Oregon Capital Chronicle ("Report: Harney County has highest Covid-19 death rate on West Coast"):
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A Poor People’s Pandemic Report 2022 shows that 36 people died in Harney County between February 2020 and this February, giving the county a death rate of 487 per 100,000 people. That’s That’s higher than any other county in Oregon, Washington or California.
Imperial County in southern California, where 860 people died over the two-year period, came next with 475 deaths per 100,000.
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Overall, Oregon, Washington and California had among the lowest Covid death rates in the country.
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The Oregon Health Authority said Oregon fared much better than many states because so many Oregonians wore masks and followed other Covid mandates. “Our Covid-19 strategy helped to save lives and kept cases and hospitalizations lower than in other states,” Rudy Owens, an agency spokesman, said in an email.

The report considered vaccination rates but said they didn’t explain variation in death rates.

“Average vaccination rates are in general higher in the highest income counties than in the middle- and low-income counties, however these differences do not explain the whole variation in death rates in the later waves of the pandemic,” the report said.

Poverty and demographics wound together as the common thread, the report said.

“Counties with the highest death rates are poorer than counties with lower death rates, with higher percentages of people of color,” the report said. “The 300+ counties with the highest death rates have a poverty rate of 45%, which is 1.5 times higher than in counties with lower death rates.”

The health authority said the pandemic made it clear that not everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy.

“This includes people of color, people with low incomes, people who identify as LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and people who live in rural areas of the state,” Owens said. “People in these communities face considerable barriers due to inequities in the social and physical infrastructures that affect health.”

Nic Calvin, director of Harney County’s Public Health Department, said poverty could have been a factor in the county’s death rate.

“In terms of access to the vaccine, it’s completely free so we’ve tried to break down any barriers,” Calvin said. “Once a person got Covid, poverty could have been a factor” in the severity of the disease.

The report found that in Harney County, nearly 40% were living in poverty, defined as a maximum of $2,265 a month for one person and $4,625 a month for a family of four.

In Josephine County, which had the second highest death rate in the state at 354 deaths per 100,000, nearly 44% were living in poverty, the report found. In Malheur County, which had the third highest death rate at 330 deaths per 100,000 in the two-year time span, the report found that 48% were living in poverty.

Calvin said Harney County’s low population – about 7,300 people – could have skewed the numbers.

“We’re such a small population,” Calvin. “If we have an additional five people die, that puts our per-capita death rate higher.”

Other eastern Oregon counties

Other eastern Oregon counties also have low populations, and among the lowest vaccination rates in the state. Lake County has the lowest vaccination rate in the state, with 46% of adults receiving one dose, according to the Oregon Health Authority. Malheur, Grant, Gilliam and Baker come next in that order. Harney County has the sixth lowest rate: 56% of adults have had at least one dose.

“Like most eastern Oregon counties, there was some resistance to getting vaccinated due to the political nature of the vaccine,” Calvin said. “We have had vaccinations available every day basically since the vaccine came out.”
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The groups behind the report hope it will rally members of Congress and President Joe Biden to do more to help poor people.

“The findings of this report reveal neglect, and sometimes intentional decisions, to not focus on the poor,” said Bishop William Barber II, president of the nonprofit advocacy group, Repairers of the Breach. “It is further evidence why we have called for the president to meet, at the White House, with a diverse delegation of poor and low-wealth people, religious leaders and economists to put addressing poverty and low wealth front and center.”

Salem Statesman Journal ("Election 2022: Meet the candidates for Oregon labor commissioner")

Oregon voters will be choosing a key enforcer of workers’ rights this year. Whoever wins the race for labor commissioner will be in charge of an agency with a $35 million budget and more than 100 employees.
The Bureau of Labor and Industries enforces wage and hour claims and other worker protections. It also supports apprenticeship programs for Oregonians seeking job training and enforces protections against discrimination in housing and public places.
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Eight people are trying to become labor commissioner this year. These are the candidates:

Aaron Baca, reforestation company owner

Baca, of Cornelius, says that as a contractor and former electrician he understands both the struggles of small businesses and what it’s like to be part of a union. When he relocated to Oregon from California, he says it was too difficult for him as a journeyman electrician to get qualifications to do similar work in Oregon.
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Baca said he has not managed a budget of BOLI’s size but that he has worked as a manager.

Brent Barker, real estate broker

Barker, of Aloha, could not be reached for comment by deadline.

On his website, he says his campaign “will work with business and labor to encourage and promote high paying jobs to Oregon; protect workers’ rights and improve Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) social media public service ratings.” His website also says he wants to work with schools to “enhance” job training.

Cheri Helt, former state legislator and restaurant owner

Helt, a restaurateur and former state lawmaker from Bend, cites her experience as a legislator, business owner and school board member as qualifications. As a member of the Bend-La Pine School Board, Helt said she worked to pass Measure 98 in 2016, which dedicated state money to career and technical education.
“We now have a designated line item in our budget for career and technical education to high schools,” Helt said. “But what we haven't done is really captured the pipeline from those career and technical education programs into high-paying jobs.”
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Helt also points to her experience running a business, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses had to adapt to rapidly changing regulations.
She says she also wants to use her understanding of state laws to work on workforce housing issues. Oregonians across the state struggle to afford housing, especially in Bend, an outdoors town with a booming real estate market.

Chris Henry, truck driver

At midnight on Sept. 9, 2021, Henry, who has been a Teamsters freight truck driver for 18 years, pulled off the highway to file to run for Labor Commissioner the first minute that registration opened.
That ended up not working, and he had to wait until he got home. He and one other candidate, Robert Neuman, filed on Sept. 9, according to Secretary of State records. The perennial candidate – who says he also has run for governor, treasurer, attorney general, Congress and the Tualatin Valley Water District – is now looking to help his fellow workers as labor commissioner.
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Henry said. He wants to see a higher minimum wage, which he says he would use a statewide platform as labor commissioner to advocate for, and wants to require companies to provide diversity training.
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Casey Kulla, county commissioner and farmer

As a county commissioner in Yamhill County since 2019, Kulla says he has worked with a range of people with varying political beliefs to improve government services, and wants to bring that skillset to statewide leadership.
For instance, when the state-mandated vaccines for health care workers, he helped the county come up with an agreement – over the course of many hours of discussion – that Kulla said was respectful of the workers but also complied with the mandate.
He thinks that BOLI can better inform Oregonians of their rights.
In recent years, the state Legislature has passed new policies enshrining new protections for workers, like requiring overtime for farmworkers and creating a new program for people to take paid family and medical leave when they welcome a new child or care for a sick loved one. BOLI has the responsibility for enforcing those rights.
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Kulla says he also wants the agency to step up its enforcement of apprenticeship programs and wage and hour laws. In early 2021, the Oregon Center for Public Policy published research finding that Oregon businesses paid penalties to the state in only 1% of cases where a worker’s wage theft claim was found to be valid.
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And Kulla wants to figure out how to reduce the workload for the agency's civil rights investigators. The bureau gives equal priority to each case, and the pandemic has also resulted in high workloads per worker, Kulla said. He said addressing that might mean increasing the number of workers the agency has to do that work, but also could mean providing investigators withtechnological tools to do their jobs more efficiently.
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Robert Neuman, worker from Baker County

Neuman, who says he works to help manage businesses, says his basic platform is that it should be easier for workers to apply for jobs. He believes the Bureau of Labor and Industries is underfunded and doesn’t have enough workers.
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Asked if there was anything he would change about the agency, he said that he would wait until he was elected to decide what needed to be changed.
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Christina Stephenson, civil rights lawyer

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Having long been interested in public policy, Stephenson researched the law and learned that other Oregon workers could be fired if they took time off to grieve a loved one. So she mobilized the members of her grief support group to advocate at the state capitol for changing the law in 2013.
Since then, Stephenson has provided feedback on legal language in bills that have become state laws, like the new program to provide paid family and medical leave to people who have just had a child or are taking care of a loved one, and a measure to promote equal pay.
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Stephenson says she has a good understanding of what it’s like to run a small business and worry about making payroll, too.
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Stephenson says that overall, the bureau has half the workers that it did 40 years ago and she wants the agency to be strategic about how and where it spends money and enforces workplace protections. Part of that could involve using data to see which industries are least compliant.