Rights & Democracy is currently engaging in a number of intersectional campaigns:
We are helping lead campaigns in Vermont to push for a $15 minimum wage by 2024, family and medical leave insurance legislation, and preventing worker misclassification. With tens of thousands of workers struggling on poverty wages, 90 percent without union representation, and thousands of families lacking paid leave to care for their families, it’s more important now than ever that we organize locally to enact policies that make economic security and work with dignity realities in our state.
Working families across the country have won important victories on a range of workplace rights and consumer protection standards in the past five years. However, enforcement of these new standards remains a challenge.
Traditionally, workers and consumers could file lawsuits to hold lawbreakers accountable. Most of us have lost the right to go to court, now that powerful corporations are burying forced arbitration provisions deep in the fine print of contracts.
Corporations and their political allies are denying more than 60 million people – half the American workforce – their right to challenge their employer in court.
These hidden clauses strip away our rights to utilize our public justice system to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal, and completely stack the deck against employees and consumers. Companies use arbitration to hide wrongdoing: women who experience sexual harassment are often forced into arbitration, which silences them from speaking out.
We are working to move toward an economy based on renewable energy that provides work with dignity and puts us on the forefront in the fight against climate change. We must advance a more unifying vision of how we put people and the planet over profit – and one that seeks to engage people around the idea of clean water, clean air, clean food, and clean soils. From business development to energy policies, including those focused on public transit, progress will be measured by an open, democratic approach to determining our future.
Sign up to get involved with our Jobs, Justice & Climate campaign.
Throughout the country, the Congressional Republicans’ and the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and portions of Medicare and Medicaid will generate both urgency and momentum in the fight for health care for all. In Vermont, we will continue to ally ourselves with sister organizations such as the Vermont Workers’ Center, Planned Parenthood, and Vermont Health Care for All (among others) to continue to push for reforms that move us towards full universal healthcare.