Issue Position: Jobs and the Economy

Issue Position

The people of Illinois deserve to have high-paying respectable jobs. We need to create an economy that works for all of our citizens.

These should be the best of times for working people in Illinois. After all, the unemployment rate is near its lowest level in almost 50 years. If that were our only guide, then we might conclude that virtually every adult in the Illinois who wants to work is either doing so or is diligently looking for a job. The problem is that the unemployment rate, is an insufficient statistic, despite all the attention it gets. It tabulates the number of men and women who are actively job-hunting, but leaves out the growing numbers who have stopped actively looking.
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Those who stop looking for work aren't listed as unemployed. People stop looking for work when wages are too low, A low unemployment rate does not consider that the jobs ADDED to the economy are LOW WAGE jobs, and the jobs we are LOSING are HIGH WAGE jobs. If a worker has to cobble together 2 or 3 jobs just to get by because wages are so low, that is NOT good for the working class, it is only good for the employers.
​A living wage for a single parent with only 1 child in Illinois is currently $26.27/hour ( https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/17 ) Even after our wage raises to $15 in 2025, it's still not enough.
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In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, everyone who can work should have the right to a decent-paying job. We can and should have a full-employment economy. In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about the right of every American to have a job. That was true then. It is true today. A job guarantee will lower the crime rate, improve mental health, and create a stronger sense of community. It will create a much healthier and happier America. A full-employment economy is a vibrant economy that will work for all of us.
We need thousands of workers to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure--roads, bridges, drinking water systems, wastewater plants, rail, schools, affordable housing--and build our 100% sustainable energy system. This infrastructure is critical to a thriving, green economy.
At a time when our early childhood education system is totally inadequate, we need hundreds of thousands of workers to provide quality care to the young children of our country.
As the nation ages, we will need many more workers to provide supportive services for seniors to help them age in their homes and communities, which is where they want to be.

Wages:
Illinois has legislation in place to raise our minimum wage to $15 an hour by the year 2025 for the 1.4 million of our family, friends and neighbors who currently make less, . This is an important piece of legislation as it will allow all of us to have an opportunity to afford a decent life. When FDR signed the Fair Labors Standards Act, he was signing into law protections for the people against the corporations that were taking advantage of the working class. Minimum wage was designed as an amount that companies were required to pay their workforce so they could survive, and live a decent life. Without those protections, employers could, and did, pay starvation wages. We enacted a shorter work week, and eliminated children in the workforce. This incredible legislation has driven our society forward.

We need to bring these ideas to the 21st century. Raising the minimum wage will stimulate consumer spending, help businesses' bottom lines, and grow the economy.This modest increase will improve worker productivity, and reduce employee turnover and absenteeism. It will also boost the overall economy by generating increased consumer demand. We support indexing the minimum wage to inflation means adjusting it automatically to keep pace with the rising cost of living so that minimum wage workers do not lose purchasing power each year.

New Opportunities:
With the renewable energy sector preparing to explode, we propose Illinois does everything possible to be a big player in this industry. Illinois is poised to be a great location for hubs of these new technologies as we have massive rail systems, highways, and waterways that connect us to the entire rest of the country. We have an opportunity to have production facilities here in Illinois, and we intend to do everything possible to attract major companies to central Illinois to provide new and high-wage jobs to our communities.

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