Who Gets to Vote in Indiana?
IndyStar
Unions must maintain unity among the workforce split by the Carrier deal, and educate its members on why they should not have voted for Trump. Election data seems to indicate that it was union white workers more than poor white workers who supported Trump to begin with. The divide between highly skilled and paid workers and minimum wage workers harkens back to the 1920s when unions focused primarily on craft workers rather than the expanding industrial workforce.
Amid all that’s clearly wrong with Indiana’s current direction under right wing Republican rule, Quigley ( If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement, Cornell University Press, 2015) finds cause for optimism. “Despite a state political climate that proved inhospitable to labor in the right-to-work debate, private sector workers are launching union organizing campaigns across the state’s capital,” and in smaller towns as well.
Hoosiers must also understand that this latest transgression of workers' rights - the Restoration of Freedom of Religion Act - is just the latest round in a sustained Indiana effort to undermine the entire working class. It shifts further wealth and power from the vast majority to the minority, while deepening the human misery that more and more Hoosiers experience; whether they are straight, gay, white, Black, Asian, Latino, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist.
Roughly 20 to 25 percent of all union contracts have recently contained some kind of two-tier payment. Such arrangements, often made in response to threats of plant closures or job losses, can turn into strategies for long-term suppression of wages. They can also generate conflict and resentment among workers making vastly different amount of money and undermine solidarity.
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