VIDEO: Booker Discusses Impacts of COVID-19 on American Workers and Small Businesses

Booker: “I live in a community at the poverty line where people who’ve missed one paycheck, they can’t make a rent paycheck, they can’t make a car payment, their lives spiral out of control”

WASHINGTON, DC – Today at a Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee hearing on the Coronavirus, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) highlighted how COVID-19 is impacting workers in communities across our nation, along with exposing vulnerabilities in the supply chain for American small businesses. During his questioning, Booker pointed to our nation’s overreliance on foreign countries across our supply chain and highlighted the need to build more manufacturing capacity in the United States.

“This is an obvious area where we should have bipartisan commitment to fill these vulnerabilities and actually build more American manufacturing.” Booker said during the hearing.  “You cannot just flip a switch and have the manufacturing capacity here.”

During the hearing, Booker announced that he will be reintroducing legislation, the Scale-Up Manufacturing Investment Company Act, to increase access to capital for U.S. entrepreneurs looking to scale-up and commercialize their advanced manufacturing operations.

Booker’s full remarks are available here

Booker also discussed the impact of COVID-19 on the economic security of American workers, including the need to strengthen policies like paid sick days and family leave.

“I live in a community at the poverty line where people who’ve missed one paycheck, they can’t make a rent paycheck, they can’t make a car payment, their lives spiral out of control,” Booker continued. “So telling a food service worker, for example, to stay home for two weeks is just not going to happen.”

“Eighty percent of our food service workers do not have paid family leave. Every year we see the spread of flu and like that, because they’re handling our food. Right now in this crisis, we cannot bend the curve, unless we find a way to make it so people can stay home without putting themselves in impending [financial] doom,” Booker concluded.

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