American families are grappling with the rising costs of basic essentials.
Things like food, gas, rent and utilities are on the rise while wages remain stagnant and not consistent with inflation.
Parents like Margaret Soland, a single mother of three, are then left to make difficult decisions between food and personal health care.
“Sometimes I can’t afford my meds, because either my kids need meds or my kids need something so I have to choose and it’s hard,” she said at a panel discussion about affordability with Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva on Thursday, National Working Moms Day.
Soland wears many hats on top of motherhood. She works as a stagehand for local productions as well as a training officer for IATSE Local 415 and other flexible, parttime work.
She says she is also a supporter of universal health care and looks to lawmakers like Grijalva to help pass legislation to increase accessibility.
“I wish that it wasn’t a pride or ego thing and a power thing,” says working mom, Marissa Sanders. “The majority is working class, why is the economy set up attacking that or making it harder for the working class to get ahead or keep food on their table and keep gas in their cars?”
Andrea Moreno, executive director of Honest Arizona says equality is one of the challenges that working mothers face today.
“Working moms don’t feel almost equal to a male, we get asked different questions like about childcare, ‘Who’s watching your kids?’,” she said. “I think inherently being a mother can make you [feel] like an activist.”
Grijalva listened to a panel of five mothers from diverse backgrounds who raised concerns about affordability, equitable access to education and workplace policies for working parents.
“When you look at the increased cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, the requirement to make less than $29,000 penalizes people who are actually seeking employment anywhere,” Grijalva said, before calling out recent government spending that’s been allocated to the war in Iran.
“We spent 11.3 billion in six days…10% of that could have funded all of these cuts to Medicare and Medicaid,” she said.
During the panel discussion, Grijalva said she has been prioritizing legislation that supports a working families agenda before listing several bills she’s co-sponsoring.
“The Family Act, that one would make sure that 43% of people that don’t have it now, have personal medical leave…and then 12 weeks of partial income when they need to take leave,” she said.
Grijalva is also co-sponsoring the Healthy Families Act, that would establish a national standard for paid sick leave as well as the Social Security Income Restoration Act which looks to modernize the SSI program by raising benefits to 100% of the federal poverty level.
“Those are just three of the 59 that I signed in one day that have to do really with how we are supporting a working family’s agenda,” she said.
Grijalva is a member of the Education & Workforce Committee that is trying to pass a Working Families’ Resolution to boost wages and support work life balance.
She says she’s looking towards the midterms and is hopeful for newly elected officials with different priorities.
