Soaring income inequality. A lack of home care workers statewide. Green-industry jobs that can keep young families in the area.

Those were just a few of the reasons a group of about a dozen people, including representatives from nonprofit Voice of Westmoreland, held a protest outside U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler’s Greensburg office Wednesday afternoon.

The purpose was to encourage Reschenthaler to support President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar “Build Back Better” proposal. Reschenthaler has referred to the initiative as Biden’s “next attack on the American worker” on his Twitter feed, saying the proposal will harm the U.S. economy rather than help it.

Suzanne English of Greensburg disagreed.

“This contains so much to address income inequality, which has soared during the pandemic,” English said. “We can’t continue to glorify capitalism and acquisition at the expense of those struggling to make it. I’m not saying I’m against capitalism, just against unbridled capitalism, which often becomes greed.”

Leigh Carroll is a member of the United Home Care Workers of Pennsylvania, which recently unionized.

“There’s a lot of home caregivers in Westmoreland County, and they’re some of the most underpaid workers in the state,” Carroll said. “In Pennsylvania, their average wage is $10.50 an hour, largely without benefits.”

A recent story by Trib news partner Spotlight PA outlined the coming dementia crisis and delved into how Pennsylvania is not prepared to properly address it. Among the reasons is a lack of those trained to care for patients.

Carroll said $400 billion in the Build Back Better proposal, earmarked for the nation’s home care system, could be “transformative.”

“Right now, there’s about one caregiver for every eight patients in Pennsylvania,” she said. “We really need this.”

Edward West of Greensburg said he is tired of Pennsylvania officials waiting for the state’s steel and coal industries to return to their heyday.

“This is our congressman and I don’t want to see Pennsylvania left behind again in these new green industries,” West said. “We have a lot of young families looking for good-paying jobs and we should be trying to keep them here in the area.”

Reschenthaler called the Build Back Better agenda a series of “radical proposals will wreck our economy, send our good-paying energy jobs to competitors like China and Russia, and bankrupt future generations of Americans.”

“For our nation to recover from the covid pandemic, we need to prioritize policies that support economic growth and job creation, not stifle them,” he said.

Reschenthaler’s social media posts stake his position out fairly clearly.

“Only 10% of Democrats’ trillion-dollar ‘infrastructure’ bill actually goes toward infrastructure,” he tweeted in late August. “The rest of the bill is full of Green New Deal policies that prioritize coastal elites in big cities while leaving middle America behind.”

Diana Steck of North Huntingdon does not see it that way.

“The Build Back Better plan is so important to our recovery from the pandemic, especially the American Families Plan, which I look at as infrastructure for people,” Steck said. “We need child care, better health care, home care, and we need climate change to be addressed. And when it is addressed, it will also lead to better ‘green’ union jobs as well.”

For more on the proposal, see WhiteHouse.gov/build-back-better.

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