Move The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act In Oregon---And Let's Get To An Industrial Policy & A Green New Deal

The AFL-CIO posted the following press release today. If I am reading this correctly, and if  the proposal is as it is is described, this will be a great help to food supply chain workers here in Oregon, and would particularly help people here in the Mid-Willamette Valley. A press release from Senator Sherrod Brown's office says that "In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) created the Farm and Food Workers Relief (FFWR) Grant Program to help farm, grocery, and meatpacking workers with pandemic-related health and safety costs. The first of its kind, the FFWR Grant Program distributed nearly $680 million in competitive grant funding to meat processing, grocery store, and farm workers for expenses incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, FFWR was a one-time grant program. This legislation would make a similar program permanently available during disasters, including natural disasters."

I hope that unions, consumer groups, and progressive organizations here in Oregon get behind this proposal and push hard for it. We need this. Reports from the Oregon Food Bank and the Oregon Center for Public Policy talk about hunger in Oregon and how difficult it is for food banks to keep up with the needs of the people. 

That said, I am also concerned that we have a pro-labor President who is fighting an uphill battle, justifiable worries about inflation, and simple corporate greed pushing up prices and pulling back on services---and we have no industrial policy, no unitary plan in place to rein in wild profiteering and make the necessities of life like housing and healthcare and food and education and public safety affordable. We're talking about human rights here, not luxuries. I'll grant that the economic picture is mixed at the current moment (see here and here and here) but working-class people are still running from crisis to crisis and we're not feeling the impact of the good news that is out there regarding overall wage gains and slowing inflation. The reports mentioned above are real talk. This is having a negative impact on the Democrats and is making it harder to win legislative victories that benefit working-class people in the first place.

We need a forward-looking plan that gets us to well-paying union jobs in a green economy and that builds in equality and equity, housing, healthcare, food, education and public safety as undeniable human rights. As I see it, the present debate over industrial policy is being held captive by the far-right and the enemies of organized labor. We need to recapture that debate and own it. I believe that we would be in a much better place if we were debating how to best implement a national economic plan or policy that represented working-class needs than trying to affect discreet sectors of the economy one by one. And that said, let's get The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act passed!    

Here is the AFL-CIO press release:

The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act, proposed early last week by Sens. Sherrod Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. Nikki Budzinski, aims to provide support to food supply chain workers during emergencies like natural disasters. The legislation, if passed, would establish a permanent grant program and authorize the appropriation of $50 million to help cover disaster-related health and safety costs for front-line workers critical in efforts to keep food on tables across the country.

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, grocery and meatpacking workers—many represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)—were absolutely essential to keeping the rest of the country fed, just like they do when hurricanes and snowstorms strike. UFCW International President Marc Perrone applauded the bill and said in a press release that this dedicated fund would “provide critical funding for essential work during times of crisis and strengthen America’s food supply chain over the long run.”