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Building Worker Voice on
the Frontlines
The dual crises of COVID-19 continued
to ravage the nation this week, with deaths
now surpassing 50,000 and unemployment claims topping
26 million. As the
Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz estimates, the job losses of the last five weeks
likely translate into an 18.3 percent unemployment rate. With
frontline workers still on the job, and as parts of the economy begin
to reopen, guaranteeing worker safety is a matter of public safety. A
new report by Roosevelt’s Suzanne Kahn and Brishen Rogers and Clean
Slate for Worker Power’s Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs outlines how
Congress can do it: by establishing systems for sector-wide
consultation, creating more transparent and democratic workplaces, and
protecting workers against retaliation. “By giving workers a voice, we
can ensure that the pandemic response happens with them and not to them.”
Read
on.
- Rewriting the rules: As
a Fast Company exclusive explains, the
report lays the foundation for longer-term input on wages, benefits,
and working conditions. “The medical folks need to take care of
stopping the virus, but policymakers need to get the structural
problems with the economy under control,” Block says in the piece.
“Maybe what we’re going through now will open up some imaginations.”
Next week, a new report from Roosevelt Fellow Alex Hertel-Fernandez
surveys the scene of worker power, access to information, and
workplace rights, and proposes a roadmap for reform.
- The
effects on young people:
“I’ve always considered myself financially responsible, but I lost my
restaurant job because of COVID-19, and now the savings I set aside to
pay off my loans are going towards rent, groceries, and bills,”
Roosevelt Network organizer and Northeastern University senior Maggie
King tells
the Washington Post. “Frustration has been rising in our
generation for awhile, and this crisis is making things worse.”
As
Kahn tells WaPo, “I think that the problem is even in the best-case scenario
where you get a job—if you’re entering the job market at this moment,
it’ll take 20 or 40 years for your wages to be where they’d be if you
entered the job market at a better
moment.”
 Why the Government Should Be Guaranteeing
Paychecks
Today, President Trump signed a
fourth
relief package
that allocates an additional $321 billion to the Paycheck Protection
Program created by the CARES Act. But as Roosevelt President & CEO
Felicia Wong, Economic Policy Institute President Thea Lee, and
Congressional Progressive Caucus Center Executive Director Liz Watson
argue in a Time op-ed, that
program simply isn’t working. “Businesses, and nonprofits, can only
apply for these loans through a limited number of Small Business
Administration–approved banks. The process itself is slow, confusing,
and extremely discouraging,” they write. “A simpler, more direct form
of a grant can provide sufficient support to businesses that maintain
payroll. This could augment other forms of support—such as
unemployment insurance—by ensuring a range of options for employers
and their employees. Government could provide direct paycheck support
through a number of avenues, including by working through payroll
companies or making payroll transfers through the Department of
Treasury or IRS.” Read
on, and read more
from Wong in Vox’s “The
Legacy of the Pandemic: 11 Ways It Will Change the Way We
Live.”
- Another angle:
“In this crisis period, fintechs are likely an important lifeline for
many small businesses, and some fintech companies have been granted
access to the Paycheck Protection Program,” Roosevelt Fellow Lenore
Palladino writes for Barron’s. “Ease of use and speed can be
an asset. To stay alive, small-business owners are going to be looking
past the PPP just to make it to the other side of the crisis. But the
rules of the game should ensure that the loans are offered in a way
that’s comparable to traditional bank loans so that small-business
owners who are locked out of federal programs do not end up saddled
with unpayable debt down the road. That would only deepen the
inequities of the current economic crisis.” Read
on.
 FedAccounts Would Provide
Relief
As a new Roosevelt fact sheet
explains, response efforts that ignore underlying structural
inequalities will only exacerbate them: “One of the clearest examples
is the lack of access to bank accounts. Congress authorized $1,200 in
relief checks to millions of Americans, yet whole segments of the
population—indeed, those most in need of this urgent relief—will
likely wait six to eight weeks for these funds because
they
lack access to a functioning bank account . . .
Fortunately, Congress can fix this immediate problem, while
simultaneously addressing structural flaws in our financial system, by
directing the Federal Reserve (the Fed) to offer bank accounts to all
US residents.” Learn
more.
 Using OIRA for Progressive
Regulation
Times like these require
out-of-the-box thinking: Roosevelt Director of Governance Studies Todd
Tucker and Rajesh D. Nayak—a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program
at Harvard Law School—have ideas. “With strong leadership and
additional resources, a reimagined OIRA
[Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs] can serve
to push agencies to think more creatively and proactively. Such an
OIRA could make the difference between years of frustration and wasted
opportunity, and the advancement of a proactive agenda for workers’
rights, climate justice, consumer protections, access to health care,
and even an industrial policy that will create new jobs to support our
nation through our economic rebuilding effort and beyond,”
they
write for the American Prospect. Sharon Block agrees: “No one should be
naïve about the challenge involved in charting a new course for OIRA.
But I believe that Tucker and Nayak have laid out a path to make the
most of OIRA’s potential for putting its expertise in service of a
progressive agenda. The pandemic has made that path more critical than
ever.” Read
on.
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