Tell Your Legislator: Protect People, Not Corporate Interests
All Pennsylvanians—Black, white, Latinx, and Asian, native-born and immigrants, employers and employees, those with low incomes and high incomes—have been making sacrifices and working together to reduce the devastating impact of COVID-19. Many of our neighbors have lost jobs, closed businesses, or are grieving the loss of loved ones. Yet because of long-term structural problems within our economy, the burdens of this struggle have fallen more heavily on those with low incomes, as well as on Black and brown people and immigrants.
Pennsylvanians need government to protect and support everyone, not just in times of crisis but all the time. We need our legislators to provide working people and their families with the relief they need right now and to fix our economy so that we all do well in the future. We need them to:
- ensure that essential workers immediately get protective equipment and supplemental wages as well as a permanent living wage;
- provide relief to small businesses now and over the long-term the capital and technical assistance they need to grow;
- give every worker in the state paid family leave and sick days;
- freeze rents and mortgages and make housing affordable for working people;
- make testing and emergency care for COVID-19 free, and quality affordable health care available to all;
- help our schools and colleges survive and provide all children with the education they need to have a bright future; and
- fix a broken tax system in which the rich pay at half the rate of working people so that we get through this crisis and have the revenues we need to achieve our goals for a long time to come.
Yet instead of addressing these needs, Republican legislators have called for the premature opening of businesses which would deepen the crisis and put our lives and health at risk. They have also rejected proposals to protect front-line workers and raise their wages.
- privatizing state liquor stores in a way that would give a windfall to large corporations while driving up alcohol prices and costing the state hundreds of millions in revenue when we most need it;
- granting immunity from lawsuits to corporate-owned hospitals, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes that failed to protect their patients from COVID-19;
- rolling back regulations that would raise overtime pay for 200,000 Pennsylvania workers; and
- freezing property taxes for everyone, including large corporations, instead of providing schools with more aid and targeting property tax relief to those who truly need it.
We need a compassionate response that helps Pennsylvanians who are struggling and a plan for the future that helps all of us—Black, brown, and white; urban, suburban, and rural; native-born, and immigrant, whether documented or not—thrive and build a stronger, more equitable Commonwealth.
Please use this action tool to tell your legislators that they need to care for all Pennsylvanians—without exceptions—instead of putting our lives at risk and helping powerful corporate interests.
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