When the COVID-19 pandemic started and restaurant dining rooms throughout town began to close for safety, Meritage Hospitality was the very last quick service restaurant (referred to as QSR from this point on) to close their dining room doors to the public. Less than one week after local restrictions were altered to allow for dining rooms to be open again Poplar Bluff Missouri’s location 5009 was reopened for dine in orders; requiring all crew to wear face masks and gloves but applied no restrictions to patrons of the restaurant. Steps have been taken to make the customers feel safe and slash the possibility of crew spreading any germs to them but the staff of the restaurant is put in danger constantly with the only protections in pace for them being a plastic barrier in front of the register which customers often will stand to the side of to better hear the cashier and refuse to maintain a 6 foot distance from the order taker. Meritage has jumped the gun by allowing people back in their restaurant putting all their employees in danger, blinded by the profit to be had by being among the only restaurants with open dining rooms. As of this petition being written on 8/10/2020 only 2 other QSR establishments have opened their doors to the public again; with no plans to open before December or even this year. Just over 4 weeks into the dining room being open store 5009 has already tested with a positive COVID-19 case. The confirmed cases for the county have been rapidly increasing every day for weeks with over 500 cases between 7/28 and 8/8 alone. Every day that the dining room remains open your employees are at higher and higher risk of becoming infected and passing it to family and friends. The response to the positive test has been the dining room closing for the remainder of the week before reopening on Monday 8/17. By closing the lobby for these few days Meritage is acknowledging the safety increase that restricting the public to the pick up window brings, but also shows how little they care for the well being of their staff by making it last only one week. One week for the employees to be safe. One week for the staff to not have to worry about passing COVID-19 to the ones they love, but Meritage only sees a week of reduced profit. No amount of money is worth strengthening the spread of an infectious disease through a community, especially not a Frosty. The only responsible response to a clear indication of unsafe working conditions with an open dining room should be to reinstate the restrictions that limit customers to the pick up window to limit direct contact with crew and patrons; the current precautions are nothing short of laughable in the face of a global pandemic.

because trump is a racist, sexist, homophobe , transphobe , rapist and hes an ignorant piece of shit.

Biodegradable plastics have existed for years. My time working at both Starbucks and Coffee Bean showed me the amount one single store throws away in a day. My heart breaks for the landfills full of plastic, the animals and environment we destroy and ultimately ourselves. If Starbucks switches cups and straws alone to biodegradable plastics imagine how many lives we save. Banning straws did nothing and is ablist! Don’t be fooled by recycling! All the recycling would go into the same dumpster as the trash, and most places in the US say they recycle but it ends up in a landfill. STOP THE WASTE - CHANGE TO BIO DEGRADABLE PLASTICS NOW. Starbucks claims to be at the forefront of innovation, I believe if they make the switch others will follow suit!

Their health and safety is essential and impacts the city of Philadelphia.

It is important because of the current Covid crisis because families are having to keep children at home and do school online and because monopolies and collusion between corporations that compete with each other is illegal and destroys the very foundation of a free market.

In the last 5 months and counting, non-essential small businesses have not been able to open or generate any revenue, while rents and other expenses are still owed. County specific moratoriums only delay the payment of rents and evictions and do not protect small businesses from landlords collecting rents due from the mandatory closure. To obtain a commercial lease, small business owners personally guarantee the lease. Not only is the small business itself at risk of closing, business owners will face bankruptcy if landlords expect all rents during closure to be paid and expect rents to continue to be the same amount while the economic landscape has drastically changed. Commercial leases are generally very lengthy and primarily tip in the favor of the landlord, leaving the tenants little to no rights for rent relief or renegotiations. To-date, most non-essential small businesses that are allowed to reopen are operating at 10-30% of regular capacity, while some businesses are not able to use outdoor space to reopen, and others are not able to reopen at all. While earning zero to reduced revenues, overhead costs have also increased significantly for businesses with the new mandates to provide PPE, additional cleaning and sanitation, hazard pay, and other COVID-19 related expenses. It is nearly impossible for small businesses to survive the impacts of COVID-19. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. Without financial relief or a law in place to provide protection against commercial leases, more businesses will close and owners will declare financial bankruptcy. It is vital that Governor Newsom issue an executive order to provide small businesses relief and protection, and the ability to weather through the long term impacts of COVID-19 on our economy.

Temporary administrative forbearance expires on September 30. The pandemic is making it impossible for some and much harder for others to resume payments. We are in a recession. We have lost our jobs. We have had reduced hours. We have increased childcare costs. We are not working to take care of school aged children. We are unable to find jobs. We are drowning in debt. Cancelling federally owned debt would benefit the U.S. economy, reduce the massive wealth divide, and give hope to millions of Americans struggling in today’s economy. The CARES Act placed federal student loans in a temporary administrative forbearance but what is needed is a permanent solution. Our crushing debt require cancellation entirely.

Right now your internet provider is based on what company has laid internet lines that go to your residence. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and all of the rest of those internet companies have a gentleman's agreement to not invade each other's space so that they don't have to give customer service because they know that you can't shop internet providers. All the government has to do is declare internet a public utility and make it so that internet companies have to share the lines that run internet to your house, and you would have the ability to pit one internet provider against another, and they would actually have to do their jobs to a satisfactory level in order to retain you as a client. This would improve internet speeds and the cost of Internet. We live in a capitalist society, and these companies should be competing with the best speed, the best customer service, and the best prices in order to retain you as a customer. As it stands, they can charge you what they want, and they can jerk you around for hours, days, weeks and weeks on end without providing a resolution because they know you have no options. This must end.

The last person you want making decisions for your children is Betsy DeVos. As Trump’s Education Secretary, DeVos has been a disaster from Day 1. But during the pandemic she’s only gotten worse. Secretary DeVos wants to hold federal school funding hostage to pressure schools to reopen in a couple of weeks, despite the nation still seeing spikes in COVID-19 cases.[1] Sign the petition: Tell Congress to block DeVos from using federal funds to pressure schools to reopen! Our nation’s schools are already massively underfunded. In a dangerous public health nightmare scenario like the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government should be funding schools to do whatever is necessary to protect students, teachers and staff, and slow the spread of the virus. Instead, if DeVos has her way, schools will have to reopen if they want federal funding that most districts desperately need. In short, DeVos wants to force cities and states to "re-open" - and doesn't seem to care if children, teachers, and school staff get sick or even die in the process. It’s worth remembering that DeVos has never once taught in a classroom, holds no degrees in education, and until Trump appointed her as Secretary of Education, had no government experience. DeVos is a right-wing billionaire donor whose pet project has been dismantling public education. Every year Trump has been in office, DeVos proposed massive budget cuts to the Department of Education. Now she’s only willing to put funds into schools if students, teachers, and school staff risk their health and their lives in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic. There’s not much time left to act before schools start in the fall. That’s why you need to tell Congress to stop DeVos immediately. Sign the petition: Tell Congress to block DeVos from using federal funds to pressure schools to reopen! [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/politics/trump-schools-reopening.html

On March 29, 2020, the state of Ohio shut down. The US Government passed the CARES act to ensure that US Citizens had a necessary financial lifeline to pay their bills in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The state of Ohio's unemployment system was grossly outdated and lacked the necessary infrastructure to facilitate the federal CARES act to supply Pandemic Unemployment Assistance to millions of Ohioans. As a result, there was a massive delay in providing assistance to those individuals and families who needed it the most. The tip waged, the contract employed, the freelance, gig-workers and the self-employed. These are some of Ohio's lowest paid workforce. The Ohio PUA system did not go live until May 12th, over a month after the shut down, a time when many fell egregiously behind on their bills and struggled to provide. They were assured that back pay would be given. On July 15, the ODJFS erroneously and maliciously flagged over 226,000 Ohioan's PUA claims as fraud, most of which are erroneous flags as these individuals did provide their proof of income, proof of identity and banking information upon filing and these claims were not approved until they did so. The Ohio Unemployment system was already exhaustively overwhelmed by the sheer number of claims which they are responsible to process. Now hundreds of thousands of workers and their families have had their only source of income taken from them without notice, without cause, and without explanation. Calls to the PUA hotline went unanswered as did calls to the adjudication centers. Individuals who did manage to reach a representative were given a plethora of flimsy excuses and outright lies as to what was going on. The reality is, they didn't know either and could offer no help whatsoever. The amount of misinformation provided by the agency was staggering. Calls and letters to the governor, the state representatives, and the news media went ignored for over a week. According to a recent interview with the news media, Kimberly Hall of the ODJFS finally addressed the situation and claimed that these 226,000 individuals are legitimate cases of fraud. She employed this excuse to justify not paying benefits to already struggling Ohio families in the midst of a global pandemic. There is no logical or conscionable reasoning for Ms. Hall's handling of this matter. There is no logical or conscionable reasoning for withholding benefits to individuals who have already submitted their information upon applying for assistance. Above all else, there is no logical or conscionable reasoning for the director of the ODJFS to be so concerned with fraud in the middle of a global pandemic as to go so far as to erroneously deny benefits to hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who are the most at risk for homelessness due to this crisis. With the abundance of resources available, to say that there was no other way to detect and address fraud in this system is not only irresponsible, but an immense dereliction of her duty to the people of Ohio to whom she is responsible for assisting. The reasons Ms. Hall has cited do not hold up. Her reasons were that individuals were having their personal bank accounts compromised, particularly online banking institutions and prepaid card systems. It is the responsibility of the individual and their financial institution to investigate fraudulent transactions to their personal bank accounts. It is the agency's duty to ensure those individuals are paid on time. Stopping the payments injures innocent citizens and does nothing to punish the criminals. Other reasons cited were failure to prove identity or income, to which each application could not be approved without, and if so, that responsibility falls on those who approved the claims without verifying the information from the start. The excuses are invalid, there is no justification in the world that the state of Ohio or the ODJFS can provide which can justify the course of action that they used to address this matter and their own incompetence. The already overburdened unemployment system cannot support the abundance of claims it currently has. We've spent 81 million on this failed system and now will require many more millions of dollars to adequately train and employ enough workers to facilitate the correction of Ms. Hall's incompetence. In the meantime, 226,000+ Ohioans are at risk of being homeless by next week when their rent or mortgages are unable to be paid. Children will go hungry as the lifeline providing for them has been unceremoniously cut without remorse or resolution. The freeze on evictions and foreclosures has been lifted and the food banks are empty. Ohio has failed it's most at risk populations by the choices and political motivations of one individual. This issue requires IMMEDIATE resolution to those affected. If Ms. Hall and the ODJFS is incapable of fulfilling that resolution, then further action by the State of Ohio to ensure that IMMEDIATE action is taken to prevent homelessness, hunger and poverty to those impacted by this crisis. The people of Ohio deserve answers. They deserve to be paid. They deserve a state that is aimed to see them succeed in the midst of this crisis. In the midst of a pandemic, there is a responsibility to ensure the livelihoods of ALL Ohioans, this was the very PURPOSE of the federal CARES act and the PUA. Ms. Hall has utilized this opportunity to facilitate an unnecessary fraud investigation against the people of Ohio with regard to their financial institutions. It is the responsibility of the individual and their financial institution to determine fraud, and is a gross overreach of the ODJFS Director. The State of Ohio has ignored its citizens for too long in this matter and immediate resolution is now sought.

Buried in the 177-page GOP COVID-19 relief proposal are BILLIONS of dollars for weapons of war wish list: fighter jets, helicopters, and missile defense systems. That’s right, while they’re nickel and diming families who desperately need protections and benefits to put food on their tables and keep roofs over their heads — Senate Republicans are ready to hand out $29 BILLION for Pentagon pet projects completely unrelated to COVID-19. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the power to reject this absurd proposal and stop it entering the final bill, because nothing the Senate has proposed can become law without House approval. Add your name to tell Speaker Pelosi: NO COVID-19 relief money for weapons of war!

As essential workers are demanded to show up to work and support the society's needs in the midst of a pandemic, they will need to arrange for childcare and tutors to enable their children's education and safety (both of which are legal requirements). For single-parent families of essential workers, many of whom are low income, virtual-only instruction is a sentence to oversized debt (if available), poor financial state, and even bankruptcy. For two-parent households, virtual-only instruction forces essential workers’ spouses to drop out of work, lose half of the household’s income and go into significant debt due to unexpected childcare costs. A virtual-only school plan is in effect challenging essential workers to choose between being good citizens and essential members of their communities and meeting the basic needs of shelter and food as well as the educational and emotional needs of their children. It asks essential workers to disproportionately bear the burden of the pandemic, and to do so twice: first, at a personal safety level, by being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice as they enter the workplace, risk being potentially infected with the COVID-19 virus and die, at no fault of their own; second, at a financial level, by making financial and career sacrifices to accommodate a virtual-only instruction and afford their children the learning and safety they deserve. These are unjust, cruel, and un-American options that essential workers, who have carried the society’s healthcare burden on their backs, are presented with to ensure the safety of their children and their educational advancements, as well as provide essential services to their communities. Through this petition, we urge the State of Michigan, the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and the community to support essential workers beyond lip service and front-yard signs at a time when essential workers need it most and the society needs them most.