An Economy that Works for All

Our economy should guarantee fundamental economic rights and a high quality of life for all and not just those at the top.

In recent years, the costs of housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education have skyrocketed while wages have barely budged. Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods lack basic access to transportation, quality schools, and even healthy food, water, and air. Rural Virginians have seen good-paying jobs consolidate to a few successful areas of the Commonwealth without any tools to even the playing field. Women, and especially women of color, go underpaid compared to their men colleagues.

We didn’t make this two-tiered economy through inaction. We made it through deliberate policies that cater to the interests of the privileged few. In the race to be a ‘business-friendly’ state, we’ve forgotten that our economic agenda needs to focus on making Virginia a more affordable, healthy, and prosperous place to live for all. Investing in our working class is a surefire way to create a competitive economy where everyone who contributes to our Commonwealth’s success can benefit from it.

MY VISION FOR VIRGINIA’S ECONOMY INCLUDES:

• Strengthening the ability of workers to organize by repealing the so-called “Right to work” law that hurts workers and keeps wages low.
• Extending the right to collectively bargain to all public sector employees.
• Ensuring Virginia’s minimum wage is raised to $15 an hour by the end of 2023, and indexing it inflation to keep up with the true cost of living over time.
• Guaranteeing paid sick, family, and parental leave for all Virginians.
• Closing the gender pay gap for women and women of color and supporting pay transparency.
• Providing affordable childcare and universal PreK to all of Virginia’s parents.
• Investing in educators by hiring more support staff and providing competitive pay and resources for teachers.
• Reexamining our state public school funding formula to address inequities across the Commonwealth and ending the practice of “unfunded mandates” from Richmond.
• Making Virginia’s tuition-free community college universal and available for all while working to lower tuition at Virginia’s public colleges and universities and pushing for federal student debt cancellation.
• Expanding Medicaid to cover more working class Virginians, offering a public option through a controlled state insurance exchange, and pushing for a federal Medicare-for-all system.
• Requiring that healthcare providers offer telemedicine as part of in-state insurance plans.
• Creating thousands of new affordable housing units and promoting planning and zoning changes that address decades of racial and economic segregation in Virginia’s neighborhoods.
• Strengthening tenants’ rights and protecting renters from eviction.
• Empowering rural Virginia with green jobs in the infrastructure and technology sectors, improved connectivity, state funding for rural schools, and universal broadband.
• Realigning our tax code to promote families and small businesses rather than big corporations.
• Providing the Virginia Employment Commission with the resources necessary to ensure no one is left behind by our unemployment insurance system.
• Incentivizing telework to reduce congestion and pollution and make for more accessible workplaces.
• Investing in green, accessible public transit that allows workers to commute to higher-quality jobs and provides employers with a more diverse labor force.