From fighting for fair work week legislation, to advocating for immigrant communities and the health of the city as a whole, City Councilmember Helen Gym takes a long-term view of the systemic changes she wants to implement, but embarks on those campaigns with all of the urgency of the immediate. She sat down with AL DÎA in September to talk about her vision for a more equitable and thriving Philadelphia. [This interview has been condensed. You can watch the livestream in full on our Facebook page.]
This legislation that I’m proposing simply asks for advance notice of schedules for hourly workers in retail and fast food and hospitality. These are some of our largest sectors of the economy, they are extremely unstable, and we have currently 130,000 workers who, for the most part, don’t know when they’re going to work, or how much they’re going to work.
The bill…eliminates probably 98 percent of food businesses in Philadelphia, so they won’t even be impacted. We’re talking about large-scale employers, McDonald’s, chain restaurants, those that have…the technological capacity to get to zero food waste, every single month. I have a hard time believing that they can’t treat their employees with that same kind of respect.
We know that when people don’t know when they’re going to work, or how many hours they’re going to get in a particular week, we see them swing wildly from week to week. They struggle to take care of their children, they don’t take care of their health, they can’t get a second job, they struggle to go back to a training program to get higher skills…They can’t go back to school or even juggle all these things.
You’ve been an advocate for shutting down the Berks County Residential Center. Where do efforts to shut down the detention center stand?
It’s extraordinarily inhumane to keep children in a prison setting, to not allow them to be able to attend school or participate in programs, or play in parks, and keep them in cells — even if it’s with their families — and keep families there that have committed no crime, except to seek refuge in the United States, to apply for asylum, which they are legally allowed to do.
If we’re appalled by what we’re seeing at the border and the separation of families, then we should be equally appalled when we’re doing this less than an hour away from Philadelphia with families here in our own state, on our watch.
Berks could be well-used for other things — maybe it could be a treatment center for the drug opioid crisis that is eviscerating out whole parts of the center of our state of Pennsylvania.
Gov. Wolf could issue an emergency order removal, we believe that is well within his purview….
