Workers get paid when workers have power to insist on it.

You don't get paid what you are worth. 

You get paid what you can insist you get paid.

A Guest Post about the value of unions. 

Herb Rothschild is writing in response to my blog post Tuesday about the problem Democrats have winning the votes of White non-college voters, the largest single demographic group in America. 

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have delivered economic stability to that group, which left the field open for Trump and Republicans to appeal to them on cultural grounds. Nothing assures non-union workers a middle-income lifestyle except two breadwinners in a family, but at least Trump waves the flag, holds a Bible, defends guns, says he protects the borders from Mexicans and Muslims, and communicates his contempt for the pointy-headed, pencil-necked, politically-correct, job-killing so-called experts and scientists and moral scolds of the Democratic left.

All the Democratic candidates I watched closely in New Hampshire and Iowa spoke of their support for public and private employer unions. Biden told a group of New Hampshire firefighters that he owed his political career to firefighters. Beyond that, he said that first responder firefighters saved the lives of his two sons in the accident that killed his wife and daughter. Democrats try to be the union-friendly party. Mitch McConnell, in warning of "scorched earth," listed a national right-to-work law on the GOP agenda if the filibuster is eliminated. 

Rothschild writes that there is a practical solution for increasing worker pay; worker power. Workers need to organize into unions. Unions, not higher education, are the key to access to the middle class. Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Herb Rothschild, Jr.

Yes, beginning with Jimmy Carter’s administration the Democratic Party got out of touch with working class people. Under Clinton and Obama especially, it was complicit in exacerbating our nation’s huge economic inequality. One should note, however, that the Republicans’ hostility to unions and their continuing opposition to a livable minimum wage, plus their successful skewing of the tax code to the benefit of the wealthiest Americans, were the most important factors in de-democratizing an economy that from 1955 to 1975 was working increasingly well for the majority of White male workers (although not so well for Black and Hispanic workers and females of any ethnicity).

If the current unhappy trend is to be reversed, it will be crucial to put measures in place to raise low-paid workers into the middle class. College-going is not the solution to the woes of the working class.

A large number of jobs will always be unskilled or semi-skilled. In 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that the five occupations that would add the most workers between then and 2022 are personal care aides, registered nurses, retail salespeople, home health aides, and food service workers. Only the second category requires a higher education. Unorganized and thus with no power in the workplace, the millions of workers who filled those positions had to rely on the federal hourly minimum wage ($7.25). At one point Wal-Mart ran an ad showing the company helping its workers apply for food stamps before it realized that it was an indictment of the corporation. Further, level of education is not a reliable determinant of wages and benefits. Jobs in mining and manufacturing tend to be high-paying and well-benefited, and our switch to a service economy has contributed in a major way to the growing woes of the working class. But we need to realize that there was nothing about jobs in mining and manufacturing jobs that commanded high pay. Indeed, during the 19th century and well into the 20th, they paid subsistence wages, demanded long hours, offered no benefits, and often were dangerous. Only labor union organizing combined with government intervention changed those conditions in the U.S. and Europe. They still prevail in much of the world.

Rothschild, on behalf of First Nation

Conversely, a higher education doesn’t guarantee good wages. Take school teaching and nursing. Historically, their pay was low because those were the only professions significantly open to women before Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbid gender bias in employment, and because teachers and nurses hadn’t organized themselves. Thanks to their unionizing and becoming a political force in most states, their wages improved dramatically. And now, there is a large underclass of college teachers—usually called adjuncts—that have MAs and even PhDs who are working for poor pay and without job security. Only where they have unionized have they risen from poverty.

To understand why some work is well rewarded and other work isn’t, we mustn’t focus exclusively on level of education. Power is a major determinant. When workers, through their unions, had political power, they were able to secure government help in protecting and enhancing their power in the workplace. Currently, workers are, for the most part, politically unorganized and volatile in their behavior at the ballot box. Given how hostile Republican policies are to workers, it should be an easy task for Democrats to win them over. But that will mean a willingness—as Sanders and Warren have shown—to part company with Wall Street and the economic elites that the Clinton-Obama wing of the party served so faithfully.