labor

Labor Union Works to Persuade Voters Door-to-Door

Doug Livingston Akron Beacon Journal
While candidates and political parties use mostly volunteers to get the public to help them optimize ad spending, Working America aims to shape attitudes in face-to-face conversations, usually standing on a front stoop with a cracked screen door or a barking dog between a canvasser and a malleable voter. Over the past 12 years, the labor group has held repeat conversations on their front porches to advance progressive policies and candidates.

Trumpism In The Context Of American History; Why Some Union Members Vote Against Their Own Interests

Van Gosse; Mark Pazniokas
Trump's strategy and campaign is to appeal to majority white, working class voters who have economic anxiety and fear of demographic change. Trump's candidacy viewed in the context of historical continuity - nativism is a primary political discourse in American history. Trump has shown us that it is just as powerful now as in the 1850s or the 1920s. Indeed, "Make America Great Again" recalls the 1920s Ku Klux Klan's appeal for "100% Americanism."

labor

Burying the White Working Class

Connor Kilpatrick Jacobin
Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda.

Burying the White Working Class

Connor Kilpatrick Jacobin
After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.

U.S. Labor: What's New, What's Not?

Kim Moody Against the Current
In a sense, the current debate over just how much employment is or isn’t “precarious” misses the bigger change in U.S. working-class life over the past three decades or more: the decline in living standards experienced by the vast majority of this class. One measure of this is the fall in both hourly and weekly real wages which despite some ups and downs remain below their 1972 level.

labor

The Mythology Of Trump's `Working Class' Support

Nate Silver FiveThirtyEight
Trump's voters are better off economically compared with most Americans. The definition of "working class" and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump's voters: The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's well above the national median household income of about $56,000.

Tidbits - April 7, 2016 - Reader Comments: Bernie - Jewish Secular Values; Long Legs of Bernie's Army; 2016 - not 1968 or 1932; John McCain: Salute to a Communist; Fidel's Message; and lots more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Bernie - Jewish Secular Values and what they represent; Long Legs of Bernie's Army; 2016 is not 1968 or 1932; John McCain: Salute to a Communist; Fidel's Message to Brother Obama; the Right Minimum Wage; Tech Workers and the Working Class; Israeli Minister Calls for 'Civil ' Targeted Killings of BDS Leaders - Azmi Bishara is No Enemy of the Israeli State; Military Leviathan and the Draft; Announcements: Washington, DC; Brooklyn; Berkeley; New York

The U.S. Working Class - Two Quick Snapshots

Robert E. Scott and David Cooper / Cherrie Bucknor and Dean Economic Policy Institute
1) Still Working Hard: An Update on the Share of Older Workers in Physically Demanding Jobs 2) Almost Two-Thirds of People in the Labor Force Do Not Have A College Degree

books

Beware the Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"

Thomas Frank TomDispatch
Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]

Labor for Bernie Activists Take the Political Revolution into Their Unions

Rand Wilson and Dan DiMaggio Labor Notes
This is the first time in decades that a national movement of this scale has come together around a candidate with an unapologetic allegiance to working class concerns and aspirations. It’s evident that there’s broad support in unions for Bernie’s platform—and that many members, fed up with their unions’ legacy of “blank check” support for corporate Democrats, want a more inclusive, democratic process for deciding endorsements.
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