As usual @jbouie is on point here. I would only add that when we think about the labor movement as it exists today and is likely to grow in the future-nurses, teachers, public sector workers, retail and gig workers-the point is even more potent./1 nytimes.com/2019/12/04/opi…
Trump pretended during the 2016 campaign to be a friend of labor by saying he’d bring coal mining and factory labor-coded as white and male-back. This was obvious bs at the time and his plutocratic agenda since shows he was never serious about supporting the labor movement./2
The reality is that today’s working class is multiracial & as much if not more female than male. Moreoever, there are roughly 50k coal miners and 95k Whole Food employees and 2 million WalMart workers. Among our most militant workers are nurses, flight attendants, and teachers./3
As many others have pointed out, what made industrial jobs “good” in the era of the New Deal Order was unionization, which improved wages, benefits and working conditions and, in many cases, also provided a mechanism for labor solidarity and a connection to social movements./4
The Democratic Party, in turn, benefitted from its support for organized labor, which was an essential part of the New Deal coalition. That support was not complete because of its anti-union and, eventually, anti-New Deal rump, based primarily in the white South./5
Organized labor, especially in the private sector (which in the 1950s was about 1/3 unionized) is much weaker today than it was at the height of the New Deal Order. /6
There is great potential in a revived labor movement that builds upon the many successes of recent union campaigns—“Justice for Janitors,” the “Fight for 15,” grad student strikes (as at Harvard rn), teachers strikes—and that reflects the diversity of the working class. /7
Because of changes in the economy and much else, it will not be possible to precisely rebuild what Jefferson Cowie calls the “fragile juggernaut” of New Deal coalition as it once existed. /8
But, as Bouie argues here, there is great potential for the Democratic Party, which is already the home of the bulk of the multiracial working class, to do more to help expand the ranks of organized labor. /9
There will doubtless be tensions, as there always have been, between the labor movement & a broad, ideologically diverse Democratic Party, but there are also many areas of mutual benefit. /10
