Teresa Leger Fernandez:
Today was education and labor mark-up of the COVID bill. So I gave five minutes remarks, and now there’s a little break, but they just brought up all kinds of things. The Republicans are clearly focused on, We must condition everything upon schools opening in person, which is—talk about federal government messing with what schools can open under what conditions. So those have all been defeated and then all the different amendments where they wanted to strip the minimum wage have also taken a lot of time. And once again, it’s just amazing. The idea that people think that it’s up to businesses to decide whether they should pay tipped workers, $2 an hour. $2 an hour, right? It just stymies me how someone can get up there and say, it should be allowed for us to pay people below what they can live on. I mean, not like a living wage, because, one of the Republicans said, relative to really have a living wage, it needs to be $18. We were like, yeah, but let’s start here. So anyway, it’s an interesting contrast of priorities. I got to sit through and listen for the markup.
Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
I wanted to ask you part of what we’re doing is a bit of a civics lesson. What does markup mean?
TLF:
So markup means you get the bill and this is when the bill actually gets heard in committee. And in a sense, the way I’ve translated it, it gets marked up. So here’s the bill—
MCD:
Red pen.
TLF:
—red pen, you know what amendments get made. Some of the amendments that were made today that passed was, here are lots of changes that fix things, fix certain references. So that’s a markup, it’s a red pen. Now and then there are amendments where they are thinking to get that bill and strike the minimum wage, or make the minimum wage available only to, you know, that changes by district, which would, Oh my God. How horrible is that? That you would say all those places that they don’t make very much money. You are going to be stuck and you will always make less money. That was one of their amendments.
TLF:
So if that passed, then that would get put into the bill, that amendment would pass. In this instance, there’s been one amendment that has passed, which was a technical amendment. Would all the amendments seeking to condition money for the school was based on school’s opening. Those kinds of things have all been defeated and all the amendments seeking to strike the living wage have also been defeated. You know I’ve spoken on opening and on the importance of not discriminating against immigrants without status. If the bill would allow federal subsidies for Cobra—
MCD:
For what?
TLF:
—for Cobra, which is the coverage that you get if you’ve lost your job. You’re allowed to purchase health insurance if you are willing to pay for it yourself. And so what the bill does is provide a subsidy to allow people to pay for that Cobra, because if they lost the job, they don’t have the money now to continue paying for the health insurance.
And so there are two ways in which the bill helps those who have become uninsured: One is you can get Medicare, you can enroll in the ACA and get subsidies, or we’ll provide subsidies through Cobra. But they want to strip out that immigrants, so undocumented immigrants can’t get that. So my comments are, well, we want to rely on you to pick our food and to work in meat packing plants, and to take care of our elderly. But you lose your job then, sorry, you’re on your own. I mean, it’s that thing of we will exploit you, but then once we can no longer use you, we will not respect you.
MCD:
And especially, I think this has gotten really front and center during COVID because so many of those frontline undocumented workers are the ones who are most vulnerable to the illnesses itself.
TLF:
Right. And especially because of the conditions in which they work—because of the conditions in which they work, because of the poverty in which they live. And it’s shown a spotlight on these conditions, and to turn our back on them now is simply inhumane. It’s cruel. This is the whole immigrant status. It’s never about economics. It’s always about wanting to scapegoat somebody.
MCD:
Right. Did you get what you wanted? Did you defeat the things that you wanted to defeat?
TLF:
Yes. There is strong unity among the caucus. So we’ve defeated everything we wanted.
MCD:
When you say “the caucus,” I keep meaning to ask you about this. You mean the Democratic caucus?
TLF:
Okay. I always say caucus, the Democratic caucus. So the Democratic members of the committee have been united and moving this bill forward and they’ve been united in making sure we keep the minimum wage. They’ve been united and making sure that if an undocumented immigrant—but yes, we’ve been very united. And we have enough votes as long as we stick together that we can move the bill.
MCD:
Right. There’s this thing that when you do something to solve one problem, it can end up having a bigger, positive effect than what its original intention was. So like a really simple example of that is curb cuts on the sidewalks that help people with wheelchairs to be able to navigate. But it also ended up helping people with suitcases and carts and all kinds of things with wheels. And that’s just a trivial example, but I was wondering how you see that phenomenon happening with COVID relief and the stimulus initiatives, whether you see that having an effect beyond addressing this terrible disease, which of course needs addressing and its ramifications, but going beyond that too.
TLF:
Well, yes. I mean what both Biden and the Democrats, and maybe a few Republicans, are saying is that we need to take this opportunity to address these issues. And let’s look at some of the underlying conditions, then underlying inequities. That’s one of the things the minimum wage does that has such an impact going forward. The consequence of needing to deal with it now as part of COVID as part of needing to stimulate the economy for will, but it will have a long-term impact on narrowing the inequity. So yeah, I mean that’s—but it’s not unintentional, like the way the curb cuts might’ve been, Oh, we weren’t thinking about people with their suitcases. We are actually thinking very intentionally about the future. Now, how that then has some ramifications we might not think about, you know, but we are very intentional about this is so that somebody can work at one job, not two jobs, because one of those consequences is not just that you raise people’s been arranged, but if you work at one job, you’re then going to be able to be home for your children, to help them with their homework.
You’re going to be able to go and help coach the soccer team or the baseball team or participate in going to all the teacher-student conferences. So those consequences that aren’t economic that come from this are very known to us and we’ve spoken to them. And that’s, I think a real thing is that it has, if you believe in family, this is a very family-oriented economic provision, but it’s so family-oriented because it strengthens the ability of the family unit to do things that are important, and that only a family can provide in a real way. Personally, I tried to go to every single one of my kids’ soccer games or swim meets or the different things they did. And it was hard because I was working and I couldn’t always do it, but I had the ability to make my schedule work with that. Well, if you’re working three jobs, you don’t have that ability and we need to have that available for all of our families. So this is a family first and if Republicans really believed in the family they would vote for this and support it.
