Poor People’s Campaign Congressional Briefing, June 15, 2022

A Third Reconstruction Agenda for the Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls 

Congressional Briefing, June 15, 2022, 4:00-5:30 p.m.

Longworth House Office Building, Room 1539

Hosted by:  Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Repairers of the Breach, Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice, Institute for Policy Studies, Economic Policy Institute

Honorary Hosts: Congressional Progressive Caucus, Majority Leader Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity

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Selection of Testimonies

1. Aaron Scott, Washington 

My name is Aaron Scott. I’m a single father. I’m transgender. I grew up working poor in rural Upstate NY, and for the past eight years I’ve helped pastor a rural, poor, mostly white community in Grays Harbor County, Washington State. When the timber industry left, it took the jobs with it. A lot of our people die young—from overdoses, being homeless in the winter, police brutality, suicide—all of which tie back to poverty. I do this work because I don’t want people left on their own to battle this system the way my family was.

Nine years ago I lost the most important man in my life, my grandfather. He was a veteran of the United States military who fell into a mental health crisis. It was easier for him to get a hold of a gun than it was for him to get the help he needed. He died by suicide in the garage. My grandma found him. 

I am here today to ask: where was the support from this government, that my grandpa proudly served his whole life, when he needed you? Where was the support for my grandma, his widow? You left us on our own. It was my teenage cousin and my disabled aunt who took care of Grandma in the night when she would wake up screaming. It was a younger veteran who lived across the street that came and pressure-washed Grandpa’s blood off the garage walls so we wouldn’t have to. He said it was an honor to help our family. 

I am asking you to honor the memory of my grandparents Leland and Ivy Scott, and to honor our poor and abandoned youth, by making it possible for *everyone* in this country to get the health care we need—including mental health care—regardless of our income, ability, immigration or carceral status. Hundreds of rural hospitals in particular have been closed. Over 400 more are about to close because they’re not profitable.

And make sure we have good jobs, living wages and guaranteed incomes. We aren’t poor because we’re lazy. We’re poor because the laws and policies in this country are stacked against us. If that can’t be done now, make sure we can vote to get people in there who can and will make this happen. 

The Bible says, 

“Woe to those who make unjust laws,

    to those who issue oppressive decrees,

to deprive the poor of their rights

    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,

making widows their prey

    and robbing the fatherless.

What will you do on the day of reckoning,

    when disaster comes from afar?

To whom will you run for help?” 

(Isaiah 10:1-3)

God is watching—all the time, not just during election cycles. So are we.

2. Guadelupe de la Cruz, Florida

Hello, my name is Guadalupe de la Cruz. I am the Florida director for American Friends Service Committee and one of the state chairs for the Florida PPC (Poor People s Campaign). I’ve been organizing for immigrant rights in South Florida for the last 10 years.

When immigrants come to my state, they are fleeing violence, war, and poverty. But what do they find when they arrive in the richest democracy in the world? They are turned away or told they are criminals and don’t deserve any rights. They are humiliated, shackled with ankle monitoring bracelets and left to manage the immigration system on their own. 

Florida’s anti-immigrant and anti-democratic laws make conditions for immigrants particularly bad in my state.   

  • SB168 prohibits my community from becoming a sanctuary for immigrants.
  • SB1808 fortifies the relationship between police and ICE.
  • Our governor is blaming farmworkers for the spread of COVID.    
  • Voter suppression laws make it even harder for immigrants who CAN vote to make the system work for us.
  • Under a new anti-protest bill, HB1, we can’t even express our voices against these assaults without the fear of being charged with felonies and incarcerated. 

Meanwhile, efforts to provide immigrant workers with living wages or even minimum wages or to protect them from heat-related illnesses have stalled.

But we can’t just blame Florida lawmakers. On any given day, tens of thousands of adults and children are held in more than 200 immigrant detention facilities nationwide. These centers are often built on polluted land and there is inadequate care and widespread medical abuse, including forced sterilizations and insufficient COVID protections.

U.S. taxpayers fund these inhumane facilities. In 2018 alone, the top ten contractors of the five federal agencies responsible for immigrant detention and correction received over $2.3 billion in federal contracts.

No one should be subjected to these abuses — no matter what documents we carry, where we work, or where we come from. 

This is why I’m here in Washington. The U.S. Congress must step up and protect people in Florida and other states where anti-immigrant forces have captured our democratic system.

Here are some of the actions you could take that would make a real difference:

  • pass the Dream Act.
  • lift restrictions that prevent undocumented families from accessing critical social services.
  • enact federal protections guaranteeing everyone — regardless of immigration status — a living wage, safe working conditions, the right to join unions and to peacefully assemble and protest, and meaningful voting rights.      
  • ensure that we all have access to affordable health care, regardless of our documentation status.

Congress must also adopt an immigration policy that addresses the inhumane detention system and allows us to live and work in dignity. We are already essential to the U.S. economy. A path to citizenship would create an even bigger boost — increasing GDP by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, according to one recent study. 

For a nation of immigrants, the current situation is shameful. The American dream cannot come on the backs of immigrants and poor people anymore.

3. Catherine Jozwik, West Virginia 

My name is Catherine Jozwik. I am a resident of Harpers Ferry, a concerned mother, and a PhD trained molecular biologist who has studied pulmonary disorders for over 20 years. On August 2016, our community discovered plans by the WV Development Authority to build a heavy industrial factory at the site of an historic apple orchard. It was to be the first in a 1000 acre industrial park. 

The Rockwool company was recruited and the factory was approved in a process rife with improprieties at both the state and local level; public participation and engagement were circumvented through secretive and opaque processes, and heavy industrial activity at the proposed site poses grave threats to the local environment. The most concerning aspect of the project is the location of the factory less than 0.5 miles from the poorest, lowest performing elementary school in the county and within 2 miles of four other schools, comprising 30% of County students.

Upon learning the facility, a majority of County residents have pursued every possible legal and legislative remedy from filing seven lawsuits against various aspect of the project to voting out elected officials (even popular incumbents) who brought Rockwool to Jefferson County. In addition to the local outcry, neighboring communities in Maryland and Virginia issued formal statements of opposition to the Rockwool factory. We have met with all local, state and federal elected officials and representatives from the WV Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA. Several County residents even purchased shares of Rockwool stock and traveled to Denmark to attend Rockwool’s annual shareholder meeting. Despite these Herculean efforts, the factory began operating in June 2021 and, as feared, has already had numerous violations of its air and water permits. Area residents are now forced to monitor their own air quality, well water and local schoolchildren are enduring periodic heavy metal testing to provide early warning to county residents of deleterious environmental effects of this factory.

This isn’t unique to WV – it happens in communities across America every day and we need your help when our officials’ interests collide with the protection of affected communities. And, remember, pollution of air and water do not obey city or state boundaries-our problem IS your problem. This is what we need now: 

1.     Protect our voting rights: Without strong protections for our voting rights, citizens will have even less of a say than we do now. 

2.     Support a just transition to a greener future: West Virginians natural resources have been exploited by corporations for centuries. We should not have to choose between our health and good paying jobs.

3.     Strengthen environmental regulations at the Federal level: States like WV are known to have weak environmental protections. Loopholes in federal regulations further facilitate the environmental exploitation of our communities. Guidelines are not the same as regulations, and they’re easy to get around, which means that now our students will be exposed to the pollutants from the Rockwool factory-many for the entire 12 years of their academic life. We need stronger federal regulations to push back against the outsized influence of corporations and unscrupulous elected officials.

Thank you. 

4. Kyle Bibby, New Jersey 

Good morning. My name is Kyle Bibby, and I’m the National Campaigns Manager for Common Defense. Common Defense is the nation’s largest veteran-led grassroots organization. I’m a US Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Corps captain that served seven years in the infantry and an Afghanistan War veteran.

After my time in the military, I worked at the Office of Management and Budget during the last few years of the Obama Administration. The first lesson I learned is that our national budget reflects our priorities. As a former military officer and government program analyst, I’ve witnessed first-hand how our national priorities have left millions behind.

Our  military receives almost half of the annual discretionary funds allotted by Congress. Year after year, we effortlessly increase that same budget. Over the past 20 years, our government has spent over $8 trillion on the Global War on Terror. During that same time, we spent more than $21 trillion on militarizing our nation internationally and domestically. The budget hearings for the Defense Department focus on political geography, power politics, and, of course, “supporting the troops.” This misses the real toll and effect of war, especially on our uniformed service members.

Despite the trillions we put into our military, everyday veterans like myself don’t see the benefit. A more meaningful number for us is the number 22. For years, war veterans were told that 22 veterans were committing suicide a day. As we scrambled to build the networks necessary to respond to this crisis, many of us began to speak louder about the ongoing cost of war here in the United States.

The pain that leads to suicide doesn’t appear out of thin air. Every veteran can repeat the names of our friends and allies whose personal torment came from the same wars that we overfunded and under-interrogated. Even worse, these wars come with an opportunity cost of meaningful growth and investment in the communities we serve.

Every day that we continue with a budget that prioritizes war is a day that American service members are asked to recommit to that cycle of trauma. And, as a nation, we never reckon with the harm we put on communities overseas, who didn’t volunteer to join the world’s premier fighting force — they were just born on contested land. Some of our hardest memories are  tied to the families and children we lived with in these warzones. The cost and grief of the forever war is incalculable.

Every dollar that we spend destroying communities overseas is a dollar not spent on universal healthcare, affordable housing, or meaningful social services and public education. Every youth sent overseas for war is a life at risk for a sacrifice that we can not justify. Every veteran returning who is saddled with trauma is a high toll to pay for wars that never had a clear goal — and many are returning to underfunded and forgotten communities.

I am here today, with the Poor People’s Campaign, because we can make different choices. We need you to make different choices. 

5. Kenya Slaughter, Louisiana (Virtual testifier) 

Hello everyone. My Name is Kenya Slaughter I currently reside in Alexandria La. I have been employed with Dollar General for the past four years. I am also a mom to a child with autism who needs special attention and care. 

During the pandemic, I closed the store many nights, so I know my stores revenues were going up. But we didn’t get paid more, in fact, we often worked alone, without any PPE, while more than 300 customers would come in, looking for whatever it was they needed. At one point, we were going to get a $300 one-time bonus, but that didn’t begin to compensate me for all the risks we were taking. Many of our stores have been robbed at gun point, during the night shift, with just one or two workers there. 

More recently, I and several other Dollar General workers (shareholders) were turned away from the shareholders meeting on May 26. This was at the City Hall in Tennessee. I was with Bishop Barber and other workers, and we had a proxy to enter. We knocked and were ignored. We were told we were were denied entry because we were FOUR MINUTES late 🙄. 

Nowhere on the proxy does it state a time frame for entry into the meeting. And we had been there since 7:30am. The meeting began at 9am. We entered the building at 9:04 and were denied entry into the meeting that we rightfully should have been able to attend.

The concerns that we wanted to address were things like having a WORKING AC in our stores, weekly Covid testing, safe working consideration and better wages. Dollar general makes more than enough money to provide better wages for all of its employees as well – especially its essential workers! It  is the nation’s fastest-growing retail chain, with $3.2 billion in profits in 2021. But they have not shared the wealth with their employees. In 2021, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos made $16.6 million — 935 times as much as the firm’s median worker pay of just $17,773. 

Dollar General is also intensely anti-union. They’ve even shut down store locations where workers have voted to be represented by a labor union. 

I really believe that people try to fit us into their budget and accounting, but we are not more than numbers on a spreadsheet, to be pushed around until we make sense on paper. 

We can’t get done what they are asking of us in the tiny amount of hours they think it takes. We can’t live off of poverty wages. And we can’t live in constant threat to our lives. 

This is why we’re organizing and asking for better pay, safe working conditions, and for corporations like Dollar General to pay their fair share. And it’s why we’re asking you to be accountable to us, not them. 

6. Fernando Garcia, Texas (Virtual testifier)

I am Fernando Garcia, the founder and current executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights. Today, I am speaking on behalf of thousands of mix-legal status families and border residents that are part of the Border Network. Our organization has been doing human rights organizing within border communities for more than 24 years, in the midst of an open war against immigrants, refugees, people of color and the poor. 

For decades, immigrant families and border communities in America have been subjected to a brutal combination of systems that dehumanize them, persecute them, criminalize them, and kills them. Our immigration system has: 

  • separated more than 2,000 children from their parents at the border since 2017
  • expelled almost a million and a half refugees and asylum seekers in the last 2 years
  • built more than a 1,000 miles of border walls, that send migrants to the isolated deserts and mountains at the border where they are dying at a ratio of 1,000 per year (3 people a day)
  • pushed 11 millions of immigrants in the US to live in poverty and ongoing persecution. 

This is rooted and perpetuated by a distorted narrative has been infused with vitriol and racist white supremacy for at least 30 years that dehumanized immigrants – and we see its effects in both federal and state policies. I recently spent more than 3 weeks along the Texas-Mexico border and saw how the State of Texas has become the epicenter of the white supremacist aggression against democracy, women, immigrant and refugee families, people of color and the poor. The so-called Lone Star Operation, spearheaded by Republican governor Greg Abbott, has spent more than $8 billion dollar of taxpayer money to build state border walls, and deployed thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guards to the border with the purpose of arresting and detaining migrant children, migrant families, and refugees. 

America is supposed to be a Nation of Immigrants. The borders of our country, with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, used to represent the promised land and a better future. Nowadays our borders, especially our southern border, represent quite the opposite: for immigrants, refugees and communities, it is the promise of poverty, criminalization, and militarization. 

We refuse to accept this culture of abuse, terror, and poverty and we reaffirm that the southern border of the United States of America is the New Ellis Island. 

We call on Congress and the Biden Administration to: 

  1. End the anti-refugee strategies at the border such as Title 42, MPP, family detention and Separation. And instead, rebuild and strengthen a fair and humane asylum and refugee system 
  2. To End the Militarization of the border and the construction of Border Walls and instead create Welcoming Centers and expand the legal ways where families, workers and refugees can come to America free of violence and abuse
  3.  To make Border Patrol, ICE and other immigration law enforcements agencies and institutions accountable to Congress and to communities and infuse them with theory and practice of human and civil rights. 
  4. To reform our immigration laws to reunify families, and to allow 11 million “undocumented Americans” who live here to be integrated and recognized as citizens, with dignity and rights. 

I thank you for your attention. 

7. Jessica Boyles, Pennsylvania (Virtual testifier)

Hello! My name is Jessica, I live in Northeast Pennsylvania and I’m a Home Healthcare Aide. I’m speaking to you from the deck of the home I live in, built by my father and grandfather in the late 60’s. I grew up, however, in the suburbs of Philadelphia and worked and lived for many years in Philly. Since moving up here six years ago from Philadelphia, I’ve come to understand why folks up here call this God’s country, but I’ve also discovered how neglected our rural communities remain – where folks locked into tiny towns can’t access services in larger, neighboring towns because of a lack of transportation, they can’t get the better paying jobs that are there, or access high speed internet or cell service, so we lack information and other services, assistance. 

And good health care, including dental care, and mental health care, is really hard to come by. 

In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic hit and suddenly I was essential and a hero, I was also a healthcare worker with no health insurance and at $11 an hour, I made too much for Medicaid but not enough to buy insurance. I looked for a new job offering insurance benefits and the best I could find was an agency requiring a full year of employment before benefits kicked in. I took that job and I worked that year because I was desperate – only to find that my benefits were so low and the deductible so high, I couldn’t actually afford to use it.

Home health workers’ poor working conditions aren’t just a problem in rural areas. Across the country, the median hourly wage for home health and personal care aides is just $14.15. In other words, way more than half of us make less than $15 per hour. 

I’d also like to tell you about Richard. Richard is an 84-year-old former client of mine who requires 24 hour care. When an agency takes a case they are legally required to fill all of the hours. This never happened in the 6 months I was on Richard’s case. He was routinely left without a caretaker in excess of 8 hours and in full knowledge of my supervisor and the county caseworker.

I watched coworkers burn themselves out and quit trying to meet these unfilled hours, believing the agency or county would fix things soon. I knew better by that point, so I would stop in as often as I could to get him to the bathroom and out of his own soiled clothes causing him urine burns, but I lived with guilt for those six months every time I chose to take care of myself rather than fill in extra hours for Richard. How do people expect workers to show up day in and day out under those levels of demoralization, when we can’t even get our own damn healthcare!

At the same time, huge profits are being made at the top of the health care industry. Last year, the CEO of Humana, which owns the country’s largest home care agency, made $16.5 million. That’s 561 times as much as a typical home care worker.

The CEO of the second-largest home care company, Amedisys, made $8.3 million, or 282 times as much as a home care worker.

Something is very wrong when people who need care like Richard and the people working to provide that care like me are struggling just to survive while people at the top are making a killing during a pandemic.

And the audacity of our leaders to turn the problem around on us and tell us it’s our fault, that we’re loafing off handouts, too lazy to get back to work and all the while, our communities have been devastated by a pandemic that has killed a million of us and that has killed poor people at higher rates than rich people. I am angry and I am affronted. 

That’s why the Poor People’s Campaign is demanding health care that works for all of us, from Medicaid expansion to protecting Medicare and universal, single payer health care, regardless of who we are, what we do or where we live. It’s why we’re demanding a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour NOW and living wages for all workers. That’s why we’re demanding that corporations pay their fair share in taxes – they don’t get to profit off of our pain. That’s why we’re asking you to center the poor in national policies and what rural communities need. 

It’s the only way forward. 

8. Rev. Carolyn Foster, Alabama (Virtual testifier)

I am Rev. Carolyn Foster.  I serve a small inner-city Episcopal church in Birmingham, Alabama and I am on staff with a non-profit organization that serves the five-county area surrounding Birmingham called, Greater Birmingham Ministries.  We provide direct services to people who are hurting and at risk due to economic constraints and we work to dismantle issues that are systemic in nature that keep people needing basic services such as food, clothing and financial assistance.

As an example, people come to us on food distribution day because they have children who are hungry.  We have learned that most of the time, their hunger need can be traced to a policy or a systemic problem that is an obstacle or barrier in them, such as lack of a living wage.  

People wouldn’t come to us needing food to feed their children, or needing money to pay their utility bills or to purchase medications if they had a living wage and affordable health care insurance. 

And if these people, many of whom are the working poor, had a fair and just election process, they would elect people who truly represented them and their interest.

Lack of a living wage, lack of Medicaid expansion and barriers to voting are huge obstacles in Alabama. 

Alabama still has not expanded Medicaid even though:

  • federal funds are made available to do it
  • 100,000 Alabamians who hold regular job, albeit low wage jobs, would benefit from it
  •  300,000 people in Alabama would benefit from it who are:
    •  uninsured veterans, 
    • adult college students, 
    • people with disabilities, 
    • adults who care of children and older family members,
    • workers who are in-between jobs.

There are great moral and economic costs of not providing for the health and well-being of the people in AL and across the country. A recent study shows that universal health care could have saved over 330,000 lives in the pandemic. We are so quick to run to war, defend the rights of powerful, but where is the urgency to address the lack of health care, decent and adequate incomes, and democracy? 

Legislators and officials are elected to represent all the people in their districts, but when the vote is suppressed by purging eligible voters, when thousands of people are disenfranchised because of fines and fees, and cumbersome, unnecessary paperwork that must be completed before you can cast their vote, then it is blatantly obvious, that obstacles are in place for some of us but not for others.

Organizations like Greater Birmingham Ministries can only do so much to provide temporary relief to people who are in great need, vulnerable, disenfranchised and sometimes targeted by legislation and policies that undermine their very existence.  We can’t do it all and we shouldn’t have to. 

Permanent relief is in the hands of policy makers, your hands!  Are you going to wipe your hands of these, your people?  Or are you going to open your hands to them with moral conviction and compassionate care that says, “Yes, I am my brother’s and sister’s keeper.”   The power to help and the power to hinder is in your hands.