Friend,

Corporate greed is a disease that has long inflicted this country. In the district I represent, Michigan’s #13thDistrictStrong, we’ve had enough.

We feel the symptoms every day: Developers get billions in tax breaks while families have the water in their homes turned off and have to turn to food pantries to feed their kids.

While lavishing extravagant wealth on their top executives, many top corporations pay their workers poverty wages. For the average employee to earn what their CEO makes in a year, it would take more than a lifetime: 100 years.

It’s time for a change, so I worked with Rep. Barbara Lee and Sen. Bernie Sanders to co-introduce the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.

If passed, the bill would incentivize a more fair, narrower pay gap between CEOs and employees, by taxing corporations if they pay their CEOs over 50x their median worker pay. The wider the pay gap, the higher the tax rate.

SIGN NOW: Become a grassroots co-signer of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act to address rising levels of income and wealth inequality.

General Motors workers in my hometown of Detroit just got back on the job after winning a new union contract. They endured the longest strike in the auto industry in 50 years—which was provoked partly by GM’s obscenely unjust pay disparity between its workers and CEO.

Last year, GM’s CEO Mary Barra made nearly $22 million, while GM workers hired after 2007 started at just $17 per hour. That’s unacceptable. Especially because the federal government and American taxpayers recently bailed out GM after the Great Recession.

While average CEO pay has gone up over time—along with inflation and costs of living increases—the wages for the average worker have not. That’s led to rising poverty, which disproportionately affects people of color.

Here’s a graphic from The Detroit News, which showcases the 2018 CEO-worker pay gap at some of Michigan’s largest corporations:

And it’s not just Michigan. At many large U.S. corporations, CEOs continue to hoard the wealth that is generated by their employees’ labor. They rely on working families to make their riches, but the average CEO at a Fortune 500 firm today makes 200-300x the average pay of their typical workers—and sometimes that number is much higher.

CEOs don’t work hundreds or thousands of times harder than the average worker, so why should they be paid like it?

Under our new bill, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, if heads of corporations refuse to share the wealth, they will pay more in taxes. In turn, that will generate revenue to fight the inequality and poverty exacerbated by CEO-worker pay gaps.

Sign the petition to become a grassroots supporter of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act and help end extreme income inequality.

My community, the country’s third-poorest congressional district, faces severe joblessness and poverty. That’s why I know this problem is urgent and requires real solutions immediately. We can’t just wait for corporate executives to act. We have to make them change.

If you want to read more, check out my recent op-ed in the Detroit Free Press. And don’t forget to sign the petition.

Always serving you,

Rashida