Portside

Donald Trump is selling his economic chaos with a simple story:

“In the years 1945-1981, before Reagan and Clinton (and pretty much all of both parties) embraced ‘free trade’ neoliberalism, a single worker in an American factory could buy a house, take a nice vacation every year, get a new car every two or three years, put his kids through college, and retire with a comfortable pension. All because we made things in America.

“When the Free Trade era began, it took 90,000 factories and 40 million high-paying jobs with it to China and other low-wage countries, which kicked off the immiseration of the middle class. To get back to that prosperity, all we need to do is use tariffs to force manufacturing back to the US.”

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It’s a story that makes a lot of sense to those who’d lived through that “golden age of manufacturing” era, and the younger workers who see it portrayed in movies and on TV or hear the stories from their grandparents. But it overlooks one massive reality: it wasn’t the factories that created the middle class, it was the unions.

Factories were a major feature of countries that went through industrialization between the Civil War era and World War II. But only occasionally did a factory in a community produce a middle class; more often factory workers endured brutal conditions, violent bosses, and were paid crap wages.

Alcoholism was so rampant in these miserable factories that wives across the nation rose up in 1920 and demanded prohibition; their pressure was so great that they succeeded in forcing Congress to amend the Constitution that year to outlaw booze altogether.

That roughly seventy-five-year period came to a close — and the explosion of the American middle class began — when President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act, through Congress in 1935, legalizing unions.

A decade later, with the end of WWII, employers were forced to embrace unions, high pay, and good benefits because they had to compete with each other for laborers to work in their factories. That period, from the late 1940s through the late 1970s, produced the vast and resilient middle class that Trump touts and American workers long to return to.

It’s a coincidence — albeit an intentional one — that the offshoring of our factories happened around the same time (1981-2020) as the collapse of union density. Both were the result of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama embracing Free Trade Neoliberalism.

Reagan first made the argument that we needed to throw the doors open to the world’s manufacturers so Americans could enjoy cheap goods made in low-wage countries. He added that “union bosses” were predatory leeches who’d attached themselves to workers’ backs and, to “free” workers from these corrupt men, he declared war on unions.

The Supreme Court fell into Republican hands in the 1970s and went along with Reagan, gutting union rights in decision after decision over the following three decades.

And President Bill Clinton joined in, telling Americans that blue collar jobs were a relic of the past and we could afford to move past them and the unions that represented them. In 1998, for example, he gave a speech arguing:

“We are moving from an industrial age built on gears and sweat to an information age built on ideas and creativity.”

He added in another speech that labor unions should accommodate employers who want to freeze wages and benefits as competition for workers waned with our growing population and the loss of so many factories:

“To succeed in the global economy, we need a new spirit of cooperation between labor and management.”

The result was easy to see: When Reagan came into office in 1981, about a third of American workers were union members, meaning that roughly two-thirds of workers had the benefits and wages unions had negotiated because they set the local wage and benefit floors.

But by the end of the first Trump presidency, private sector union membership had fallen to a pathetic 5.9%, meaning only around 11% of US private sector workers had access to the wages and benefits earlier generations of Americans had enjoyed.

It’s thus no wonder that we slipped from two-thirds of us being solidly in the middle class when Reagan came into office down to fewer than 47% of us today.

While Democrats repudiated Clinton’s neoliberalism with the Biden presidency, openly embracing unions (Biden was the first American president to walk a picket line), Republicans still stand emphatically opposed to unions and unionization.

Which is why Trump’s siren song of reindustrialization won’t do anything to bring back the middle class, unless it’s accompanied by a revival of the union movement.

But instead of supporting labor, he’s put Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an openly anti-union former Republican congresswoman, in charge of the Labor Department. And she makes no bones about her opposition to what she calls “forced unionism” (aka union shops), instead supporting the state-based right-to-work-for-less laws that gut union membership:

“The right to work is a fundamental tenet of labor laws, where states have a right to choose if they want to be a right-to-work state, and that should be protected. … Forced unionism is not something we should support.”

The simple reality is that bringing manufacturing back to America without accompanying it with intense unionization won’t raise wages at all. It’s why Honda workers in Alabama and Indiana make less than do unionized MacDonalds workers do in Denmark (who also get six weeks of annual paid vacation, free healthcare, and free college).

The apparent real goal for Trump, as Senator Chris Murphy points out, is forcing country after country and industry after industry to come kiss his ass and beg for exceptions to his tariffs. That, in turn, helps him accomplish his goal of becoming an absolute dictator and destroying our democracy.

As Senator Murphy said:

“It’s not economic policy, it’s not trade policy. It’s a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy. … You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever — either him or his family or his handpicked successors. He’s trying to destroy our democracy.”

In other words, trade policy this ain’t. It’s a power play and little else.

There are strong arguments to be made for bringing manufacturing back to America, as I point out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

They include national security concerns (we can’t build a battleship without parts from China); the reality that manufacturing is the fastest way to increase the overall wealth of a nation (as Adam Smith pointed out in Wealth of Nations); and safety for American consumers (particularly with regard to pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, toys, and processed foods).

But Trump’s strategy — which is falsely being sold as a solution to crappy wages and benefits — will only increase the number of workers (and kids) toiling in sweatshops and low-wage factories.

Trump’s vision of America’s economic rebirth is a hollow echo of a time that never truly existed — at least not without the force of organized labor behind it. He talks tariffs and smokestacks, but appoints anti-union ideologues to dismantle the very structures that once gave those jobs dignity and power.

You can build factories on every corner of the country, but if you do it without unions, you’re not rebuilding the middle class — you’re building sweatshops with American flags on the roofs.

This is the real fantasy: that we can separate prosperity from worker power.

The truth is as stark as it is simple — the middle class won’t rise without unions. No matter how loudly Trump sells his dream, it’s strong unions and high levels of unionization of our workforce that could make it real.

And Republicans will never go along with that.