Working-class Americans are the backbone of the middle class, and workers still do not have the protections and dignity they deserve. The COVID crisis revealed the inequities workers face in seeking to achieve decent pay standards, paid family and medical leave, pay equity, affordable housing, and rent control. We must build worker power and strengthen unions.

Small business owners are at the heart of the American dream, and COVID-19 hit California small businesses hard, with more than a third of them closing. Let’s make it easier for American families to start and maintain their own businesses.

A quality education should not be reserved only for the wealthy, and public schools are at the very center of every person’s ability to achieve their own potential. Many families struggle and sacrifice so their children can live in neighborhoods with access to good schools. Let’s ensure our public schools are adequately funded and our underpaid and overworked teachers get a raise.

Health care is a human right, and making sure that all Californians have access to quality healthcare is our responsibility. We have an obligation to ensure our most vulnerable, including our seniors and differently-abled, do not fall through the cracks.

Post-COVID, we are seeing a rise in hate crimes, gun violence, and mental health crisis. Investing in mental health needs to be a priority. We can start by building on recent reforms to Medical/Medicaid known as CalAIM, which enable us to provide capitated funding directly to state doctors and relevant County governments, not to managed care providers.

Every person has been touched in some way by drug and alcohol addiction, especially in the wake of the COVID crisis. Rather than criminalize it, let’s invest in wrap-around rehabilitation services and end the taboo associated with addiction.

In order to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and bring costs for consumers down, our elected officials must take bold action on climate change, and we can start by pledging to not take campaign contributions from the same gas and oil lobbies that are holding us back from meaningful progress.

Bring consumer costs down and reduce gas emissions by incentivizing a transition away from natural gas and towards heat pumps and electric appliances in homes and public buildings.

Let’s create additional incentives for purchasing Electric Vehicles here in California and make those practical by incentivizing EV chargers, especially in low-income and multi-family housing and workplaces. Let’s incentivize solar on already-degraded spaces like parking lots, canals, and buildings instead of pristine environment. Let’s modernize the California infrastructure and ensure a just transition for our fossil workforce by creating good-paying clean energy union jobs that deploy solar and wind in this district and across the state.