Monday Mailing - June 22

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 41 22 June 2020 1.

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Main Spotlight: How Rural Economies Can Leverage the Rise in Remote Work (Sarah Abigail Moehrke) Racism in the Great Outdoors: Oregon’s Natural Spaces Feel Off Limits to Black People (Katie McFall) Coronavirus Concerns Revive Labor Organizing How Workplaces Can Invite Dialogue on Race What’s So Special About Oregon and Utah?

Postal Worker Worries about Threats to Rural ‘Lifeline’ During Pandemic May 2020 Employment: A Happy Surprise Coronavirus Relief Funds to Finance Broadband Projects in Rural Oregon They’re Turning Up for Black Lives Matter in Rural and Small-Town Oregon, Too RESOURCE – Oregon’s Black Pioneers RESOURCE – Streets for Pandemic Response and Recovery

1. Main Spotlight: How Rural Economies Can Leverage the Rise in

Quote of the Week: “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

- William James

Oregon Fast Fact

Oregon’s state soil is Jory soil. Jory soil is identified in nine western Oregon counties on over 300,000 acres. The soil can be recognized by its red color.

In its native state, Jory soil is home to Douglas fir forests. It is used agriculturally for grass seed, Christmas trees, pasture, wheat, berries, filberts and wine grapes.

More info.

Remote Work

COVID-19 has greatly impacted the way we work, including where we work. Estimates today suggest nearly one-third of the workforce is now working remotely due to the pandemic (Kaiser Family Foundation poll).

Further data suggests this will likely stick for many Americans, greatly accelerating a trend that was already present in society. In a recent survey by Garnter, nearly three out of four finance leaders said they plan to move at least 5 percent of their workforce that had previously reported to an office to a remote schedule full-time. According to a report by Upwork, some 73 percent of all companies will have remote workers by 2028.

For downtown, community, and economic developers, remote workers potentially represent a change in how we think of recruitment strategies: shifting away from business and skilled workforce attraction to one that focuses on attracting people through place-based strategies.

Remote workers are typically well paid, and thus bring with them a boost to local spending and investment resources. A CNBC survey shows that a quarter of the roughly four million remote workers in the U.S. make more than $100,000 a year—compared to just 7 percent of the total in-office workforce—and 13 percent of those remote workers are remote full-time.

To access the full story, click here.

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2. Racism in the Great Outdooes: Oregon’s Natural Spaces Feel Off Limits to Black People

Parks and trailheads are slowly reopening, allowing people to once again enjoy the benefits of being in nature while the coronavirus pandemic continues to play out.

But not everyone has the same access to green spaces. Tara Cooper, like many Black people, felt excluded and unwelcomed from a hike in the forests, well before this spring’s closures that were ordered to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Cooper moved to Portland from the San Francisco Bay Area more than eight years ago. She said she fell in love with Oregon’s lush green forests and what seemed like never-ending opportunities to enjoy nature.

But once she arrived, things changed.

“I quickly realized that may not be for me and my son,” Cooper said. “I would love to have been able to go camping more or do more nature things and even do some off the grid camping if the opportunity came up, but I would never do that in Oregon.”

To access the full story, click here.

3. Coronavirus Concerns Revive Labor Organizing

On a crisp May morning in Washington’s Yakima Valley, Blanca Olivares took her break from sorting apples at the Allan Brothers packing facility a little early. Soon, five other workers joined her in the outdoor patio area. Together they waited, disappointment creeping in when more didn’t follow. Little by little, however, employees trickled out. Within the hour, 40 to 50 people had congregated, and the first in a string of labor strikes that would include hundreds of workers at seven fruit packing facilities in the valley had begun. “I didn’t know anything about strikes,” Olivares said, through a translator. “I just knew that if we all put our voices out there, then maybe they would listen to us.”

The labor actions — catalyzed by frustration over inadequate protections and compensation during the COVID-19 pandemic — swiftly grew into a protest against industry working conditions in general, according to Rodrigo Rentería Valencia, an anthropology professor at Central Washington University and member of the Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs, who chronicled the strikes and interviewed dozens of workers. The strikers held out for weeks, their fight demonstrating the nascent power of the region’s agricultural workers and the challenges they face in having their concerns heard.

To access the full story, click here.

4. How Workplaces Can Invite Dialogue on Race

In times of great public debate and turmoil, people often become wary of weighing in, particularly in the workplace. They don’t want to offend anyone or fear getting in trouble for speaking up. This is especially true around sensitive issues of diversity, as fear often paralyzes people into silence.

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But silence only makes the problem worse. To heal divides, we have to listen to and learn from one another. And it’s in workplaces that people are most likely to interact regularly with others whose backgrounds are different from theirs.

To access the full story, click here.

5. What’s So Special About Oregon and Utah?

Last month, The Atlantic science writer, Ed Yong, described the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. as a "patchwork pandemic."

This pattern exists because different states have experienced the coronavirus pandemic in very different ways. In the most severely pummeled places, like New York and New Jersey, COVID-19 is waning. In Texas and North Carolina, it is still taking off. In Oregon and South Carolina, it is holding steady.

Furthermore, in the absence of federal leadership, the patchwork is essentially a 50-state experiment, with governors "freelancing", as Scott Greer, a political scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told NPR on April 17. "You just have to have somebody who can give authoritative guidance, who can give governors cover for taking risky actions, who can deploy federal resources," he said. He was referencing the role of Ron Klain, President Obama's "Ebola czar" in 2014.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Postal Worker Worries about Threats to Rural ‘Lifeline’ During Pandemic

Alex Fields delivers mail to rural communities outside the city limits of Knoxville, Tennessee.

He’s worried that lack of federal support and attempts to privatize the U.S. Postal Service will break the lifeline that the post office provides to rural America.

The Trump administration recently blocked $25 billion in funding for the USPS as part of the CARES Act, instead offering a $10 billion USPS support package on the condition the organization implements changes to its operations, primarily in the form of the increased price of its services. Trump himself threatened to withhold the money late in April. The money would be an extraordinary measure and not part of any regular funding.

Where Fields delivers mail “people rely more on the Postal Service in those areas, even though it’s less mail, less volume.” Some public services like the USPS are designed to serve the needs of a democratic and equitable society, even if that means giving up profits, he said.

To access the full story, click here.

7. May 2020 Employment: A Happy Surprise

This week we got the May 2020 employment report for Oregon. Like the U.S., it was a happy surprise in that jobs grew and unemployment declined. Today I just wanted to highlight the data, update our charts, and introduce a new piece of research. Next week I will follow-up with

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more thoughts on how our office is working through the report’s implications and what it means.

First, the good news is that in May, Oregon added back about 1 out of every 12 jobs lost during earlier in the recession. The state remains in the deepest, or most severe recession on record, with employment data back to 1939. However those losses are no longer mounting based on the latest data. This truly is good economic news!

To access the full story, click here.

8. Coronavirus Relief Funds to Finance Broadband Projects in Rural Oregon

Oregon’s Legislative Emergency Board has allocated $20 million in federal coronavirus relief funding to expand broadband internet availability in rural areas of the state.

Half of the $20 million will go to projects in regions that have no broadband internet access. It will be distributed through the Rural Broadband Capacity Program, which is managed by Business Oregon, the state's economic development agency.

The other half will go to Link Oregon, a nonprofit consortium that includes the State of Oregon and the state’s four research universities working to expand broadband coverage in the public sector, including school districts, health care providers and businesses.

The funding will be used for Phase 2, which focuses on southern and eastern Oregon, including Roseburg, Medford, Ashland, Klamath Falls, The Dalles, Pendleton, La Grande, Ontario and Burns, among other locations.

To access the full story, click here.

9. They’re Turning Up for Black Lives Matter in Rural and Small-Town Oregon, Too In Hood River, 150 people blocked the overpass to an interstate highway.

In La Grande, hundreds of people gathered outside of city hall.

In St. Helens, organizers at first scrapped plans for a planned Black Lives Matter rally due to threats of violence, then decided to persist.

After the caught-on-video killing on May 25 of Minneapolis man George Floyd, who died as a police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, protests broke out all over the country. In some ways they were similar to other large street demonstrations, especially those of the past decade in response to the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police or racist vigilantes.

But demonstrations in the past two weeks have felt different in many ways—including where they happen.

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“I think there’s a lot of energy in rural Oregon,” says Hannah Harrod of the Rural Organizing Project, a nonprofit founded in 1992 as part of the No on 9 campaign, an effort that helped defeat an anti-LGBTQ ballot measure.

To access the full story, click here.

10. RESOURCE – Oregon’s Black Pioneers

For decades, Oregon legally excluded black people from settling in the region. Despite racists laws and attitudes, some came anyway.

“Oregon’s Black Pioneers” examines the earliest African-Americans who lived and worked in the region during the mid-1800s. They came as sailors, gold miners, farmers and slaves. Their numbers were small, by some estimates just 60 black residents in 1850, but they managed to create communities, and in some cases, take on racist laws — and win.

To access this resource, click here.

11. RESOURCE – Streets for Pandemic Response and Recovery

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has published a new playbook for urban streets in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dubbed the “Streets for Pandemic Response and Recovery,” the playbook lays out seven emerging strategies in cities and many other policy choices for streets that can help maintain social distancing protocols and aid businesses. Some of the key strategies outlined in the document include things like slow streets, markets, outdoor dining, and sidewalk extensions.

To access to this resource, click here.

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