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby has said it will remain open during the coronavirus epidemic – but has also refused sick pay for workers who fall ill, including from Covid-19.

The chain is keeping some stores open in states that have not ordered non-essential retailers to shut down. In a letter to all employees on 19 March, founder and CEO David Green warned that times would be tough: “To help ensure our company remains strong and prepared to prosper once again when this passes, we may all have to ‘tighten our belts’ over the near future.”

Mr Green, a devout conservative Christian whose net worth is in the region of $6bn, also wrote that “I cannot adequately express how much I appreciate each one of you.”

However, in a March 23 memo to store managers seen by Business Insider, store operations vice president Randy Betts wrote that the business would “make every effort to continue working the employees”, and that sick workers will be expected to use their personal paid leave or take an unpaid leave of absence.

Much of the reaction to the revelations focused on the discrepancy between the Christian values expressed in the letter and the hardline payroll policies in the memo. Left-wing blog DailyKos, for instance, headlined its story “Hobby Lobby founder tells workers that God spoke to his wife and forgot to mention paid sick leave”.

Sure enough, in the 19 March letter to employees, Mr Green wrote that when his wife Barbara prayed for guidance the week before, “God put on [her] heart three profound words to remind us that he’s in control: Guide, Guard and Groom.

“While we do not know for certain what the future holds, or how long this disruption will last, we can all rest in knowing that God is in control.”

The Independent has approached Hobby Lobby for comment.

Hobby Lobby has been involved in controversy on more than one occasion. In 2014, it won a politically polarising case in the Supreme Court, Burwell v Hobby Lobby, which freed family-owned employers from the obligation to provide employees with health insurance coverage that included contraception access. The case was won on the grounds of religious freedom.

A dissenting justice called the majority opinion in the case “a decision of startling breadth”, saying it could open the door to cases brought by businesses citing religious freedom to challenge anti-discrimination laws.

In 2017, meanwhile, Hobby Lobby was fined $3m for smuggling deliberately mislabelled thousands of Iraqi artefacts out of the Middle East to be sold in the US, violating a 2004 law banning the import of Iraqi cultural property into the US.