NEWS
MyEagleNews.com
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
A13
Food bank sees spike in demand
By COURTNEY VAUGHN
Oregon Capital Bureau
EO Media Group
Emergency room personnel hustle to care for patients at St. Charles
Bend in August.
New union drive
at St. Charles
By SUZANNE ROIG
The Bulletin
BEND — More than half of
the St. Charles Health System
hospice and home health nurses
have formally asked for a union
election with the National Labor
Relations Board.
The nurses filed with the labor
board after the health system
declined to recognize their right
to join the Oregon Nurses Asso-
ciation without a formal vote.
The union already represents
about 1,200 nurses at multiple St.
Charles Health System facilities,
according to a union statement
released Wednesday.
Nurses say they need a union
for collective bargaining because
they have been feeling a push
from the health system to increase
productivity. On average, a home
health nurse will see five to six
patients a day and those patients
can be anywhere from Gilchrist
to Warm Springs, said Karin
Arthur, a registered nurse who is
a home health nurse.
“We recognize and respect the
right or our employees, includ-
ing our nurses, to freely choose
whether they wish to be repre-
sented by a union,” said Lisa
Goodman, St. Charles Health
System spokeswoman. “We also
respect the National Labor Rela-
tions Board processes that allow
our employees the opportunity
to participate in a secret ballot
election following the NLRB’s
review of the proposed bargain-
ing unit.”
Because a majority of the
39 workers in these two divi-
sions signed union cards indicat-
ing they supported a union, the
nurses wanted to bypass a labor
board vote.
“Ever since all the trouble
with the finances came out, the
health system has been push-
ing onto the nurses efficiency,”
said Arthur. “They want us to see
more patients, but not giving us
more time.”
For home health care, each
visit takes about an hour. There’s
travel time, and nurses have to
record their actions and obser-
vations. Sometimes they have to
contact the physician if there’s a
change needed.
By forming a union, the nurses
will be able to ensure that they
receive fair treatment, access to
due process and adequate com-
pensation, according to the union
statement.
The health system also is fac-
ing union representation from
doctors at the St. Charles Medi-
cal Group who said they wanted
a bigger role in establishing
patient care. A vote has not been
held yet for that union, which ini-
tially filed in June and again in
August. Calling themselves the
Central Oregon Providers Net-
work, the group of physicians,
nurse practitioners, physician
assistants and other health care
workers, signed cards indicating
support to unionize, citing man-
agement choices, financial deci-
sions and quality of patient care
as their chief concerns.
The union is under the
umbrella of the American Fed-
eration of Teachers, a national
union that includes 200,000
health care members and 1.7 mil-
lion teachers.
SALEM — It’s been more than
50 years since the White House
announced a plan to address food,
nutrition and hunger, but a new federal
strategy aims to curb food scarcity and
diet-related disease.
On Sept. 27, the Biden-Har-
ris administration rolled out plans to
expand Supplemental Nutrition Assis-
tance Program benefits and tax credits,
while increasing healthy eating and
exercise among Americans.
The announcement couldn’t come
soon enough. In Oregon, there’s been
a sharp increase in the number of peo-
ple who face food insecurity since the
pandemic.
The Oregon Food Bank went from
serving 860,000 people in Oregon and
Southwest Washington in 2019 to 1.2
million people in 2021. This year, the
organization expects to help 1.5 mil-
lion people.
“We’re at historic levels of hun-
ger,” said Susannah Morgan, CEO of
the Oregon Food Bank. She said food
assistance programs should be consid-
ered the last tier in America’s social
safety net program. If more people
are relying on food pantries or federal
food benefits, that means the whole
system is askew.
“The best defense against (pov-
erty) is offense: living wages, access
to housing, to food, and when we look
around, we are not meeting the needs
of everyone,” Morgan said. “The final
line of defense is the food assistance
program. When you see more people
asking for food it’s because the social
safety nets aren’t working. I think
we’re a warning sign.”
Morgan notes that the majority of
people the Food Bank serves have
jobs and income, but aren’t bringing
in enough to comfortably pay bills and
buy groceries each month. With infla-
tion and a dramatic increase in rent
prices over the past two years, people
are feeling the pinch.
“There are a lot of folks living
with food insecurity,” Morgan said.
“They’re living on a fixed income
and it’s never enough. They’re mak-
ing trade-offs between paying for
heating or food, or medicine or food.
The root cause of poverty is systemic
inequities.”
President Biden’s announcement
this week came with an ambitious
goal: ending hunger, while increasing
healthy eating and physical activity by
123RF Photo
Oregon Food Bank officials say the need for food assistance in the state is at “his-
toric” levels.
2030, in an effort to reduce diet-related
diseases and health disparities.
To get there, the president proposes
changes to food labeling on the front
of packages, updating nutrition criteria
for healthy meals, expanding incen-
tives for fruit and vegetables in SNAP
benefits, reducing sodium in the food
supply and testing out meals medi-
cally tailored to patients in the Medi-
care program, among other measures.
“More than 50 years since the first
White House Conference on Food,
Nutrition and Health, the U.S. has yet
to end hunger and is facing an urgent,
nutrition-related health crisis — the
rising prevalence of diet-related dis-
eases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity,
hypertension and certain cancers,”
Biden’s White House announcement
states. “The consequences of food
insecurity and diet-related diseases are
significant, far reaching, and dispro-
portionately impact historically under-
served communities.”
That’s a step in the right direction,
the Oregon Food Bank CEO said, but
addressing the root cause of hunger
and empowering people to buy health-
ier food will take more than an expan-
sion of welfare programs.
Morgan said she sees stronger pro-
grams in place now, compared with
two years ago, including the expan-
sion of a crucial benefit during the
pandemic: the child tax credit.
President Biden’s plan calls for
pushing Congress to permanently
extend the expanded Child Tax Credit
and Earned Income Tax Credit while
raising the federal minimum wage to
$15 an hour and making sure more
people are able to access health insur-
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ance coverage through Medicaid.
The Child Tax Credit — an exist-
ing federal benefit put in place in 1997
that allows households with dependent
children to receive a credit on their
taxes — was expanded with the 2021
American Rescue Plan Act. Accord-
ing to the White House, the expan-
sion “helped cut child poverty nearly
in half” while reducing food insecu-
rity by nearly 26%, leading to the low-
est rates of childhood hunger ever
recorded.
According to the National Confer-
ence of State Legislatures, 28.2 mil-
lion people claimed the tax credit in
2017, with the average filer receiving
a $998 credit.
But even an economy that has seen
wages increase along with demand for
employees is still struggling to prevent
a large portion of people from needing
social services. That’s largely because
of federal rules tied to SNAP benefits,
formerly known as food stamps, that
cut off many immigrants from getting
help.
“As a nation, our single biggest
safety net program for addressing hun-
ger is SNAP,” Morgan noted. “By fed-
eral law, SNAP is only available to
people who have been legal citizens of
the United States for 60 months. That
means 112,000 of our neighbors in
Oregon aren’t getting help.”
“I just fundamentally believe that
food is a human right,” Morgan said,
emphatically. “It should not rely on
the color of your skin, who you love
or where you were born. The richest
country in the nation should be able
to ensure that everybody has enough
food to eat.”