Issue Position: Working Families

Issue Position

Unions are Vital

I come from a working-class family. At age 16, I was lucky to get a union job at a grocery store. With the support of my union, I was able to work my way through school, achieving my dream of becoming a physician, while being economically secure. Unions are vital to providing people with protection in their livelihoods and ensuring that workers are able to reap the fruits of their labor.

Unions created the middle class and are a critical part of the solution to the rampant income inequality all around us today. All workers should have access to living-wage jobs with good benefits. They should also be protected from wage theft and our elected officials must set clear expectations for worker protections.

I support universal pre-K and expansion of this program to universal child care to empower working families to have the flexible, high-quality, affordable childcare they need to achieve their full economic potential.

We need stronger community college and job-training options. We need to recognize that corporations and the richest Oregonians need to invest disproportionately through taxes to help lift up and prioritize struggling and stressed working families. I will support complete corporate reporting, closing current loopholes and increasing the taxes on Oregonians in the top 0.5% of earners to fund worker protections and prevent wage theft.

I strongly support House Bill 2016 (passed in 2019), which makes it an unfair labor practice for employers to discourage employees from joining a union or to encourage employees to revoke their union dues authorization, and will continue to support expansion of pro-union legislation. Lastly, we need to protect public employee pensions from further cuts to ensure they can retire with the retirement benefits they worked so hard to earn.

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