I’ll be honest. I don’t like working from home! After the NETWORK office went partially, and then fully, remote last week, I thought I had it made. I could wear my pajamas all day and my only commute was from my bed to my kitchen table. Even with the constant worry and threat I’m feeling due to the global COVID-19 pandemic surrounding me, I was at least excited to work from home. Unfortunately, working remotely isn’t all sunshine and roses. Technical difficulties arise almost every time I try to join a conference call or conduct a meeting, and I’m starting to feel disconnected from my friends and family.

Fortunately, I don’t live completely alone. Like many millennials living in a big city, I have roommates —three to be exact. As COVID-19 spreads across the world, they don’t have the privilege that I have to simply work from home. One of my roommates is a hairdresser and one works at Trader Joe’s while also a full-time student. Both of these roommates are currently facing challenges due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and both of their struggles are being widely felt by all vital workers and those working in the gig economy.

For my roommate, who is a hairdresser, she is technically classified as a gig worker or an independent contractor in her salon. Andi relies on payment from her clients and does not receive payment from the salon itself. So, when her salon shut down due to fears over coronavirus spreading in Washington, D.C., she was not given any paid leave from her employer. In order to pay her rent for the next few months while the entire city is on lockdown, she has been cutting hair in our house, purposefully breaking the CDC’s self-distancing and quarantine guidelines out of financial necessity. My roommate has been constantly cleaning and disinfecting the house to try and keep us all safe. She has described her debilitating fear and anxiety that she’ll get sick to me, but her need to remain financially stable outweighs any illness she faces.

One of my other roommates, is facing similar issues in her job. She works as a cashier at Trader Joe’s while paying her way through college. When coronavirus became more of a threat in Washington, my roommate knew that she was still going to work, because her job is a vital part of our nation, especially as more and more people begin to panic shop at grocery stores and retailers across our nation. While people are staying home and working, she is coming into contact with hundreds of people every day at the grocery store in order to provide an essential service that keeps our nation running. My roommate worries because she is at risk of contracting COVID-19 every day at work, yet she does not have any guarantee of paid leave if she feels sick and has to quarantine.

This global pandemic has revealed a glaring injustice in our nation’s labor system: our heinous lack of federally mandated paid leave. The vast majority of working people in the United States do not have access to comprehensive paid leave. Across the nation, less than 25% of middle to lower-income workers have access to paid leave. With this highly contagious, deadly disease spreading through our communities, it is more important than ever that people are able to stay home when they are sick. Lack of paid leave means low-income workers are required to go to work, even when they are sick, and even when they could be carrying coronavirus.

Luckily, the House and Senate passed a historic paid leave bill this past week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It allows for 10 days of paid sick leave for full-time workers and up to 12 weeks of unpaid emergency family leave if they or a loved one gets sick for a long period of time. This bill is a historic first step in ensuring that all people have access to paid leave, and it will vastly reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States. Unfortunately, this bill still does not ensure that all workers have access to paid sick leave, specifically health care workers and employees who work for corporations with over 500 and under 50 employees. For these workers, more must be done so that they can stay home when they are sick and care for their loved ones during this trying time.

No one should have to go to work when they are sick with a deadly virus, simply because they are financially forced to. They could potentially infect and endanger others when they are sick and more and more people could die. It is imperative for our nation’s health that we are all ensured comprehensive paid sick leave.

There’s always one thing we can look forward to every four years and no, it’s not the summer Olympics. I’m talking about the United States presidential election. In less than seven months, the American people will vote for their next commander in chief. Amidst everything that is happening, especially with COVID-19, who we elect matters now more than ever. This country needs a leader who will put its citizens’ wellbeing, health, and safety first. We at NETWORK, understand the importance of being able to participate in such an important and historic election, so we have designed a toolkit to prepare folks for this moment.

Our election toolkit has everything you need to help assess who the right candidate is for the job. With the help of our 2020 Mend the Gaps Policy Platform, we’ve created a list of questions to ask a candidate at a town hall to gage how they intend to mend the gaps in our nation. Our letters to the editor (LTE) toolkit will help you produce compelling writing that will be read in both local and national newspapers. Use our “Do It Yourself Candidate Side-By-Side” to determine which Presidential, Senate and House candidate aligns closest with NETWORK’s 2020 Policy Platform and your personal views. Finally, don’t forget to engage with the candidates on social media using our social media pro tips.

Show your commitment to being a “Mend the Gaps Voter” this Election Season with the use of NETWORK’s newly created placards. Make your voice heard in person and online! Take a picture with the placards and use the hashtags #MendtheGapsVoter and #My2020Vision. Be sure to tag @NETWORKLobby as well. Whether you’re at a candidate’s rally, polling place, or Member of Congress’s office, snap a photo of yourself with the placard.

Discover your choice candidate in our election toolkit. This is a living document that is continuously being updated to reflect what is going on in the election and adding new resources to alleviate some of the stress that comes with the voting process. Continue to check out the webpage and stay up to date by following us on social media!

I did not expect to text my high school classmate this weekend to ask about her mother’s coronavirus experience. The truth is, I haven’t texted this classmate in almost a decade, but circumstances change. Global pandemics put things in perspective and you find yourself reaching out to all manner of people you have really talked to in years. Hi, How are you? How are things back home?

My classmate’s mother, Beth, went through a bureaucratic nightmare with deadly consequences. After returning from a trip abroad more than a month ago, she found herself exhibiting symptoms of coronavirus. She decided to take extra measures and self-quarantine. But, at that time, information about the virus was sparse in the United States, and county health officials had no tests available to administer when she asked. They recommended she quarantine herself.

“At that time, we knew so little, and I was at a real loss as to how even do that,” she said. Over her quarantine, she suffered a sinus infection and unfortunately ended up infecting her 83-year old mother, at high-risk of developing deadly symptoms. She tried to get her mother tested too but was faced with the same shortage of answers.

Almost a month later, a doctor declared that Beth and her mother had had the virus, after reading their chest x-rays. “When the nasal congestion turned into a sinus infection, I thought I was no longer contagious. Now I find out that I probably was,” Beth wrote. The consequences for her mother could have quickly turned deadly. But for now, Beth says,“[she] is still in isolation.”

Beth’s nightmare doesn’t end there: Beth’s entire family will remain in quarantine, including my classmate who is a seasonal worker, and is likely to be laid-off in the next few days. Sarah, Beth said, is bracing for a future without a job.

The demands of responding to a pandemic is beyond what any one family should have to go through alone. What kind of nation would we be if we didn’t respond to a salient public health crisis now, when the consequences of inaction can be deadly? This virus is crystalizing our need to redress inequalities in our healthcare system, guarantee paid family and sick leave, and support families through smart economic policy.

Last week, the House passed the Family First Coronavirus Response Act (H.R 6201). The bill would put resources in testing and treatment. It would affect sweeping changes in our nation’s paid sick leave and unemployment insurance laws, ensuring that working family’s livelihoods are not disrupted. It makes sure families are fed, by expanding nutrition programs, and health care and other workers are protected. It ensures states are well prepared to respond, by boosting federal funding for Medicaid.

As the Senate prepares to act and soon vote on the House bill, additional steps will need to be taken to address wide-scale financial distress caused by the economy constricting. The hallmark of Congressional efforts to stem this health emergency and any related economic downturn should meet the needs of working families. Above all, Congress must ensure accessible and affordable testing and treatment for the Coronavirus, regardless of income, location, disability, or immigration status. It must also:

• Ensure all have the support they need to take sick leave and care for family members without risking their jobs or their paychecks.
• Ensure low-income workers and individuals facing hardship have the assistance they need to put food on the table and provide for their families.
• Give special care and attention to individuals at increased risk of infection, including individuals in prison, immigrants and children in detention, in long-term care facilities, and experiencing homelessness.
• Economic stimulus measures should focus first on low-income and vulnerable communities. Such policies also have the strongest economic impact. Any bailouts and emergency assistance for major industries and businesses must be paired with comparable assistance for low-wage workers and vulnerable individuals.
• Oppose any efforts to use the pandemic as an excuse to further militarize the border or exacerbate immigration deportation and detention.

While we laud recent passage of the House bill, and recommend swift action on these emergency measures in the Senate, we recognize the need for a stronger and wider social safety net, especially for the disproportionately impacted like low-wage workers, domestic workers, and people of color. In terms of paid family and sick leave, we strongly Congress take up and pass the Family Act, and the Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee seven days of paid sick leave.

Our federal tax code incentivizes massive wealth accumulation and the prioritization of profit, driving a greater wedge between the share of the population who have only some, if any, savings for an emergency, and those who a lot. This preferential treatment for the wealthy can only have consequences down the line, as we’re discovering, since the Federal Reserve’s fiscal response to economic crisis has done little to touch on the lives of everyday working families. The slow degradation of our nation’s labor laws, the stagnation of wages and benefits, and the country’s insistence on lending a lifeline to corporations and not people is a thorough indictment of our economic policy.

Coronavirus’ indiscriminate path is showing us that the inequities in our systems continue to leave millions of Americans vulnerable to economic instability and health care insecurity. Because it’s no longer a manner of if, but when, we rewrite our nation’s social and economic policy to better meet the needs of families in crisis, we must summon the same political courage and haste it will have taken to pass these emergency measures.

***

Beth is an ordained minister with the United Methodist Church. I am thankful of her courage in sharing her account of living with coronavirus and for reminding me that spiritual practice can serve as a lifeline in times of hardship.

Today, NETWORK is proud to have Heather Boushey, the President and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth at our office to talk about mending the gaps in our nation’s growing wealth and income disparities.

As a regular writer for popular media, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, MSNBC, and CNBC, Boushey has made quite an impact on what it means to be a woman in our economy.

Focused on the inequality, Boushey has actively been an advocate for economic inequities in the social fabric of our nation. In fact, her new book Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It is all about how economic inequality ultimately hurts people, businesses, and the overall growth of our country. Boushey argues that stagnant wages and lack of workplace benefits further complicate financial instability for many people. Our economic policy must work to heal inequality and create new solutions for people to be supported, not hindered, by our government.

Click here to purchase her new book and learn more about the author.

“¿Como te llamas?” I asked. “What’s your name?”

“Elsa,” she replied.

“No it’s not,” my friend Tracey quickly said. Tracey works at the Kino Border Initiative as education coordinator, and I had gone down to visit her and see for myself what was going on at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Still, the little girl became known to me as “Elsa” for much of the rest of my trip to Nogales, Sonora. Despite her fluency in Spanish, I learned that she came from Russia with her parents and younger brother. Only her dad – who is a few years younger than I am – was with her. Her mother had been detained elsewhere with her brother, and they were working to be reunited as they fled religious persecution in Russia and sought safety in the United States. Elsa quickly learned Spanish in the four months they’ve been waiting at the border in Nogales.

Last week, I was privileged to spend four days in the comedor (soup kitchen) run by the Kino Border Initiative (mainly Sisters Cecilia and Engracia and their team of staff and volunteers) just across the border from the United States. With many volunteers from both sides of the border – including several U.S. Americans who had come from other parts of the country to volunteer for up to a month – I shared life with migrants from Mexico, Central America, and other parts of the world. We fed nearly 200 people two meals per day in multiple shifts.

There were so many children – from infants still nursing to teenagers and young adults. There was so much hope even in the midst of trauma. There was a spirit of generosity – so many of the migrants themselves active in the work of the comedor, helping to feed and clean during and after every meal.

When I was in Nogales, MPP (the so-called Migrant Protection Protocol implemented a year ago by the Trump Administration, also known as “Remain in Mexico”) had just begun on the ground in Nogales. Asylum-seekers fleeing violence in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, and many other places now have to go through asylum court before they can enter the U.S. There’s a great deal of corruption in the metering of people getting to meet with U.S. officials, and migrants must face asylum court in El Paso, a 5-hour drive from Nogales. For people without transportation, this means expensive bus tickets for a minimal chance at safety (less than 1% of asylum-seekers are granted asylum by the U.S. government).

There’s so much more to say about my time at the border. What struck me most when I first arrived was the normalcy in the midst of such uncertainty and trauma. Families were living. Children were joyful or upset, depending on the moment. One little girl, who I began calling “La jefa,” the boss, was running around re-setting the tables when I met her. She’d eaten and was now intending to be the best helper there as she put out new napkins, spoons, and cups. And as we began hearing stories (for me, mostly from other volunteers who could translate the Spanish that most migrants spoke), this normalcy seemed anything but normal. I began thinking of the lost educational opportunities for these kids as they waited. I began to see the future of frustration in school as they continued to work through the trauma they’d experienced and then had to make up for so much lost time and language barriers. I began to see the lost potential of so many human beings just seeking a place to live safely and take care of their families. I began to see the vast differences between my world and their worlds – all because of where I was born and the color of my skin.

As I begin to grapple with these realities in a new way – in light of a few relationships I began to develop during my time with Kino – I am reminded in a new way of the importance of changing the system. We need to ensure policies are created to recognize and honor the fullness of the human person, no matter what their country of origin. We need policies that recognize that poverty is itself a form of violence. We need policies of welcome and policies that create an opportunity for all to thrive.

And so I return to Washington to continue the work of justice, of building teams of advocates and organizers, of lobbying to change policy and educating to change the social narrative. And I hope you will join us.

College football. Amazing, unhealthy food. Devout Christians. Farmers. Home. What do you think of when someone says they’re from Alabama?

When I say I’m from Birmingham, Alabama, people usually react like this: “Ughhhh…Ooofff…I’m sorry…”. This is because there are often some pretty disparaging stereotypes associated with those living in the Heart of Dixie: Trump-supporting, Bible thumping, uneducated, college football-loving rednecks.

In many ways, they can be right. I remember when my brother broke our family’s oven out of rage after Alabama lost the Iron Bowl to Auburn in 2013. I remember catching catfish with just my bare hands in the river by my house as a teenager. I also remember my Dad thanking God for Donald Trump’s election during our Thanksgiving prayer in 2016.

How did I, a self-proclaimed Democrat, working for a social justice organization, come from a state like Alabama?

For a long time, I stayed away from all things political, mainly because I didn’t understand it. When the announcement came over my elementary school speakers that President George W. Bush had been elected for a second term, I cheered along like all the other kids, but I honestly didn’t even know who that was at the time. During the 2008 election, I told my mom I supported Obama, simply because I thought his name was cool.

In reality, I didn’t have to worry about politics because nothing the government changed would affect me and my family. As a white, upper middle-class woman, whose parents both worked secure jobs with benefits, I didn’t have to worry about anything negatively impacting my family. My privilege meant I didn’t have to participate in politics if I didn’t want to. So, I spent most of my teenage years living a blissfully ignorant life: unaware of the vast amounts of poverty, homelessness, and injustice occurring every day in a place I had dubbed the ‘bad side of town.’ My white, suburban bubble was pervasive and opaque. I was blind to the ways that the government and the nation are failing the most impoverished and vulnerable in my community.

For me, that all changed when my father was diagnosed in 2013 with ALS, a terminal neuromuscular disease. ALS is unique in that it doesn’t really discriminate: people from all areas of life have to endure a terminal disease if diagnosed. Throughout my father’s journey with ALS, I learned that although ALS is such a difficult, miserable disease, many of those diagnosed were more stressed by the financial instability the disease caused. Every week, my father and I would meet with others with ALS and their loved ones, and instead of speaking on ALS itself, they spoke of how hard it was to stay afloat financially, while also paying for their desperately needed care.  Most of the people would have to decide between paying for their medicine or their caregiver; their wheelchair or their home.

When I looked around at those with ALS in my community and my state, I saw a group of people dealing with a horrible, evil disease. I saw heroes who, even when their body was failing them, continued to work to provide for their families and those they loved. Even as I saw such misfortune and unnecessary evil in the face of ALS, I saw something else much more disheartening. I saw people who had been abandoned. People who had been forgotten, both by their government and their community.

Through this experience working and living with those suffering with ALS, I realized something vital to my political identity: all people, regardless of where they come from, must be considered and respected in the eyes of our government and society. Not just the white, and not just the wealthy. It is easy to disregard this when your interests are being served on Capitol Hill, but, if we are going to call ourselves the greatest country in the world, a true democracy, then no person or group can be abandoned by our government or our people.

So, if you’re reading this and wondering how you can get involved outside of your white, suburban bubble, I challenge you to speak and live with those different from you. People from all genders, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, abilities, etc., all have a different perspective to share. Meet with those who have been disenfranchised and invalidated by our government, media, and culture. Realize that they, just like you, are entitled to dignity and worth, and they deserve a seat at the table when policy is being made.