While many residents and working families continue to face economic hardships, from struggling to pay rent and groceries with minimum wages that haven’t kept up with inflation and productivity in decades, to small businesses in communities of color disproportionately receiving less PPP loans than in white-majority areas, we’re also currently undergoing a tumultuous time of corporate price-gouging and massive technological transformation. 

Since the 1980s, the government has prioritized corporate and special interests and the short-term maximization of profits, in the hope that doing so would create a “trickle down economy” where workers benefit at the bottom. But this trickle down economy has never worked; instead, corporations use massive profits to re-elect career politicians who then give kickbacks, subsidies, and tax breaks to those corporations. Moreover, corporations have lost any sense of duty of loyalty to their employees and the communities they’re in, as their main motive is maximizing profit for their shareholders in everything they do, even at the expense of their workers. We must understand that the American economy is built and sustained by individual workers, not by monolithic corporations and CEOs. 

For instance, large corporations like Amazon are using union-busting tactics to break up unions; automation is threatening jobs that count on physical labor, which is happening in areas like the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; surveillance capitalism is stealing our data with no in-kind payment; employers are using technology to surveil their employees; abuse of contractor status is robbing would-be employees of their legal rights to healthcare and other benefits. With the current dystopian economic landscape that values the stock market and GDP over people, we need to ensure that our economy is one that prioritizes human life and social responsibility. We must start NOW on the path of creating an economy that works for all and not lose our future before it begins.