Ritchie Torres: “I thank Teresa for those kind words. I have the honor of representing New York 15, the South Bronx, which is often said…”

“I thank Teresa for those kind words. I have the honor of representing New York 15, the South Bronx, which is often said to be the poorest congressional district in America. The unemployment rate in the South Bronx can be as high as 25 percent compared to 5 percent in the Upper East Side, so we are living through a tale of two cities. But COVID-19 has shown the South Bronx to be the essential congressional district. It is the home of essential workers who put their lives at risk during the peak of the pandemic so that the rest of us could safely shelter in place. We owe it to those workers to give them a fighting chance at a decent and dignified life. Our society will be judged by how we treat the most essential among us. There is a gap between the value of what our essential workers do and how poorly we treat them and how poorly we pay them. Bridging that essential gap is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. Raising the minimum wage is long overdue. The minimum wage in America has been lagging behind inflation. It has been lagging behind the productivity of the American workforce. It has been lagging behind the historic average. We have gone more than a decade, the longest we have ever gone, without raising the minimum wage by even a cent.…”