By DIRK VANDERHART/Oregon Public Broadcasting

SALEM — Striking workers in Oregon could receive state unemployment payments under a bill that is shaping up as the latest showdown between labor interests and employers in Salem.

The two sides don’t agree on much.

Unions say that Senate Bill 916 would extend a crucial lifeline to employees fighting for better working conditions. They argue that granting striking workers more stability will force employers to a fair agreement sooner.

“SB 916 simply and modestly levels the playing field a notch by helping make sure that workers are not starved into a contract that perpetuates the ills of our society at large,” Graham Trainor, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, said in a hearing on Thursday.

Trainor’s organization represents more than 300,000 workers from a huge swath of unions – from teachers and firefighters to electricians and farmworkers. Oregon AFL-CIO requested SB 916, and has attracted some influential Democratic sponsors, including the majority leaders of both the House and Senate.

Business groups and city governments, meanwhile, told the Senate Labor and Business Committee that the bill could bring negative consequences. They predicted more frequent and longer strikes if workers are able to access weekly payments that can range from $196 to $836 a week.

As a result, public employers – which reimburse the state for any unemployment benefits paid for former workers – said costs would shoot up during strikes, and could spur legal action. Private businesses, which typically pay into the unemployment system via a quarterly or annual tax, warned the impact of longer strikes could be far reaching. The bill would apply to workers in the public and private sector.

“It could mean store closures, fuel station closures, pharmacy closures, interruption to home delivery for those who can’t leave their home, an increase in grocery and goods prices,” said Amanda Dalton, a lobbyist for the Northwest Grocery Retail Association.

Striking workers in most states aren’t able to receive unemployment benefits that are typically available to employees who lose their jobs, but Salem is not the only capitol having this debate. New York and New Jersey already allow strike participants to be paid unemployment if a dispute lasts at least 14 days, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Delaware are among states considering similar policies.

A proposal in Washington state this year would allow striking workers to access up to four weeks of payments. A similar bill failed last year, after clearing the state’s House of Representatives.

Oregon’s bill differs from some other states by allowing workers to access benefits after being off the job for a week, rather than two. How the state’s roughly $6 billion Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund might be impacted by SB 916 was a key point of debate Thursday.

Drawing on past strike activity in Oregon, the state’s Employment Department predicts that the bill would increase unemployment insurance payments by $5.3 million during the 2025-27 biennium. That’s a small fraction of payouts from the fund – expected to top $800 million this year alone – and wouldn’t be enough to impact tax rates, according to Lindsi Leahy, the director of the state’s unemployment division.

The state also predicted that public employers, which directly reimburse the unemployment fund for payments tied to employees, would see increased costs of $3.5 million.

But Republican lawmakers and business opponents questioned the reliability of those predictions.

“If the employees that are involved with the strike all of a sudden now have income, I’m just going to put on record now that I think that $5 million is going to be significantly underestimated,” said state Sen. Cedric Hayden, R-Fall Creek.

Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham questioned what the bill might mean for public agencies that are already facing tight budgets. He asked, for instance, how much Portland Public Schools would have had to pay out in unemployment benefits during a nearly monthlong teachers strike in 2023 if the bill were in effect. Leahy said she could not say.

SB 916 lands in Salem at a time of notable labor unrest in Oregon. Aside from the 2023 Portland teachers strike, Portland-area Fred Meyer workers struck for six days last year. And a 26-day strike by nurses who work at Providence facilities around the state is still going, but could be winding down.

“Striking is the last thing any healthcare worker wants to do, especially in the emergency department where lives are on the line every minute,” said Gina Ottinger, a nurse at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland who is currently on strike. “But when management refuses to listen to the safety concerns we raise, when they won’t negotiate in good faith to improve our staffing, address unsafe working conditions and issues with patient care or provide fair pay, we have no choice but to take action.”

Donna Marks, another supporter of the bill, told lawmakers about her experience striking against employment conditions at a Nabisco facility in Portland in 2021.

“To say this was a choice would be false,” said Marks, who spoke of taking a second job and fretting over health insurance coverage during the strike. “The choice was really between staying in an unsafe job where we were forced to work days and weeks on end, or to quit and allow a new worker to be subjected to that same treatment – all while the company made record-breaking profits.”

Marks said that the contract she and her colleagues ultimately agreed to “had many flaws.”

“There’s reason to believe it passed because so many of my co-workers across the country couldn’t hold out any longer,” she said.