|
I’m only 29, so I hope my naiveté is forgivable. The thing is, when two parties receive a national mandate to do something differently, and yet continue to do the same thing, doesn’t that mean that voters lost again? Case in point: domestic spending budgets look no more likely to receive rational increases than they did last year. If I hear “continuing resolution” one more time… See the National Community Action blog for more.
Pending legislation would provide federal student loan forgiveness for long-term non-profit workers with outstanding student loans. Basic requirements for eligibility would be ten years working at non-profits and 120 student loan payments. It seems good to me, but now that the idea is in my head, I wish the terms were more like Teach For America or the Peace Corps. Read more at Arlene Spencer’s blog, thegrantplant. Update: As of September 27, this bill Continue reading HR 2699 provides student loan forgiveness for non-profit employees Earlier this week, I had a conversation with John Wilson, one of the family owners of Beef Northwest. In response to my initial entry on the efforts of their employees to unionize, the business had posted a thorough FAQ on their website; this addresses both the history of the negotiations with UFW and claims made by workers regarding working conditions and the ingredients of cattle feed from Beef NW’s point of view. Clearly, there are competing accounts of what is at stake; in fact, it was the lack of information online about the nature of the issues that piqued my interest in the first place. I’d still like to see more detailed information about the precise grievances of the workers be available because it really does matter to me that my comfort and conveniences not be tied to someone else’s suffering. Wilson said that Beef NW is not aware of specific grievances from workers and reported that, contrary to UFW claims, Beef NW provides break rooms, toilets, and water–including bottled water–for their workers. Additionally, he denied that the company had attempted to influence workers during the negotiations process. Hearing his perspective on the lack of dialog with the union, I asked whether they had proposed that a neutral third party become involved in the negotiations in order to facilitate clearer communication; according to Wilson, Beef NW proposed exactly such a step, which was opposed by the UFW and led to the breaking off of negotiations. Approximately 70% of Beef NW’s employees are Latino; I doubt that many of them have their own blogs, and if I had to extrapolate from my own experience with Oregon’s Latino farmworker population, I’d guess that a significant number of them haven’t had the educational advantages I take for granted. That’s to say, their PR position, compared to that of Beef NW, is tenuous. I’m really glad to see Beef NW’s willingness to engage with the questions I’ve raised.* I’m also aware that simply being able to get a message out has a lot of power in shaping the discourse around an issue. Overall, I have two observations to make: one is that legislation is definitely needed to provide guidelines for labor relations in the agricultural sector. Such legislation would provide a clear path for employers, especially family businesses with no experience with unions, to follow, and might clarify processes for workers deciding on whether they needed union representation. The second is that being an informed consumer is so difficult as to be nearly impossible. If one tiny part of my diet, beef that I purchase no more than once a month, has so much information attached to it, how can I even begin to know the stories behind all the other food? Discuss. *Tangentially, I’m also really glad to see that some sloppy descriptions of the cattles’ diets on distributors’ sites have been corrected. For the record, neither Beef NW nor Oregon Country Beef made claims about their beef being entirely grass-fed; those claims were elsewhere. Last Saturday, Beef Northwest employees from Boardman, Oregon, union partners, and members of the faith community gathered at Whole Foods in Portland’s Pearl District to call attention to working conditions and practices at Beef Northwest, the feedlot for Oregon Country Natural Beef, and to seek support for their efforts to unionize. Whole Foods is among a number of businesses–including New Seasons Market, Burgerville, and McMenamin’s–that sell Oregon Country Natural Beef’s “grass fed” beef. Whole Foods was targeted for protest because, as a major distributor for this product, they failed to support Beef Northwest workers’ pursuit of improved working conditions through union representation. Oregon Country Natural Beef is a cooperative of cattle farms that raise grass-fed beef. However, all the cattle these local farms raise goes through the Beef Northwest feedlot in Boardman for final processing. The cattle spend an average of 89 days there before they are slaughtered and distributed. Employees work in conditions of extreme heat and cold with no shelter for rest, lack ready access to water, breathe in dust and fecal matter from the cattle, and report being forced to continue working even when injured. Injuries are not uncommon in these settings, but workers are eligible for only three days of paid sick leave per year. Beef Northwest’s employee protections are minimal when compared to those of unionized farms; Threemile Canyon Farms, another Boardman farm, signed a collective bargaining agreement with United Farm Workers earlier this summer. This agreement improved farm worker benefits and protections and helped make the lives of the people who produce our food better. Len Bergstein, a spokesperson for Threemile Canyon Farms, described the change as working very well for the company, adding that it is in everybody’s interests for Oregon to develop clear state guidelines governing how employees go about deciding on union representation. Continue reading Farm workers protest worker treatment, shed light on beef feeding practices at Beef Northwest United Farm Workers will be protesting at Whole Foods in the Pearl District this Saturday; while I can’t go myself due to a prior commitment, I hope this event is strongly supported by our community because I think that the people that grow our food should be treated justly. Spotted on the Portland Grassroots Media Camp’s site (mentioned in PGMC schedule); announcement below with more details is courtesy of Jobs With Justice.
Update: Steve Witte of United Farm Workers emailed me the following in response to my request for more information about why workers are protesting.
Thanks, Steve! The Housing Authority of Portland will be selling a number of single-family residences and smaller multi-family residences and moving the subsidized households elsewhere in order to stay within budget, reports the Oregonian [story]. One wonders–why is there no consideration of a meaningful home-buying program to let the current tenants work on owning their home? Selling these homes to the tenants might not raise as much money as selling them to developers, but there would be that many fewer people in permanent need of subsidized assistance, which must be worth something. Right? The Oregonian has a story this morning about Commissioner Sam Adams’ plan to extend streetcar services to the eastside. As a Portland resident, I feel kind of upset. Here’s why. I live in the southwest, near Hillsdale and Multnomah Village. I work near Washington Square in Tigard. The 4.5 mile drive takes me about 10 minutes. I would love to take public transportation, regardless of the fact that my car has a pretty small carbon footprint. However, taking the bus would add over an hour to my commute. Over the course of a week, that extra time spent on buses would be equivalent to working another day. If I worked downtown, which is about 7 miles away, I could get there by public transportation in almost half the time it would take me to take the bus to where I work now. I think it’s time to start looking at better public transportation options for those of us who don’t already have a streetcar line within a 15-minute stroll of our high-rise condos. Please? That’s got to be good news for about…everyone. My stack of summer reads includes a couple books on poverty that I borrowed from the library. One is Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, and the other is Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream, a collection of essays with which Senator John Edwards is loosely associated. Both make my heart happy by containing a colon in the title, and both have inspired me to pick up my phone in the middle of a sentence and call someone–anyone–to talk about the contents. So far, though, both do little to challenge capitalism itself as necessarily creating conditions of poverty and uncertainty. For Sachs, the consumerism of wealthy nations is the ticket out of poverty for the poorest nations, even if that ticket is just for a round trip to a sweatshop that will pick up and move elsewhere as soon as the workers start to ask for a bit more a la Oliver Twist. Elizabeth Warren’s essay in the Ending Poverty anthology contains some of the more remarkable assertions I’ve read about how Americans spend their money. It’s counterintuitive and thought-provoking, and I’ll write about it more later. I thought I must have misheard OPB reporters this morning when they discussed the release of the hospital cost comparison website; it didn’t show up on oregon.gov’s main page until later today. The home page for the project follows the state’s standard unnavigable format, which of course means that the most important information for consumers is also the hardest to locate and access. However, after several minutes of browsing around and following poorly-described links, I found it: you can compare hospital rates on a variety of procedures here. Interesting things:
|