Sonia Chang-Díaz is a former public school teacher and the first Latina and Asian-American to serve in the Massachusetts State Senate — and she’s spent her career fighting for and winning the bold change that working families need. Sonia’s mom was a social worker. Her dad came to America with $50 in his pocket and became NASA’s first Latino astronaut. Now she’s building a movement to tackle our state’s biggest challenges and restore Massachusetts’ promise to all families.
Ensuring economic prosperity and security for all Bay Staters isn’t just about creating more jobs and attracting new businesses to Massachusetts — it’s about creating an economy that works for everyone. We need to make sure our jobs pay good, family-sustaining wages, close the racial wealth divide, and invest in equitable economic development to support local businesses.
During her time in the Senate, Sonia’s been a leading advocate for policies to ensure all jobs are good jobs and that no one in Massachusetts is trapped in poverty. She supported raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour and indexing it to inflation, as well as a nation-leading paid family and medical leave law.
As Governor, she will continue to lead the charge to create good jobs and family-sustaining wages and benefits while developing the workforce to power Massachusetts’ 21st Century economy:
Create tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs in Massachusetts through the state’s green energy transition, while creating workforce development opportunities for women, people of color, and workers without college degrees.
Invest in the physical and human infrastructure that fosters our educated workforce, makes it possible for workers to go to work, and promotes economic opportunity and equity, including:
Debt-free public higher education and full funding for K-12 schools to both solve the barriers that employers face to finding skilled, diverse talent and open up access to jobs in the burgeoning knowledge and green energy sectors that too few workers have access to.
Universal, debt-free child care and early education to make it possible for parents of young children to work outside the home.
Safe, reliable, widely-accessible public transit all across the state to make it easier for people in every community to get to their jobs, and easier for employers attract the workers they need.
Deliver strong equity standards for state contracts, to ensure that projects funded by taxpayer dollars — from construction to catering — are creating local jobs and promoting workforce and contracting diversity.
Implement equity provisions in the state law establishing the recreational cannabis industry. As Senate Chair of the Legislature's Cannabis Policy Committee, Sonia has continued to build coalitions and fight for reforms to ensure the cannabis industry builds wealth and opportunity for communities that have been harmed for decades by the War on Drugs.
Prioritize state investments to support small businesses, including the Small Business Technical Assistance program, which has helped thousands of local businesses across the state open, stabilize, and grow.
File legislation requiring more transparency and more accountability for state dollars spent on corporate tax credits, and require “clawbacks” of tax credit dollars when large corporations fail to live up to their local job creation commitments.