The relative good news is that workers are rationally inclined to support what will give us work. An opinion piece today on U.S. unions which support Trump explicitly addresses this, while also giving a warning shot to the Democratic Party:
Like Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump racked up the support of millions of blue-collar white voters in Midwestern swing states, and like Mr. Reagan, the 45th president is pushing to nail down more blue-collar support to ensure a lasting Republican majority. In doing so, Mr. Trump has championed many issues straight out of organized labor’s wish list — he is pressing manufacturers not to ship jobs overseas, he has promised $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, he has threatened a 35 percent tariff to slow Mexican imports and he has vowed to overhaul Nafta.
(mobile.nytimes.com/...)
Notice the absence from the wish list of building a wall and deporting millions of undocumented workers.
Beyond the political wake up call to the Democratic Party on the need for an aggressive and inclusive full employment policy as a rational and humane agenda in and of itself, however, is the question of how to prevent nativism from becoming the touchstone of the U.S. labor rank-and-file.
The very bad news is that Donald Trump knows in our desperation for jobs we can be irrationally manipulated. The anti-capitalist left cannot underestimate the power of a divisive message.
We must do more than point out the evil of nativism. It is good that liberal non-profits point out the white supremacist core underlying the anti-immigrant progenitors of the Trump campaign. (www.rightwingwatch.org/...; www.splcenter.org/...) But we must do more than tread water.
Many unions and especially union leaders have done a lot of good work to promote a rational and empathetic view toward undocumented workers. (www.npr.org/...; www.google.com/...; aflcio.org/...) Directly addressing immigration in an honest and inclusive way, Bernie Sanders promotes the labor agenda without selling out the undocumented:
So what did Senator Sanders actually say about immigration? In an interview with Sanders, Vox.com editor Ezra Klein brought up the concept of an “open borders” immigration policy. Sanders rejected the notion—open borders and unlimited immigration, of course, being a position that no elected official supports. Sanders went on to point out—a point which he later reiterated to journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce—that in some cases the importation of new foreign workers can negatively impact the wages of workers in the United States. Note that Sanders didn’t say immigrants are taking jobs or lowering wages. He was specifically referring to non-immigrant, temporary foreign worker programs, also known as “guestworker” programs, which are full of flaws that employers take advantage of to exploit American and migrant workers alike, and to pit them against each other in the labor market.
The reality is that what Sanders supports on immigration is careful and nuanced, and it’s the correct path forward for American immigration policy. In a nutshell, Sanders is strongly in favor of legalization and citizenship for the current unauthorized immigrant population, which will raise wages and lift labor standards for all workers, and he’s against expanding U.S. temporary foreign worker programs, which allow employers to exploit and underpay so-called guestworkers. Limiting guestworker programs will reduce wage suppression and improve labor standards for U.S. and migrant workers alike.
(www.epi.org/...)
And as to a whole host of other labor positions, Sanders has voiced the right policy messages.
So, what will it be? Which side are we really on when it comes to real jobs for all the real workers of the world who really need them? Or should we leave ourselves to the bad angels of our times.