Representative Ritchie Torres is a fighter from the Bronx who has spent his entire life working for the community he calls home. Like many people in the South Bronx, poverty and struggle have never been abstractions to him, and he governs from a place of lived experience.
Ritchie’s mother single-handedly raised him, his twin brother, and his sister in a public-housing project. She paid the bills working minimum-wage jobs, which in the 1990s paid $4.25 an hour. While Ritchie grew up with mold, lead, leaks, and no reliable heat or hot water in the winter, he watched the government spend over $100 million dollars to build a golf course across the street for Donald Trump. In 2013, at the age of 25, Ritchie became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person elected to office in the Bronx.
After the devastation and hardship New Yorkers experienced this past year, a post-COVID world cannot come soon enough. New York City risks becoming a shadow of its former self if we don’t make the right investments to get our economy back on track.
The dual crises of COVID-19 and systemic racism have magnified the economic inequality that plagues our country, and we can’t afford to return to the pre-pandemic status quo. We need to give hard working people a fighting chance at success.
As a member of the House Committee on Financial Services, I’m fighting every day to rebuild a more inclusive middle class. I’m in favor of increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would give millions of Americans a fighting chance at a better life by lifting people from poverty, narrowing racial pay gaps, and building a more equitable economy for everyone.
I’m also a strong supporter of the labor movement, which is our best hope to revitalize the middle class. Strengthening unions is a pivotal step towards mitigating growing income inequality and worker safety concerns. Congress needs to significantly expand the rights of workers to unionize and enhance protections for those whose efforts to unionize are impeded by their employers.