Kennedy Jobs & Justice Initiative

Building a just, equal, and resilient post-COVID America

“COVID-19 helped expose the deep injustice of our modern economy. Recovering and rebuilding from this moment will be the work of a generation. We have the opportunity to tear down what was badly broken and build something better, fairer, and stronger in its place.”

- Joe Kennedy III

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on our economy. Over 45 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past three months. Just over 50 percent of working-age Americans have jobs, the lowest number in 70 years. Almost 20 percent of all renting families in this country are at risk of eviction by the end of September. An estimated 25 million people have lost or will lose their employer-provided health insurance during this pandemic.

The profound injustices and inadequacies of American capitalism have been laid bare by COVID-19, from the systemic theft of wealth from Black and Brown Americans to fifty years of policy choices that left working families behind while corporate profits soared.

For decades, this country has failed to center economic justice and equality in federal policy-making. Now, as we undertake the difficult work of recovering and rebuilding, we have not only the obligation to provide immediate relief to American workers — but the responsibility to rethink, refashion, and rebuild our economy into something better.

This will be the work of a generation.

The Kennedy Jobs and Justice Initiative (JJI) is a massive national mobilization and federal hiring program to ease our unemployment crisis and stimulate economic growth, while simultaneously meeting national crisis response and recovery needs. It seeks to rebuild our economy so we are never again caught as unprepared and vulnerable as we were when COVID-19 hit. And it works to reorient our system towards people over profits, where prosperity is shared by all, not hoarded for few.

This program contains two key phases for immediate and sustained recovery:

1. Short-Term Worker Activation: Millions of recently unemployed Americans stand ready and willing to confront myriad crises exposed by COVID-19. Under the JJI’s immediate crisis response program, states, localities, and tribal communities will identify areas of need and create hiring opportunities for safe jobs that are critical to our reemergence from this pandemic. Such jobs will be funded and coordinated under the JJI. Funds may also be used by municipal governments to help retain existing public employees with a focus on community development, including teachers, firefighters, and other public servants. The federal government will provide funding directly to states to carry out those goals.

2. Long-Term Public Works Program: As we emerge from the acute health crisis, the JJI will implement a large-scale public works and federal hiring program that puts Americans to work, provides economic and health stability, and builds the foundation for a just, equal, and resilient post-COVID America. Partnering with community colleges and other local education entities, labor unions, workforce development organizations, and re-entry programs for formerly incarcerated individuals, the JJI would create training programs specifically geared toward increasing rates of minority and women workers in underrepresented fields.

In both the near-term and long-term phases of the JJI, all communities will be eligible for funding and assistance, but priority will be given to a) economically distressed communities, b) communities with the highest rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths, c) communities in which more than half of families live at or below the poverty line, d) communities with an unemployment rate over 20%, e) federally designated environmental justice communities, and f) tribal communities. Any states and localities utilizing JJI funds will be required to submit a plan that outlines how they will improve access to capital for Black and Brown business owners and how they will provide training and assistance in navigating procurement systems. States and localities that do not already award at least 30% of contracts to minority owned businesses will be required to sign a binding agreement that they will double the number of contracts awarded to minority owned businesses within five years.

The JJI is a worker-centered proposal that will codify in federal law a minimum wage of at least $15/hour indexed to inflation, robust workplace protections, equal pay, education benefits modeled after the GI bill, and intentional racial equity policies. It will require that the right to organize and collectively bargain be guaranteed by any private or public sector entity offering employment through the JJI.

The implementation of the JJI will be overseen at the federal level by the JJI Leadership Board, composed of a diverse group of community leaders, academics, members of leading nonprofit organizations, business leaders, labor leaders, community organizers, and government officials from across the nation. Touching nearly every sector of our economy, it will be a joint project of the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, and additional relevant agencies.

The JJI Leadership Board will be responsible for hiring and deploying JJI Directors across the country, tasked with supervising the regional and local implementation of the JJI. Any state or locality accepting assistance from the JJI will be required to employ a Director(s) to collaborate with state and local governments to: guarantee the hiring of diverse and qualified JJI workers in their assigned region; ensure that JJI goals and benchmarks are met and federal funds are being used properly; assist in changing and restructuring programs, policies, and initiatives to refocus on equity; and remove barriers to health, opportunity, and success for every American.

Anti-racism will be central to the mandate of JJI Directors, whose responsibilities will include the implementation of nationwide anti-racism training and education in health care, education, civil and criminal courts, and other sectors utilizing JJI funds. Directors will be empowered to hold mandatory trainings and file complaints regarding structural racism and biases within federal, state, and local governments within the regions and municipalities they serve.

Both the JJI Leadership Board and Directors must be diverse and representative of the communities they seek to serve. Both must reflect a diversity of gender, race, identity, geography, and immigration status, as well as diverse learned and lived backgrounds.

JJI hiring practices will be designed to intentionally rectify racial disparities in unemployment and wages. It will have rigorous evaluation metrics and regular public reporting requirements to Congress. The JJI’s success will be continually evaluated across a number of employment and wage metrics, including rates by race and gender.

The JJI builds on Congressman Kennedy’s “moral capitalism” platform to address the systemic economic inequities that plague our modern economy. It will work in conjunction with his existing proposals for COVID-19 recovery and response, including; the Kennedy/Jayapal Medicare Crisis Program Act to extend health care to all unemployed workers; the Kennedy direct cash payment plan; and the Paycheck Guarantee Act to directly cover worker paychecks.

JJI PHASE ONE: SHORT-TERM WORKER ACTIVATION

The first phase of the JJI would confront the immediate crisis we face by leveraging the skills and commitment of millions of Americans to combat an ongoing pandemic and fortify our public health infrastructure as we continue to navigate acute health care risks. From contact tracing, testing, and sanitizing public spaces to temporary health care infrastructure projects, child care for essential workers, and public service, the need and resources exist to simultaneously strengthen our resilience to a public health threat and put people back to work. Under the JJI, states and localities will help identify the areas of greatest need and the federal government will work to not only hire workers to meet demands, but ensure the health, safety, and economic security of all JJI members. Jobs will target at least five key areas and may include:

Health Care

To fully understand, limit, and control the spread of COVID-19 throughout the United States, we must implement a rigorous strategy to contact trace potential exposures and comprehensively test our communities. Based on the contact tracing plan released in Massachusetts, The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has estimated that in order to expand such a national program to scale, our public health workforce would need to add approximately 100,000 workers. The JJI will help fund nationwide contact tracing efforts, with unemployed and furloughed health care workers given employment priority.

In addition to implementing a national strategy, the JJI would provide robust funding for states to carry out tracing and containment efforts and hire the appropriate number of contact tracers. Beyond tracing measures, the JJI would create a testing strike force that would be equipped to stand up emergency testing sites, along with any necessary supports, in any area of the country experiencing an outbreak.

Participants must meet the needs of the communities they are serving; employees should reflect the diversity of race and ethnicity in their communities, be able to speak multiple languages to interact with the populations they are serving, and include skilled translators.

Additionally, there is a dramatic need for sanitation and custodial workers as the public regains confidence to venture to public facilities. This represents an opportunity for a critical expansion of the service sector, with the wage and benefit protections JJI guarantees. Companies are investing millions in cleaning their workplaces; government must do the same.

Economic Security

For millions of American families, this crisis has ripped the basic building blocks of economic security out from under them. A critical mission of JJI’s first phase is to help ensure every family has the economic essentials needed to survive. It is estimated the current crisis could close as many as 50 percent of child care centers across the country, disproportionately impacting women in the workforce. Without childcare, parents cannot return to work, and our recovery will stall. With this in mind, the JJI would direct a massive federal investment toward the hiring and retention of a 21st century, highly skilled, unionized childcare workforce — through existing or new facilities — that is finally compensated fairly for the essential service they provide.

Food insecurity has also soared in the COVID-19 era. More than a third of Massachusetts families now struggle to put food on the table. Food banks and nutrition assistance programs feed families and keep economic supply chains flowing. SNAP alone provides about $1.70 economic benefit for every $1 spent on food. We must ensure these supply chains and distribution networks remain fully operational and nimble enough to get food to families. JJI would deploy workers to meet the great demand at food banks across the country and to help safely organize, distribute, and deliver sustenance to families in need, including by building new food distribution sites in food deserts.

Manufacturing and Small Business

In response to COVID-19, manufacturing lines have been forced to transform overnight to help supply desperately-needed medical equipment like PPE and ventilators. These sporadic max orders provide no ability for these facilities to sustainably transform, keep workers employed, and keep facilities running.

We must utilize the Defense Production Act (DPA) to support the acquisition of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and medical equipment and provide needed stability to manufacturers and employees by guaranteeing the certainty of a government contract.

The DPA is not only critical to ensuring we have the equipment we need to stay safe and the life-saving medical equipment necessary to care for and treat patients; it will be absolutely essential to replenishing, strengthening, and expanding the Strategic National Stockpile so we are never again caught as unprepared as we were this year.

This is especially critical now as the threat of additional outbreaks and a second wave bear down on communities.

JJI will be deployed to scale up the domestic manufacturing infrastructure we need for crisis response and recovery. In concert with state and local governments, it will hire skilled workers to support local manufacturers in meeting our national need for medical equipment and supplies. Additionally, the JJI will fund union apprenticeships, expand community college and voc-tech educational opportunities, and increase access to workforce development and career centers for recently unemployed workers.

With the nature of the workforce changing, businesses need time and flexibility to adapt. A local coffee shop can no longer necessarily rely on the morning rush to make its business model work and may need assistance to bring an online ordering system to fruition or adjust to a delivery-service model. JJI workers will be placed via regional

Small Business Administrations to assist small businesses navigating new ordering systems and online models while retrofitting the interior and exterior of businesses to follow social distancing guidelines.

Social Service Agencies

As we face a wave of evictions, surge of overdoses, medical bankruptcy, and domestic abuse claims as a result of COVID-19, the JJI will support social service organizations standing on the frontlines with families and patients. With an 11.4% increase in overdose deaths in the first quarter of this year, the JJI will work to support community health centers, social workers, and other behavioral health providers working to increase access to substance use disorder treatment. In recent weeks as Americans have been instructed to shelter in place, survivors of domestic violence have been unable to report assaults in their homes. As cases skyrocket and states reconsider plans to reopen, the JJI will help staff crisis call centers, assist community-based organizations with outreach campaigns, and work closely with local governments to support families and children.

With an oncoming avalanche of evictions and an urgent need for protective orders against abusers, the JJI will create a Legal Aid Corps to ensure working families can access justice.

Before COVID-19 arrived, a Justice Gap routinely penalized low-income Americans. JJI workers with legal backgrounds, including new or experienced lawyers, paralegals, court navigators, translators or supervised law students, will work in legal aid organizations and communities throughout the country and assist individuals and families in cases involving their basic human needs like healthcare, safety, sustenance, shelter, and family. This program can and should focus hiring on new law school graduates and must include student loan forgiveness.

Public Service and Federal Aid

In the wake of a national crisis, federal assistance programs are more essential than ever before — not just their funding, but their disbursement. Estimates show that nearly 14 million Americans have not been able to access unemployment assistance because of overwhelmed unemployment offices and a lack of broadband access in rural and urban neighborhoods. By employing out-of-work citizens at unemployment offices, JJI will both put people back to work and bring relief to those who need it. Local small business offices have buckled under similar strain, presenting another opportunity to immediately employ thousands to support our community businesses. JJI workers will also assist families applying for SNAP and WIC benefits, as well as housing assistance programs and health care coverage.

In the weeks and months ahead, millions of Americans will head to the ballot box to cast their votes in municipal, state, and federal elections. To ensure their health and safety, and the sanctity of our democracy, the JJI will work with local election officials to employ tens of thousands of poll workers and election officials to maintain access to the ballot box. In states that have passed vote-by-mail or increased access to absentee voting, workers will be deployed on a voter education campaign to ensure any necessary information about new procedures is readily available to the public. Specifically, resources will be directed toward historically marginalized communities.

Finally, under JJI, the federal government will expand the mission of our marquee national service programs, AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, to align with the current crisis. We can put a new generation of public servants to work on projects cleaning our communities, protecting our environment, delivering groceries to food insecure neighbors, conducting outreach to isolated seniors, providing health care and testing to patients, and building temporary infrastructure.

JJI PHASE TWO: LONG-TERM PUBLIC WORKS PROGRAM

By any economist’s metric, the pain of COVID-19 will be with our families, communities, businesses, and economy for years to come, exacerbating the existing inequities in our modern economy. We know that the unemployment rate will remain stubbornly high. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses may never reopen their doors, leaving millions of employees with nowhere to turn. Families will feel the hurt of lost wages, lost savings, lost homes, and lost opportunity for a generation. In many of these communities, particularly communities of color, these stubborn economic inequities have been compounded by the pandemic through higher rates of unemployment and small business closures.

Only a nationwide economic mobilization can change our course. As we transition from recovery to rebuild, the second phase of the JJI will support the boldest public works program in our nation’s history.

Once again, employment needs will be identified by local leaders on the ground while demand and worker protections will be met by the federal government. Efforts will target communities of need, and include a long overdue rebuild of our infrastructure, a massive acceleration of our transition toward a green economy to combat the climate crisis, and a proactive preparation for future pandemics and natural disasters. States and localities will leverage existing job centers funded by federal grants that will identify projects critical to community growth, while not displacing any existing employment opportunities.

Workers participating in the JJI will be entitled to a minimum wage of at least $15/hour indexed to inflation, Medicare coverage, paid sick and family leave, retirement benefits, the right to organize, and high-quality child care. Whether laying fiber optic wires, rebuilding infrastructure, building clean energy projects, ramping up domestic manufacturing, educating our students, or strengthening our healthcare system, the JJI will adhere to the Davis Bacon Act and project labor agreements, as well as coordinate closely with labor unions to fill those jobs with highly qualified workers and strong labor protections. Projects should result in carbon neutral or carbon negative infrastructure, with the result helping reduce carbon emissions as we transition to a climate-resilient society.

Projects should focus on these key components of rebuilding our nation’s economy:

Equitable Transportation and Infrastructure

Upgrading our national infrastructure presents an opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of jobs paying Davis Bacon Act prevailing wages while stimulating economic growth and addressing some of the profound inequities in today’s modern economy. JJI funding priorities will include modernizing public transit stations and vehicles; surface transportation projects (including repair and maintenance of existing roads/transit); creating an electric vehicle charging network; upgrading airports to enhance safety and security; expanding broadband/5G infrastructure to ensure universal access; repairing crumbling schools; upgrading and replacing water and sewer systems, focused on communities with elevated lead levels; expanding our public housing stock; upgrading our existing public housing stock to be more energy efficient; and investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, particularly in frontline communities.

Clean Energy and Environment

The JJI will deploy a Clean Energy Jobs Corps to support off- and onshore wind development, solar panel installation, energy storage, energy efficiency and building retrofits, cleanup of toxic sites, urban farm and community garden installations, national park maintenance, and environmental justice. Offshore wind in New England alone could put thousands of people into jobs supporting the building and servicing of this effort. Leveraging programs like the Massachusetts Pathways Out Of Poverty, for example, the JJI will scale initiatives that utilize clean energy development to empower communities of color.

COVID-19 has devastated the clean energy industry, which lost at least 17% of its workforce — nearly 600,000 jobs. As the world confronts the existential threat of climate change, the JJI will withhold funding and support for states that choose to prioritize and subsidize fossil fuels. The JJI will be deployed to ensure that we do not lose critical ground in our urgent transition to a green economy. It will closely heed the complementary goals of a Green New Deal and ensure strong labor protections like the use of project labor agreements and extending Davis Bacon prevailing wage requirements to renewable tax credits.

Domestic Manufacturing and R&D

Utilizing the nationwide domestic manufacturing model created under Congressman Kennedy’s Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act, the JJI will put Americans back to work addressing our most pressing collective research and development needs.

From restocking the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), to developing next-generation PPE, antimicrobial and disease-resistant materials, and investing in biopharmaceutical supply chain development, research, and resilience, the American manufacturing and R&D workforce is key to our recovery and protection from future crises. JJI workers can begin to reclaim our global standing as a leading manufacturer so that in times of crisis, we are never forced to rely on foreign manufacturing again.

Health Care

Under the JJI, a pandemic reserve force will be trained and prepared to mobilize and provide emergency health care for any COVID-19 or future pandemic outbreaks. This pandemic has inexplicably resulted in job loss for more than 1.5 million health care workers as hospitals, community health centers, and local providers reached their breaking points. Working closely with nationwide labor unions, the JJI will educate, train, and place out-of-work providers in underserved communities, particularly those hardest hit by COVID-19, with a focus on sectors that have long been understaffed, like behavioral health and primary care.

Education

Students of all ages have been forced to undergo a radical shift in their learning experience as a result of COVID-19. Budget shortfalls should not be used to justify the closures of public education opportunities or teacher layoffs. If anything, this moment demands a historic investment in fortifying our public schools and growing our teacher workforce to reduce class sizes and strengthen educational equity.

In a new age with smaller class sizes and enhanced safety precautions, the JJI will support states recruiting and training new teachers with robust worker protections and living wages. Additionally, to ensure the safety of students, teachers, and faculty, the JJI will mobilize a school sanitizing workforce that will keep shared spaces clean and safe. Finally, the JJI will hire workers to staff before and after care programs focused on confronting a widening achievement gap that has held back students of color, English language learners, and female students for decades. In communities with higher education programs for aspiring teachers, the JJI will work with colleges and universities to connect undergraduate and graduate students with schools in need. As the JJI activates, it will work closely with teachers’ unions to ensure student and educator needs are being met in a safe and effective manner with a focus on educational equity.

Community and Culture

The JJI would redeploy and expand AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and the corporation for National and community service to focus on projects critical to the community good, both domestically and internationally in countries and regions without active outbreaks. JJI workers will reflect the communities they serve. Qualifying projects would be carbon neutral or carbon negative, and would strengthen local communities, either by creating clean, safe spaces for citizens or enhancing recreational and educational opportunities for people of all ages. For young people, the JJI would work with states to create a Summer Job Corps to tackle community-based projects.

Small Business

As economies begin to reopen, small businesses with smaller cash reserves will be at an even greater competitive disadvantage to national and international chains that had already pushed out many Main Street businesses. With estimates showing that over 7 million small businesses are at risk of closing in the coming months, JJI workers can leverage federal resources to help small businesses retrofit floor plans and facilities to protect businesses and consumers. The JJI can also utilize existing federal programs, like the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) and Small Business Development Centers, to directly infuse additional federal resources into helping small businesses and manufacturers in local communities across all 50 states and territories.

JJI workers in the small business support programs will prioritize projects targeted toward lifting up Black, women, and minority owned businesses, which have long faced harmful inequities due to barriers in access to capital and resources, as well as a lack of prioritization in federal contracting.

Additionally, the JJI will create a Coding Corps leveraging workers with the technology skills needed to assist small businesses navigating new ordering systems and online models. The Coding Corps will provide training to give workers from underrepresented groups the skills they need to enter the technology sector. Once the pandemic is over, the Coding Corps will expand its mission to use technology to address systemic problems such as poverty and climate change.

CONCLUSION

Our country is in the midst of a devastating global pandemic with no clear end in sight. Some states, desperate to return to normal, are now seeing soaring increases of COVID-19 cases, leading to more deaths, more shutdowns, and more uncertainty. This unprecedented time has highlighted the cracks in our systems, the inequities in our policies and programs, and the tough road ahead as we rebuild and recommit to a fairer, more just country. The Kennedy Justice and Jobs Initiative is a bold and progressive vision for a better, more equitable, post-pandemic America. We cannot again commit the same mistakes that have left our broken systems intact and far too many Americans behind.

This proposal is a working, breathing document ready to be changed and shaped by ample feedback from all, especially those impacted most by decades of policy failures: working families, Black and Brown communities, organized labor, small business and our essential workers, all of whom have been denied a seat at the table for too long.

Under the JJI, we will prioritize equity as we put America back to work. Out of this devastation, we have an extraordinary opportunity. Our country can choose to rally together, to make good on our nation’s promises and ideals, and recommit to a ‘more perfect union’ and brighter future for everyone who calls it home.

We will build something better, together.