Portside

Someone once asked labor leader Samuel Gompers, "What does labor want?" His response is often misquoted, limited to one word: "More." By doing so, that one-word answer makes the labor movement seem narrow and selfish. 

What Gompers (who lived from 1850 to 1924) actually said reflects his vision that a very different kind of society was possible and that the labor movement could play an important role in shaping that vision into reality. Here's what Gompers said, the sexist language of that era: 

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

Gompers' statement should inspire us to ask: What kind of society do WE want, today and in the future? What do we mean by a "decent" and "humane" society? Here's my answer.

A humane and decent society provides people with the opportunity to fulfill their potential and find happiness and meaning, including meaningful work. 

Two key ingredients make this more likely: shared prosperity and robust democracy. They are both essential.

Shared prosperity means that everyone in society has the basics: a well-paying job, safe workplaces, access to health care (including health providers and medications, and mental health services), affordable housing, accessible parks and playgrounds, safe streets and neighborhoods, decent schools and libraries, access to transportation by car, bus, and/or train, safe communities, clean air, and leisure time. As a society, we can afford these things. Whether we have them is a matter of politics.

These things should be available to people regardless of where they live, their income, race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. It doesn’t mean that everyone in society has the same level of income and wealth, that everyone can live in a mansion or take lavish vacations. But it does mean that these things are considered “public goods” that are basic rights for all. They are a floor below which people should not fall in a humane society.

A decent and humane society seeks to limit various forms of inequality and segregation in terms of income, wealth, race, gender, schools, work, housing, and health. 

Compounding these inequalities is geographic inequality and segregation, which makes it more difficult for our society to create both shared prosperity and robust democracy. A great deal of research shows that in an unequal society, where you grow up, live, and attend school has a profound influence on your opportunities to live a fulfilling life. That's the theme of my coauthored book, "Place Matters." (An updated edition is coming out next year).

Poor ghettos are the flip side of rich ghettos. Poverty is the flip side of super-wealth. The growing geographic segregation of America’s wealthy, middle class, and poor people is not the inevitable result of human nature, but a legacy of attitudes and policies (redlining, exclusionary zoning, the shortage of social housing) that can be changed. 

The provision of “public goods” requires a robust, efficient, and effective government. It requires government to establish strong rules and provide support to people and places who need it. It imposes limits on market forces and businesses that seek to make excessive profits – for example, by protecting people from corporate practices that pollute the environment, pay low wages, sell unsafe products, charge high rents, profit from the proliferation of assault weapons, or charge high prices for basic necessities, such as medicine, water, electricity, and food.

Only government can provide parks and playgrounds, schools, and libraries, roads and buses, safe streets and public safety departments (police and fire), and vaccines against epidemic diseases that are available to everyone, regardless of wealth or income. 

A decent and human society requires government to be run by people who believe in the power of laws and rules that apply to everyone. Only government can make possible the conditions that allow businesses to thrive – schools and universities that train the future workforce, public transportation (cars, buses, trains, ports, and airports) that allows the movement of goods, public safety that permits companies and other employers to conduct business, and a military and diplomatic corps that protects the country from invasion and allows the flow of goods, services, people, and ideas across borders. 

We pay taxes so that government can adopt policies and provide services and subsidies that make our society more livable and more fair. These include up-to-date fire trucks and other equipment, emergency assistance for victims of hurricanes and earthquakes, funds for public schools and playgrounds, financial aid for college students, funds to upgrade roads and bridges, laws that protect consumers and workers, rules that set standards for safe workplaces, food stamps to reduce hunger, housing subsidies to help families pay rent, funds to help parents pay for child care, and rules that limit discrimination and abuse by landlords, police, banks, employers, and others. Taxes should be based on income and wealth. They should be progressive, so that wealthy people and corporations pay their fair share.

A robust democracy means that people have a voice in their government and have access to information so they can make good choices. This involves voting rights, election laws, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, laws regulating and limiting the use of private wealth in elections, laws protecting workers’ right to join unions, and laws protecting people’s right to peacefully protest without intimidation.

Throughout human history, people have organized social movements to try to improve their lives and the society in which they lived. Examples include labor, farmer populism, civil rights, feminist, gay rights, disability rights, environmental, peace, and others. 

Powerful groups and institutions have generally resisted these efforts in order to maintain their own privilege, although there are always people from privileged backgrounds who join forces with the oppressed and less powerful. 

Back in 1900, people who called for women’s suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the right of workers to form unions, a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, dismantling of Jim Crow laws, the eight-hour workday, and government-subsidized health care and housing were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers, or dangerous socialists. 

Now we take these ideas for granted. Many of the so-called “radical” ideas of one generation have become the common sense of subsequent generations. 

History reveals that change that improves the lives of most Americans is possible.

In many ways, the U.S. is a more humane and democratic society than it was in the early 1900s or even the 1960s. Many obstacles to democracy and fairness have been removed or weakened. More Americans have the right to vote, including people of color and those between 18 and 21, despite conservative efforts at voter suppression. Gay couples have the right to marry. Cars, trucks, factories and other facilities have to control toxic emissions. Corporations have to provide warning labels on consumer products and medicines. Banks, landlords, developers, and employers face penalties if they are caught engaging in racial or gender discrimination. Workplaces are safer, thanks to government regulations. These laws and rules only matter if they are enforced, and that remains a challenge.

Since 1961, the number of African American members of Congress has increased from four to 66. Since 1985, the number of Hispanic  members of Congress has grown from 14 to 56. Since 1977, the number of women in Congress has grown from 18 to 156. The current Congress has 14 openly LGBTQ members - an all-time high. There are similar trends among local and state elected officials. This is progress but, as Gompers said, there should be more.

These trends are cause for celebration but not cause for self-satisfaction or apathy. Many other countries do better than the US at both robust democracy and shared prosperity. 

The concentration of wealth among America's richest 1% has gotten much worse. They now own one-third of America's wealth. The richest 400 Americans have a total of $8 trillion in wealth. That's 4% of all the wealth in a country of 350 million people. In the 1960s, corporate CEOs earned an average of 20 times more than their median employee. Today that ratio is 335 to 1. 

The US has a much higher poverty rate than any other wealthy country. More and more working families live paycheck to paycheck. They lack the savings to withstand a layoff or a medical emergency. Since the 1960s, the percentage of workers in unions - the most effective counterweight to corporate power and oligarchy, and the vehicle that has lifted people into the middle class - has fallen dramatically, plummeting to 10% today, even though over 70% of Americans support unions, according to a recent Gallup poll. This decline is due primarily to our one-sided out-of-date federal labor laws and rampant, illegal union-busting by big business. Federal labor law reform (like the PRO Act) is needed to improve our democracy.

The Trump years have demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of our democracy. His assaults on voting rights, immigrants, the Constitution and the rule of law, the media, universities, unions, free speech and assembly, and diplomacy have been frightening. His misuse of his presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his fellow billionaires is unprecedented. Most Americans oppose his abuse of the military, the war with Iran, the billions in military aid for Israel, indifference toward veterans, and vindictive tariffs that have hurt working families. Trump’s  presidency has been based on revenge, racism, megalomania, greed, and lust for power. The obsequious ass-kissing of Republican politicians and conservative religious leaders toward Trump has been embarrassing. History will not be kind to them.

But the tide is turning. Trump's popularity is now shattered. Democratic candidates are polling well in one-time Trump areas like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Alaska, Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina. Democrats are heading for Senate victories in Georgia and North Carolina. 

If Democrats win majorities in the House and Senate in November, they can neutralize Trump on the budget and judicial appointments,  conduct hearings to expose his corruption, and lay the groundwork for 2028 and beyond.  They will need to abandon cautious economic centrism, and instead put forward a progressive populist agenda that speaks to voters day-to-day problems, especially economic hardship and social malaise.  

There's no other likely Republican candidate for president with Trump's charisma and his skills as a con man and grifter. Almost any liberal or progressive Democratic presidential candidate should be able to defeat JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump Jr., or Tucker Carlson.

None of this is inevitable. Democrats have a history of unforced errors and self-defeating infighting. Unions, civic groups like Indivisible, feminist, civil rights, immigrant and Hispanic rights, enviros, and LGBTQ groups, as well as DSA, need to find common ground - or at least coordinate their efforts to target campaigns they can win and join forces to recruit a new generation of leaders, volunteers, and candidates. Wealthy liberals, who were linked through the Democracy Alliance, need to be more strategic and less faddish about short term election cycles and longer term movement-building. 

We have a long way to go to achieve shared prosperity and a robust democracy. But there are hopeful signs - progressive election victories, grassroots organizing campaigns to change policy, and successful union drives. Polls reveal that most Americans oppose reaction, cruelty, and racism. They  support policies (like universal health care, campaign finance reform, a $17 minimum wage, stronger voting rights, higher taxes on the super-rich, universal pre-K and child care) that get us closer to shared prosperity and robust democracy. 

The 2026 and 2028 elections can be stepping stones in that direction. The momentum is on our side. But we need more, and more effective, grassroots organizing in-between elections. That's the key.

[Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College.]