Enact a Take Action Budget for working women and their families

To: Governor Inslee and Washington State Legislators

Enact a Take Action Budget for working women and their families

The Covid-19 crisis is severely injuring working women, especially women of color and single mothers. We are the frontline, low-paid workers in hospitals, nursing homes, restaurants, grocery stores and public transit. We are the mothers forced to leave jobs when childcare disappeared or in order to oversee home education, nurse family members, and provide for elders. Your emergency action is needed or our economic security will be undermined for the rest of our lives and the harm will extend to generations of Washingtonians to come.

● Amend the state constitution to allow taxation of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Many have grown grotesquely rich off the pandemic. Use this tax revenue to:

--Fund hazard pay for all workers in contact with the public. Free PPE and healthcare for all, regardless of immigration status.

--Cut the workweek to 30 hours with no loss in pay to reduce contagion, accommodate unprecedented family burdens, and combat unemployment

--Enact paid leave and unlimited unemployment benefits for all workers at a livable level

--Pay in to individual Social Security accounts for lost contributions due to job loss

--Subsidize family care givers at union wages

--Require that seniority status be maintained for workers who had to leave jobs to take care of family.

-- Establish free 24-hour childcare for all

--Provide broadband and free laptops for all school age children

● Acknowledge that housing is a human right. Amend the state constitution to allow rent control. Stop the exponentially growing homelessness disaster.

-- Complete rent forgiveness. No evictions. Mandate affordable rents for working people so they can live near their work places.

--Provide state subsidies for small landlords to make up for lost rents

--House all homeless people and those fleeing domestic violence in hotel rooms and unused public and private buildings. Provide public funds to rehabilitate unused buildings. Expand services to assist the homeless to stabilize their lives, improve job skills, and deal with physical and mental health problems, and addiction.

Petition endorsed by: Freedom Socialist Party Seattle/Puget Sound, Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity, Professional & Technical Employees Local 17 (PROTEC17) Seattle Chapter, Queer & Feminist Caucus of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)