UMME HOQUE
Organizing director with the Debt Collective
Umme Hoque
Right now, families are buried under $140 billion of medical debt. People put groceries on credit cards, pay rent with payday loans, and borrow to go to college. Throughout the pandemic, the rich got richer while more than seventy million people lost jobs, disproportionately women of color in low-paid work.
These injustices existed before the pandemic, and are now worse because of it. To organize against it, we need to focus on addressing the actual systemic inequities. We need to rebuild with the understanding that the real debts we owe are to each other. Every concerned person needs to be part of local and national community groups, mutual aid organizations, and unions—including the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union where I organize with other debtors.
We must focus on the root problems of capitalism and a broken democracy, not just look for simple solutions. Only by organizing across movements and across the working class can we cancel unjust debts and win health care, education, and housing for all.
DELIA VARGAS
McDonald’s worker and leader with the Fight for $15
Last year, managers at the McDonald’s in Oakland, California, where I work, told us to wear doggie diapers on our faces to protect against COVID-19. Not real masks—diapers made for dogs.
Management did not prioritize our safety. And sure enough, almost a dozen of my coworkers and some of their family members got COVID-19. The doggie diapers were a symbol of the lack of respect we were shown at work. We knew we had to do something.
So we launched the longest strike in McDonald’s history, running more than forty days. After some coworkers sued, a judge ordered management to follow new safety measures. As part of the lawsuit’s settlement, a management-worker committee will meet monthly to discuss how to keep our workplace safe.
Collective action is powerful. We will continue to fight together against inequality, and rally around new solutions to ensure our voices are heard.
CHUCK COLLINS
Director of the program on inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits Inequality.org
Chuck Collins
We need to take advantage of the growing public awareness that extreme inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity are wrecking our lives and society.
The American public has viscerally experienced how the pandemic has accelerated existing extreme inequalities, as front-line workers, disproportionately women and people of color, were dispatched into the viral line of fire. Billionaires are paying millions to hide trillions from taxation, and that money is flooding into local housing markets and driving up the cost of housing for everyone else.
We must push for policies that “raise the floor,” increasing wages, benefits, and protections for low-wage workers. But we must also tax the wealthy to break up democracy-distorting concentrations of wealth and power.