Gender Equality
Equal pay, hear what we say. COVID-19 has brought light to the inequality women face even though we are the primary care for our children.
Protecting Working Families
We need to include above livable wages and better benefits with retirement, quality healthcare, and paid time off for vacation and personal days for ALL jobs.
Preserving Small Businesses
We need to look back on policies that prevented monopolies and put them back in place in order to protect communities from corporate greed.
Quality and Free Education
We need to make our funds go towards teachers, extra curricular activities, and social services. Our district has the highest demand for special education and we must represent people with disabilities.
Environmental Protection
Climate change and environmental issues should always be a priority like how our indigenous communities have always prioritized. We need more funding for parks and recreations, community wellness centers, and trees and shade structures to lower energy costs.
Promoting Democracy
We need to promote civic engagement and protect our democracy as more laws get passed unrecognized that hurt our constituents. We must recruit more precinct committee members and need more people to run for office.
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Gender Equality
Arizona is one out of thirteen states who have not passed the Equal Rights Amendment which would help close the significant gender and racial pay gap. We constantly rely on working women, who also often have childcare and other unpaid duties, and need to make sure we are taking leaps to compensate them for their labor. Especially during the pandemic, many women and other people of color experienced declines in full-time year-round work. Sources indicate that the gender pay gap has worsened in America and globally, and that the difference in pay is more pronounced for women of color.
Compared to the benchmark of white and male counterparts, many of these women might work in different industries, have different working hours, or years of experience which could explain a difference in compensation. However, there are also fundamental issues at the heart of the matter like the historical, cultural, social, and systemic biases and discrimination which prevent women and people of color from equal pay.
Women of color are overrepresented in the low wage workforce. Many working women of color are in care or service jobs whose hours are flexible enough to accommodate other forms of labor and unpaid duties such as child and homecare, which they disproportionately shoulder. And, of course, these jobs often don’t provide healthcare or other benefits. While education can help, there is still a gender pay gap at every level of education when compared to their male counterparts.
At this rate, economists are predicting it will take literally hundreds of years for Black and Hispanic women in the United States to attain pay parity. There are many steps we can take at a federal, state, and local level to help push legislation which can help close the gap. We need more policy which enforces equal pay protections. Local laws such as those which restrict employers from basing pay on work history, requiring employers to post salary ranges for a position, and mandated reporting of pay data could all help. Other policies like improving paid family and medical leave or providing affordable childcare are also applicable. We should work to find ways to improve pay and quality of work for everyone with collective bargaining – by both organizing and expanding union protections. Ultimately, we must find ways to confront our society’s deeply entrenched inequalities head-on, whether they be racism, sexism, economic inequalities, or otherwise.
Protecting Working Families
It’s important to grow the middle class, increase worker protections and wages, and put some much needed restrictions on corporations. The wealthy and elite should be paying their fair share, and that money should go back into our communities, schools, hospitals, and local economies. Also, a right to work state does not equal union strong. We need to support our unions, workers, and workers’ rights in this state. We need better, safer, and higher paying jobs all around. I am eager to personally work with unions and working families to improve labor standards and quality of jobs in our state.
Preserving Small Businesses
Certainly small businesses and their employees need government assistance in trying times. We need to make sure that these policies are actually reaching the people they need, however, at a state and federal level. With the CARE act, there was very little accountability and transparency, and most of that money ended up going in the pockets of corporations, not small businesses and the communities which needed it the most. We need to give local and small businesses a bit of legroom to survive and keep that money in the community.
Quality and Free Education
We must increase funding of our public education system and limit the power of private school, charter school, and voucher programs in our district. Arizona Republican legislators are constantly introducing and reintroducing draconic bills to strip away funding from public district schools. Our public schools are under attack meaning our children's future is also under attack.The Senate has also ended school boundaries in our state, which will have a drastically negative impact on our public schools. They are aggressively building private education systems in our district instead of funding the biggest and most important sources of education in our state. We don’t need to keep funneling money out of our communities into private pockets.
Environmental Protection
Climate change is a threat to the present and future health and existence of humanity. Many of its effects are already taking place on receding shorelines, higher incidences of natural disasters, and strains of populations in cities with high emissions. In Arizona, we can do a lot more to reduce carbon emissions. We need more regulations on mining companies in particular, who are more than capable of cleaning up their own messes. We need to hold companies to task for producing waste that is harmful to the environment and needs to be curbed. We (and future generations) depend on it. As far as our water crisis, Arizona gets its water from a variety of sources, including the Colorado River and groundwater. A lot of corporations and housing developers in recent years have been hoarding water reservoirs in other states, creating a surplus of water for their future, wealthy communities. There is more than enough to go around, but a lot of that water currently is in corporate hands and not the state or communities. A lot of the money divided up for water is for directing its transit and not its actual usage. We need to make sure we are preserving a vital supply of water and other resources for Arizonans and not for corporations.
Promoting Democracy
The most important cornerstone of democracy was written in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People.” The people are the ones who make democracy function, and it’s best if the people are provided certain freedoms, a necessary and enjoyable quality of life, and a life free from oppression.