Labor, cost of living, and economic fairness

If our economy runs on someone’s labor, then our policies should make sure that labor buys something back— stability, dignity, and a real path to a decent life. That is the center of how I think about the economy. Growth that looks good on a spreadsheet while leaving working people exhausted, insecure, and one emergency away from collapse is not success. It is deferred failure.

Too much of our economic conversation lives in abstraction— markets, productivity, efficiency— without ever asking how those forces land in a real kitchen at the end of a real month. I start from the other direction. Housing, healthcare, utilities, insurance, transportation, childcare, and property taxes squeeze people from every side at once, while wages have not kept pace with the cost of simply existing. For too many people in this valley, full-time work no longer guarantees a stable life.

That is not a personal failing. It is the result of policy choices we keep making.

I reject the idea that economic pain is simply the cost of doing business. A healthy economy does not concentrate profit at the top while quietly pushing risk downward onto the people with the least cushion to absorb it. A healthy economy is one where people can afford to live, plan beyond the next paycheck, and remain part of their communities without managing a new crisis every week.

Labor policy is where democracy meets daily life. People with stable work, predictable income, and time to rest have the capacity to raise families, care for neighbors, attend a city council meeting, coach a team, volunteer, and participate in civic life. Turn work into a constant emergency and that capacity disappears.

People do not check out of public life because they stopped caring. They check out because they are wrung dry by Thursday.

The quality of a job matters every bit as much as the number of jobs.

Wages matter— but a raise of a dollar an hour means very little if the job comes with no healthcare, no predictable schedule, no paid leave, and no protection when someone speaks up. That is not a good job. It is a fragile one wearing a slightly larger paycheck. Real economic fairness means looking at the whole shape of work: pay, hours, benefits, safety, stability, and respect.

I support wages that reflect what it actually costs to live here, not a mid-century fantasy in which one income covers a household, a doctor’s visit is affordable, and rent remains predictable. That economy is gone. Pretending it still exists simply hands the bill to the people it already failed.

Predictable scheduling belongs in the same conversation, even though it rarely gets there. Picture a warehouse worker along the I-15 corridor who learns by text at nine o’clock at night that tomorrow’s shift has been cut. Childcare is already arranged. Gas has already been burned. The week’s budget was already built around hours that suddenly disappeared.

You cannot plan a life around an employer who treats your time as free and endlessly cancelable. Advance notice and fair scheduling are not needless red tape. They are an acknowledgment that a worker’s time has value.

Workplace safety belongs there too. Utahns working in construction, warehousing, healthcare, transportation, hospitality, agriculture, mining, and other extractive trades face real risks every shift. Safety rules only matter when they are enforced, and enforcement only works when workers can report hazards without risking retaliation or losing their jobs.

A system that punishes people for identifying danger has already decided that output matters more than the person producing it. I will not accept that tradeoff.

The same principle applies to wage theft and worker misclassification. When an employer withholds earned wages, relabels employees as independent contractors, or manipulates hours to avoid providing benefits, that is not clever business. It is a cost transfer— off the company’s books and onto workers, families, and the public systems left to absorb the damage.

It also punishes honest employers who follow the rules, which is exactly backwards. Fair labor standards protect responsible businesses from being undercut by companies whose competitive advantage is exploitation.

The right to organize is part of this framework, not separate from it. Collective bargaining does not threaten economic stability— it is one of the ways stability gets built. When workers have a real voice, wages rise, turnover falls, workplaces become safer, and communities benefit.

I support the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively without intimidation, stalling, retaliation, or legal gamesmanship. That includes public employees, who are too often treated as political targets even though they are the people teaching our children, maintaining public infrastructure, providing essential services, and answering the call when something goes wrong.

Modern work has also outgrown many of the legal categories built for an earlier economy. Flexibility can be genuinely valuable, but too often the label “independent contractor” is simply a costume that strips workers of protections while leaving them responsible for all the risk.

Many people classified that way are not meaningfully independent. They are economically dependent and legally exposed. I support clear standards that preserve legitimate flexibility, stop fraudulent misclassification, and prevent companies from writing basic worker protections out of existence through a carefully worded contract.

Then there is the quiet trap underneath all of it: healthcare chained to employment. It locks people into jobs they need to leave, smothers people who dream of starting businesses of their own, and turns illness into a potential financial disaster.

Most of the solution must come at the federal level, but the state is not powerless. Through insurance regulation, Medicaid stability, and policies that close coverage gaps, Utah can reduce that pressure instead of pretending it does not exist. No one should have to choose between receiving medical care and keeping the job that is making them sick.

Transportation is also a labor issue, even though we rarely treat it as one. A job is only as accessible as the way someone gets there. Build an economy around night shifts, early mornings, and rotating schedules, then operate public transit as though everyone works nine to five, and you have quietly told an entire class of workers that they are on their own.

When the last train leaves before a shift ends, car dependency stops being a choice and becomes a tax— one paid most heavily by the people who can least afford it. Extending transit hours, improving frequency, and making service more reliable are forms of respect for working people’s time written directly into the schedule.

The cost of living does not land evenly either. Seniors living on fixed incomes, disabled residents, single parents, caregivers, and young adults trying to gain a foothold all carry compounded risk.

A property tax spike can push a longtime homeowner out of a house they already paid off, based on a paper value they never asked for and cannot access without selling the home and leaving the neighborhood where they built their life. People can do everything right and still be priced out of their own communities by forces they did not create and cannot control.

Smoothing that volatility is not a handout. It is keeping faith with people who kept faith with the rest of us.

This is where a belief I hold culturally also matters economically: our differences are a source of strength, not a problem to engineer away. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations means recognizing that people live different lives, work different hours, carry different responsibilities, and move through the world with different abilities and limitations.

An economy designed only for the healthiest, most flexible, and best-resourced person in the room will fail everyone standing behind them.

I also reject the story that dresses exhaustion up as virtue and treats burnout as a character flaw. Productivity that cannot be sustained is not strength— it is borrowing against our own people and calling it growth. An economy that grinds workers down may look impressive for a while, but only for as long as it takes them to break.

None of this is about punishing success. It is about refusing to let success be built on instability, exploitation, and harm we have simply agreed not to see. Prosperity that is broadly shared is not the softer version of a strong economy. It is the durable version. The resilient version. The version a democracy can actually stand on.

My commitment as a legislator is plain: help build a Utah economy that works for the people who keep it running. Not by setting workers against businesses, but by insisting on fair rules, shared responsibility, honest competition, and a system that treats human beings as more than line items.

An economy designed for dignity is an economy designed to last.