The Party of Labor

In lieu of last year's elections results, it's hard not to see them as a referendum on the Democratic Party's lacking ability to win over enough working class Americans to beat the Republicans in a national and many state and local elections. Many attribute this shift to social issues and the "war on terrorism" taking precendence in the minds of such voters, but I think it'd be disengenous not to admit that the Democrats lack of a compelling, populist economic message hurt them as well. My dad, for instance, has been a Republican most of his life. After this election, he is one no longer for various reasons, but mostly it has to do with economic concerns. He is your average working class man worried about the state of jobs in the country. Despite this, he was not swayed by John Kerry's economic message. He did not believe any of those policies would bring about significant change. Of course, I'm hardly the first one to discuss such a scenario.

However, most I think have chosen to focus on John Kerry's personal inability to highlight economic issues and articulate the differences between him and Bush, or whether those policies were significantly different than the Republicans' in the first place. This kind of criticism stems from John Kerry's and other Democrats' support of free trade policies in general and so forth. I think this misses a more basic point - the American economy is changing and the Democratic Party has to adapt.

Historically, the Democratic Party has been the party of the working class because it aligned itself with farmers in the 19th century and later labor in the 20th. The Democratic Party became the powerhouse it was during most of the last century because unions made up so much of the American working class - the majority of the country. During the middle of the 20th centrury things were simple - if you were working class you voted Democrat. Having a union job meant having a stable, high paying, high benefit job. Most working class had union jobs, and Democrats were the party that supported the unions. They supported labor.

Today, we face a vastly different economic landscape. Just 14 percent of workers are in a union. This is because America is moving away from a goods-producing economy to a service industry one. Production and manufacturing jobs are being outsourced. How many products do we see nowadays are made in America? Either most working class Americans are service industry workers (which are lower paying and have lower benefits), or soon that will be the case.

But we can't turn the tide on globalization. It's happening. We can make trade deals better, so that our corporations can't leach off of cheap labor in other countries or damage the environment with impunity, but "free trade" is here to stay. Liberals such as Dennis Kucinich talk of repealing NAFTA and returning to bilateral trade, but as tempting as it sounds, that's neither realistic nor really practical at this point. As Americans adapted to the new economy of the industrial revolution at the dawn on the last century, so must we in this one.

The modern Democratic Party wins elections by winning majorities of women, minorities, the professional class and a decent sized minority of white, working class Americans.. The average Democrat today is more likely to be driven by ideology than the mere fact that he or she is a working or lower class citizen (though it often is both).

So what direction should the Democratic Party take?

Well, there's several policy changes, many of which have been discussed before. Universal healthcare that will erase a huge burden on the backs of both Americans and business, education and retraining for those who have lost their jobs, a living wage, tuition deregulation, regulation of the credit card industry and restoration of bankrupcty protection, protection of small family farms, etc. All good ideas.

But from a political standpoint, the Democrats must be able to build a new labor base that can work at the grassroot level to win them elections by bringing them all into the political fold. How will we achive this?

By the unionization of service industry workers.

Not all of them, of course, but many. There are a few unions already, but can you imagine if Wal-Mart's workers were union members as the AFL-CIO has proposed?

The problem, of course, there is no way to organize this outside of the grassroots itself. But the Democratic Party and progressive groups like Moveon can work to support existing groups to achieve this goal. This will not be easy. It will take a long, dedicated push for gradual change. But it works, the payoffs would be insurmountable.

We can again transform the working class into a potent and powerful political force to counteract that of the rich and powerful. That's what the Democratic Party should be, and what it will have to be again to retake its mantle as the one and only party of the people in American once again.

UPDATE: According to the New York Times, wages for the average American worker fell last year (meanwhile, CEOs' are going up), after adjusting for inflation - the first such drop in nearly a decade. The worst thing about globalization is not that we are losing jobs, but that it's leading to a decline in quality of the jobs we have and create.