Deborah Ross, Democratic candidate in North Carolina’s Senate race, laid out a comprehensive agenda for strengthening families Monday that includes raising the minimum wage to $12, a bigger tax break for child care expenses and requiring employers to give women equal pay when their jobs are the same as male workers.
Ross also said that if elected, she would continue to fight for women’s access to reproductive health care, noting that when cost barriers to contraception are eliminated, women’s abortion rates fall by 80 percent.
“As I’ve traveled across North Carolina, I’ve heard from so many women and families about how hard it is to make ends meet in today’s changing economy,” Ross said in a six-page statement from her campaign headquarters in Raleigh. “When one earner in a family doesn’t get equal pay or has to choose between staying home with a sick child and earning a paycheck that just makes it worse.”
Among her key proposals:
–Ross said North Carolina women earn 85 cents for every dollar earned by a male coworker with the same work assignment, and if elected, she would push similar “equal pay for equal work” legislation that she advocated during a decade in the North Carolina House. She said more than 42 million women, about 60 percent of all working women, would get a pay hike, with the annual increase estimated at $6,251.
–She would support increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $12 per hour, raising wages for 35 million Americans, including 1.3 million North Carolinians, whose added spending power she said would pump $3.9 billion into the state’s economy.
–She would push to require employers to give workers paid family leave to care for a new child, noting that the United States is the only industrialized country that fails to provide it and that only 12 percent of workers currently receive the benefit.
–Saying that Republicans in Congress and in many states have “pursued an extreme agenda that interferes with a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body,” Ross said she would continue to fight for women’s health care and abortion rights as a senator. She said she would oppose efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides care to more than 30,000 patients in North Carolina, giving 20,000 of them contraception and 2,500 life-saving cancer screening.
Ross also vowed, if elected, to work to help rape victims bring perpetrators to justice, to protect communities from sexual predators and to combat a “national epidemic” of sexual assaults on college campuses. While saying she supports Americans’ 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, she would seek to strengthen the federal system for conducting background checks before firearms are sold “so that dangerous people can’t buy weapons over the internet or at a gun show.”
Greg Gordon: 202-383-6152, @greggordon2
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