By Melissa Young, Cameron Johnson, and Molly Bashay

In addition to enduring a climate crisis, our country is also experiencing a jobs and economic crisis. The current 5.4 million jobs shortfall means millions of families are still struggling. After the most devastating year since the Great Depression, workers and families are far from a pre-pandemic normal. An estimated 23.6 million workers have been economically harmed by the COVID-19 recession. Many of the pandemic’s job losses are likely permanent. The economic destruction wrought by COVID-19 has been particularly damaging to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and immigrant workers, young people, and those impacted by the criminal legal system—all of whom all face persistent economic disparities and marginalization caused by countless structural inequities often rooted in racism and baked into our labor market.