> with the plant under new management, his union rep no longer had the relationship with plant management that he used to have so they couldn’t help Alex
What? The union depends on the company being nice? Is the union rep compensated?
A decision like firing this employee is not made at high levels of management. Merely involving senior management in the issue is already an escalation.
If the union rep has a solid relationship with management, this conversation can be a simple "hey can you take a look at this". Management trusts that the union rep wouldn't approach them with frivolous complaints and looks into it, maybe reinstates the employee. If that trust relationship doesn't exist, then the rep would have to apply pressure somehow, which engenders bad will.
Part of the job is knowing which fights are worth fighting, when they're worth fighting, and what sort of tools you're willing to use.
The union holds management to a set of policies and there is probably a step-by-step procedure laid out for calling off for sickness with what the employee's responsibilities are and the penalty for not following policy, and based on the description the manager probably was holding to policy so the union rep didn't want to fight against the policy.
The previous management may have been less strict or forgiving about specific policies (especially with sicknesses). But at the same time if you don't follow the policies evenly, people will start accusing you of favoritism and making up rules as you go along.
Well, the union leadership depends on the company being nice if they arent willing to fight. If a union wont strike, then yeah you are left begging management for scraps.
I don't usually comment on here but this article seems poorly written and highly opinionated. While I agree that discussion can be had on the relationship between the working class of dying industry and the new wave of highly skilled youths, I don't think this article hits the mark.
The article isn't talking about highly skilled youths, it's talking about how the standards of living for more than 50% of the population are being cored out by people who disdain them. The author argues that the demographic realizes what's happening, and further points out that this could lead to some very serious trouble.
I don't agree with everything in the article, but I do believe that the non-urban folks are feeling ignored. I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored.
In the aftermath of the elections, all of the "land doesn't vote" posts serve to amplify the feeling of abandonment and disdain felt by the non-urban populations.
Unskilled Americans had such high quality of life and economic opportunity because for 20 years after ww2 literally every manufactured good in the world was produced in America since every other country had their factories destroyed. Now that other countries produce their own goods unskilled Americans are not worth as much. It's no ones fault, certainly not the "coastal elites" who have continued to make unskilled Americans the wealthiest group of unskilled workers in the world.
Living standards for people doing lower-skilled manufacturing work are decreasing because that work is (in a whole lot of cases) not economic to do in the U.S. any more.
That isn't anything to do with "coastal elites" or whoever you're referring to as the disdainful part of the population here. The causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point.
Rather than making this into a culture war, perhaps we should be talking about policy alternatives that don't result in a trajectory of helplessness for those affected by those global, secular changes.
Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the article by the above, I find it to be a rather accurate description of why the working class is disaffected towards both of the major US political parties.
I literally could not disagree with you more. The article is both well written, which I can't give any evidence for except that I also read it, and states testable hypotheses, which are not opinions.
1. I agree with the article that the left is much too focused on the "white supremacy" narrative around Donald Trump. I used to buy into this hardcore, but Trump increased his votes among both blacks and hispanics in 2020 compared to 2016. Ignore that fact at your own risk.
2. I don't have much hope that the Democrats are going to do much to meaningfully reach out to the working and rural classes. One of the first things I saw that Biden is pushing is climate change goals with various federal agencies. While these are noble goals that I agree with, let's be clear: the working and rural classes (generally) don't give 2 shits about climate change. In many of these places oil jobs are the only good jobs left (I firmly believe this is why Biden did so poorly with South Texas hispanics), and without messaging how we'll invest in these communities, climate change rhetoric will fall on deaf ears.
My prediction: Democrats will get killed in the midterms and will lose in 2024, to everyone's detriment as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.
The Democratic messaging sucks. The Green New Deal promises 30 million new jobs. South Texas Hispanics would get a large fraction of those jobs because Texas has both wind and sun, and the Hispanics are overrepresented in construction jobs. That's a good trade for the tens of thousands of coal and oil jobs that are going to disappear anyways, Green New Deal or not.
The vast majority of these answers show broad support for Democratic priorities. I mean "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to" got 70% "strong" or "somewhat" support. 71% support giving a pathway to apply for legal status to illegal immigrants, vs. 29% in favor of deportation. "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Increasing federal government spending on green and renewable energy" got 68% in favor.
And this is a Fox News poll. In poll after poll when you ask what policies people want, they lean strongly toward Democratic priorities.
It also comes at the cost of the entrenched business interests, both in raising their taxes and rolling back their regulatory capture, that bought all their election campaigns off.
Ultimately politicians on both sides walk a tightrope of how much they can sell out against how unpopular and unelectable they want to be. The races are always close almost everywhere as politicians optimize their corruption budget.
> let's be clear: the working and rural classes (generally) don't give 2 shits about climate change
Though I agree with you, it is very unfortunate. Climate change is going to effect the less well off the worst; we're all going to be affected. For instance: this report from Brookings goes into the effect hurricanes have on the poor, and it does not spell out a rosy picture:
I'm trying not to be snarky, but, with all due respect, is "Why do you think the US is moving closer to authoritarianism?" even a real question considering what is currently going on? We have a president who is completing rejecting the results of the election, while providing no evidence for the fraud he is alleging. In 2016 the margin was virtually the same, if not slightly smaller, in the other direction, and in that case the GAO gave Trump's team resources to start the transition the day after the election. More worrisome is how Trump is installing his most sycophantic cronies at multiple levels in the Defense Department.
> but Trump increased his votes among both blacks and hispanics in 2020 compared to 2016.
FWIW, that's not true, or more accurately is unknown.
Those numbers come from election-day exit polling, and since many more Democratic voters voted by mail or voted early than Republican voters, exit polling skews Republican in 2020.
It would be quite interesting to see if those numbers hold up when corrected for the percentage of Democratic mail-in voters, but I don't know of anyone who has done that yet.
Wait, are we talking more black voters proportionally, or more votes absolutely? AIUI there's simply been flat-out more voters in the 2020 election on every side, so saying "more X voters voted for trump" might be technically provable today but not very useful.
Proportions are harder to pin down, as an accurate "X%" necessarily requires knowing the full set (or at least a random sample, and votes are being counted as they come in rather than in a random order).
"White supremacy" narrative around Donald Trump is just a media amplification. Only the upscale white faction of Democrats, the media monopolists, rank it as critical and push it to political agenda. The same with climate change. It's just the Maslow hierarchy of needs in action.
> ... as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.
That depends on what Republican wins. Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians. (For that matter, Obama did quite a bit of rule-by-executive-order, too. If we want that to change, we need to fix the dysfunction in Congress. Presidents more and more almost have to rule by executive order, because Congress has become more and more unwilling or unable to actually do its job.)
> That depends on what Republican wins. Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians.
The last week of falling behind Trump in that massive election fraud occurred (without any evidence) shows that the GOP is the party of Trump whether they like it or not.
> Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians.
Perhaps not all, but I've been pretty shocked, and dismayed, about how feckless Republican senators and congressmen have been when it comes to pushing back against Trump's most dictatorial impulses. It's like "Profiles in Cowardice". That's actually what scares me the most, how someone with such transparent disdain for democracy as Trump has managed to get the Republican congressional leadership to rollover and be his lapdog.
I'm a little worried that Trump wasn't just an aberration, but rather was just first of a new breed. Thinking back on the Republican playing field in 2016, I don't know that any of the other candidates could have handled the media abuse as well as Trump did, and in failing that most first prerequisite for a republican president, they couldn't have gotten very far.
I don't honestly think they are worried about elections. They have them firmly in control. Case in point, this group from MIT recorded a zoom analysis yesterday showing algorithmic tendencies of the vote counts. Why are vote totals stored as decimal? They dig into this and analyze four counties in Michigan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu5Y5obWPk&feature=emb_logo
You mean this total, fraudulent tool who claimed to invent email long after it was in widespread use, and spread completely baseless bullshit conspiracy theories in the past?
My biggest concern about Biden is that he will return to the status quo with China. Pushing back on China is literally the only thing I agreed with the Trumpists about, but it's a big thing and I did at times wonder if Trump was worth it to break the Chinese liberalization delusion. Chemotherapy is literal poison and makes you sick, but sometimes it's what is needed.
It is impossible for American companies that must operate under American EPA and OSHA rules to compete with Chinese companies that can completely disregard the environment and employ borderline (or even literal, see Uyghur "work programs") slave labor. This is doubly true when the state is subsidizing these industries to "dump" on the market and drive competitors out of business and is employing its state intelligence agencies to conduct industrial espionage on their behalf. Private companies cannot compete with governments because governments can do things private actors fundamentally cannot.
A similar unfair trade issue exists with other countries, but China is by far the largest.
If we return to treating China like a developing nation (it isn't, it's a superpower) or a liberal democracy (it isn't), we will continue to see a collapse of the working class in the West. If that trend continues we will see a much smarter, slicker, and more ruthless totalitarian come to power in 2024 or 2028. Whether this future dictator of America is hard-left or hard-right mostly depends on which side fields the most compelling demagogue. Ultimately the working class won't care if a Lenin/Stalin or a Hitler is handing out the pitchforks.
A defense of the (minority) rioting wing of BLM and other recent protestors I've heard is "a riot is the voice of the powerless." I sympathize with this view a bit, but people need to understand that Trump was in part a political riot of the working class. An actual quote I heard in 2016: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Trump." If trends continue another riot is guaranteed and this one may be much more destructive.
China both is and isn't a developing nation. It's massive, it has so many nations worth it's ridiculous.
Seriously, let's compare the top 1% of China with the bottom 1%.
China has 1.4 billion people, 1% of 1.4b is 14 million.
Actually, that's not that important. Let's talk about the top and bottom 10%.
The top 10%, being 140million, are the size of Germany (~80million) and France (~60million) combined.
The bottom 10% are the same size, obviously, but they share all the laws of the top 10% (at least on paper). Now the real question is "what percent of China's population are 'developing country' level?", because if it's 40%, that's 560 million people.
So how the fuck do we deal with it? China is unique, although India may face the same problem later.
Remember after Trump’s election it seemed like half of New York was reading The Hillbilly Elegy [1]?
I don’t remember when that desire to reach out to rural America vanished. Maybe it was always posturing. But everyone who was planning vacations to Appalachia and Iowa forgot about those ambitions quite quickly.
I have always thought America needs an Erasmus program [2]. Something that prompts young people to spend time in a different population density regions of the country.
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of the Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
(Of course, as you point out, such open-mindedness didn't last long.)
Many of these “working class” folks aren’t voting Trump because they are mesmerized or duped by him, they are voting Trump to stop or “stick it” to the most left wing (and loudest) fringe of the Democrat party.
If the Dem party just flat out denounced Defund Police / Green New Deal / Critical Race Theory etc and consolidated around a moderate platform they would effectively end the Republican Party.
I am a dem voter but have felt this way myself. However, I only _feel_ this way. I'm curious whether there is any substantial evidence to back this claim up.
I think just not calling rural whites "deplorables", "uneducated hicks", or "trailer trash" would go a long way.
Most of the people I know who voted for Trump aren't "deplorables", they are hard-working salt-of-the-earth people who would come plow out your driveway if they saw you struggling to clear the snow with a shovel or cook you a meal if they learned you just lost a loved one.
Are there rural people that aren't that kind of people? Sure. But they exist everywhere.
What's missing is respect. That alone would lead to some healing in this country, especially if it came from both sides.
The "deplorables" speech was one reference in one speech. They seized on it because they're convinced that we hate them. They seize on any signal and tell each other, over and over, that it's Democratic policy.
And now they're right. They're ignorant fucks, and I'm done reaching out to them. Time for them to reach out to me. They can shove their snowplow where the sun don't shine. They can stop voting for the people who do use hateful language, over and over, as policy.
They just turned out to vote for a person who was demonstrably incompetent, and their visions of his opponent were delusional -- he never once called them any of the things you say. Until they stop doing that, they will remain correct that I have no respect for them.
This is a convenient trope. I mostly hear it from well-off friends.
There is an American aristocracy. They live on inherited wealth, have never connected to the common person and are a scourge.
But there are people whose compensation is tied to productivity growth. And there are people who are not. Getting those of us making six or seven figures, with health insurance and a retirement portfolio, looking to buying a house and having kids, to find common policy with someone constantly facing foreclosure, who may not have a bank account, whose kid is struggling with opioid addiction and can’t afford to fight an illegal parking ticket issued by their dying town will be hard.
Put another way, we have Americans who feel they need to fight to survive. And we have Americans who feel they need to fight to thrive. Those result in different policy priorities.
This is also a convenient trope. You can literally be both of the pictures you paint in America, sometimes in the span of the same year. Things like affordable job training and college education, and universal health care would benefit most Americans.
I have a feeling especially on Hacker News that a lot of people do not like to compare themselves to poorer working people - and think they are wildly different somehow.
Saying that doctors and waiters are both 'working class' may satisfy some ideological preference of yours, but it will reliably confound understanding and any improvement that could be downstream of that understanding. People have long been able to understand the notions of 'professional class' and 'service sector'; I recommend taking advantage of their intellectual legwork.
Having "works for a living" in common means a lot less than your entire worldview, what you think the purpose of life and existence is, and what the properly ordered priorities of the State are.
And all of those are drifting faster and further apart.
Readit News
What? The union depends on the company being nice? Is the union rep compensated?
If the union rep has a solid relationship with management, this conversation can be a simple "hey can you take a look at this". Management trusts that the union rep wouldn't approach them with frivolous complaints and looks into it, maybe reinstates the employee. If that trust relationship doesn't exist, then the rep would have to apply pressure somehow, which engenders bad will.
Part of the job is knowing which fights are worth fighting, when they're worth fighting, and what sort of tools you're willing to use.
The previous management may have been less strict or forgiving about specific policies (especially with sicknesses). But at the same time if you don't follow the policies evenly, people will start accusing you of favoritism and making up rules as you go along.
Deleted Comment
In the aftermath of the elections, all of the "land doesn't vote" posts serve to amplify the feeling of abandonment and disdain felt by the non-urban populations.
That isn't anything to do with "coastal elites" or whoever you're referring to as the disdainful part of the population here. The causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point.
Rather than making this into a culture war, perhaps we should be talking about policy alternatives that don't result in a trajectory of helplessness for those affected by those global, secular changes.
1. I agree with the article that the left is much too focused on the "white supremacy" narrative around Donald Trump. I used to buy into this hardcore, but Trump increased his votes among both blacks and hispanics in 2020 compared to 2016. Ignore that fact at your own risk.
2. I don't have much hope that the Democrats are going to do much to meaningfully reach out to the working and rural classes. One of the first things I saw that Biden is pushing is climate change goals with various federal agencies. While these are noble goals that I agree with, let's be clear: the working and rural classes (generally) don't give 2 shits about climate change. In many of these places oil jobs are the only good jobs left (I firmly believe this is why Biden did so poorly with South Texas hispanics), and without messaging how we'll invest in these communities, climate change rhetoric will fall on deaf ears.
My prediction: Democrats will get killed in the midterms and will lose in 2024, to everyone's detriment as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.
1000% agree. There was a serious of images of Fox News voter analysis polls that made the rounds in social media. The results are here: https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results/voter... .
The vast majority of these answers show broad support for Democratic priorities. I mean "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to" got 70% "strong" or "somewhat" support. 71% support giving a pathway to apply for legal status to illegal immigrants, vs. 29% in favor of deportation. "Do you favor or oppose each of the following? Increasing federal government spending on green and renewable energy" got 68% in favor.
And this is a Fox News poll. In poll after poll when you ask what policies people want, they lean strongly toward Democratic priorities.
Ultimately politicians on both sides walk a tightrope of how much they can sell out against how unpopular and unelectable they want to be. The races are always close almost everywhere as politicians optimize their corruption budget.
Though I agree with you, it is very unfortunate. Climate change is going to effect the less well off the worst; we're all going to be affected. For instance: this report from Brookings goes into the effect hurricanes have on the poor, and it does not spell out a rosy picture:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/09...
FWIW, that's not true, or more accurately is unknown.
Those numbers come from election-day exit polling, and since many more Democratic voters voted by mail or voted early than Republican voters, exit polling skews Republican in 2020.
It would be quite interesting to see if those numbers hold up when corrected for the percentage of Democratic mail-in voters, but I don't know of anyone who has done that yet.
Proportions are harder to pin down, as an accurate "X%" necessarily requires knowing the full set (or at least a random sample, and votes are being counted as they come in rather than in a random order).
> ... as the US continues a degradation of democratic ideals and moves closer to authoritarianism.
That depends on what Republican wins. Not all Republicans are Donald Trump-style authoritarians. (For that matter, Obama did quite a bit of rule-by-executive-order, too. If we want that to change, we need to fix the dysfunction in Congress. Presidents more and more almost have to rule by executive order, because Congress has become more and more unwilling or unable to actually do its job.)
The last week of falling behind Trump in that massive election fraud occurred (without any evidence) shows that the GOP is the party of Trump whether they like it or not.
Thinking anything else is delusional.
Perhaps not all, but I've been pretty shocked, and dismayed, about how feckless Republican senators and congressmen have been when it comes to pushing back against Trump's most dictatorial impulses. It's like "Profiles in Cowardice". That's actually what scares me the most, how someone with such transparent disdain for democracy as Trump has managed to get the Republican congressional leadership to rollover and be his lapdog.
You mean this total, fraudulent tool who claimed to invent email long after it was in widespread use, and spread completely baseless bullshit conspiracy theories in the past?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai
It is impossible for American companies that must operate under American EPA and OSHA rules to compete with Chinese companies that can completely disregard the environment and employ borderline (or even literal, see Uyghur "work programs") slave labor. This is doubly true when the state is subsidizing these industries to "dump" on the market and drive competitors out of business and is employing its state intelligence agencies to conduct industrial espionage on their behalf. Private companies cannot compete with governments because governments can do things private actors fundamentally cannot.
A similar unfair trade issue exists with other countries, but China is by far the largest.
If we return to treating China like a developing nation (it isn't, it's a superpower) or a liberal democracy (it isn't), we will continue to see a collapse of the working class in the West. If that trend continues we will see a much smarter, slicker, and more ruthless totalitarian come to power in 2024 or 2028. Whether this future dictator of America is hard-left or hard-right mostly depends on which side fields the most compelling demagogue. Ultimately the working class won't care if a Lenin/Stalin or a Hitler is handing out the pitchforks.
A defense of the (minority) rioting wing of BLM and other recent protestors I've heard is "a riot is the voice of the powerless." I sympathize with this view a bit, but people need to understand that Trump was in part a political riot of the working class. An actual quote I heard in 2016: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Trump." If trends continue another riot is guaranteed and this one may be much more destructive.
Seriously, let's compare the top 1% of China with the bottom 1%.
China has 1.4 billion people, 1% of 1.4b is 14 million.
Actually, that's not that important. Let's talk about the top and bottom 10%.
The top 10%, being 140million, are the size of Germany (~80million) and France (~60million) combined.
The bottom 10% are the same size, obviously, but they share all the laws of the top 10% (at least on paper). Now the real question is "what percent of China's population are 'developing country' level?", because if it's 40%, that's 560 million people.
So how the fuck do we deal with it? China is unique, although India may face the same problem later.
I don’t remember when that desire to reach out to rural America vanished. Maybe it was always posturing. But everyone who was planning vacations to Appalachia and Iowa forgot about those ambitions quite quickly.
I have always thought America needs an Erasmus program [2]. Something that prompts young people to spend time in a different population density regions of the country.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Programme
The New York Times (yes, the Times) pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press that (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...)
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of the Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
(Of course, as you point out, such open-mindedness didn't last long.)
If the Dem party just flat out denounced Defund Police / Green New Deal / Critical Race Theory etc and consolidated around a moderate platform they would effectively end the Republican Party.
Most of the people I know who voted for Trump aren't "deplorables", they are hard-working salt-of-the-earth people who would come plow out your driveway if they saw you struggling to clear the snow with a shovel or cook you a meal if they learned you just lost a loved one.
Are there rural people that aren't that kind of people? Sure. But they exist everywhere.
What's missing is respect. That alone would lead to some healing in this country, especially if it came from both sides.
And now they're right. They're ignorant fucks, and I'm done reaching out to them. Time for them to reach out to me. They can shove their snowplow where the sun don't shine. They can stop voting for the people who do use hateful language, over and over, as policy.
They just turned out to vote for a person who was demonstrably incompetent, and their visions of his opponent were delusional -- he never once called them any of the things you say. Until they stop doing that, they will remain correct that I have no respect for them.
Voting Democrat is already the compromise.
---
Ah, here in lies the problem... "Liberals" and "Never Trump Conservatives" are divided out as different as "Working-Class".
If you sell your labor, you are working class. Until there can be more solidarity there, I see the division of America only worsening.
This is a convenient trope. I mostly hear it from well-off friends.
There is an American aristocracy. They live on inherited wealth, have never connected to the common person and are a scourge.
But there are people whose compensation is tied to productivity growth. And there are people who are not. Getting those of us making six or seven figures, with health insurance and a retirement portfolio, looking to buying a house and having kids, to find common policy with someone constantly facing foreclosure, who may not have a bank account, whose kid is struggling with opioid addiction and can’t afford to fight an illegal parking ticket issued by their dying town will be hard.
Put another way, we have Americans who feel they need to fight to survive. And we have Americans who feel they need to fight to thrive. Those result in different policy priorities.
This is also a convenient trope. You can literally be both of the pictures you paint in America, sometimes in the span of the same year. Things like affordable job training and college education, and universal health care would benefit most Americans.
I have a feeling especially on Hacker News that a lot of people do not like to compare themselves to poorer working people - and think they are wildly different somehow.
And all of those are drifting faster and further apart.
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