Why Is There So Much Hate for Working People?

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Labor’s failure over the last 50 years “to have a message that appeals to all working people is fundamental to the political weakness of the working class,” says Judy Ancel, director of the Worker Education and Labor Studies program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “We never should have been content to organize only a minority.” As union membership dropped, she says, it became easier to portray labor as a “special interest.”

Me-Me vs. Solidarity

A more nebulous reason is a broader decline in social solidarity and the rise of selfishness as an ideology. “People have gotten so entrenched in the me-me-me, it’s gotten lost,” Antonette Bryant says. She laments the loss of close-knit communities like the one she grew up in during the ’60s, and feels this had led to less political empathy for others. It should be “unacceptable in America” that Walmart workers make so little they have to rely on food stamps and Medicaid, she says.

For example, says Ruff, storekeepers in a factory neighborhood who knew workers as their customers would likely be more sympathetic to a strike than people who get their opinions from the media. He also cites the lack of pro-labor media to counter anti-union propaganda; the “animus” of religious fundamentalism; and the American myth of rugged individualism, the belief that we are a classless society where you can make it on your own if you really want to, and there’s no need for collective action. Even at its peak, the U.S. had a much lower rate of union membership than Canada, Britain, France, or Germany.

Racism and sexism also play a role, he adds, as most public-sector union members are black, Latino, or female. “What percentage of BART workers are people of color?” Ancel asks.

And much of the worst contempt for workers comes from the pervasive Ayn Rand acolytes, who believe that unions and minimum-wage laws force employers to pay the undeserving far more than they’re worth.

Who’s Speaking for Workers?

Ronald Reagan, despite his antilabor actions, won some traditionally Democratic white working-class votes, especially in the South, by casting himself as the defender of hardworking (white) taxpayers against lazy (black) welfare parasites. His contemporary followers who want to justify economic inequality have to deal with the inconvenient fact that most poor people work for a living. They get around this by claiming that if people lose their jobs or work for low wages, it’s because they lack “personal responsibility.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray is a notorious proponent of these themes, dancing along the borderlines of politically acceptable racism. In 1984’s influential Losing Ground, he argued for the abolition of government aid to the poor, and in 1994, his The Bell Curve claimed that black and poor people were genetically predisposed to have lower IQs. In his 2012 book, Coming Apart, he contended that white working-class people were losing ground economically because they’d started behaving like ghetto dwellers, dropping out of school and having kids out of wedlock.

But mainstream Democrats aren’t doing much to defend working people. President Obama’s 2008 campaign promise that he would push “card check” legislation, which would let workplaces become union shops if a majority of workers signed cards to join, evaporated quickly under a Republican filibuster the next year. In 2011, when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was obliterating state workers’ collective-bargaining rights, Obama said it “seems like more of an assault on unions,” but added that in tough times, “everybody’s got to make some adjustments.” And his much-hailed litany of Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall in his inaugural address this year did not include labor-struggle sites like Lawrence, Flint and Delano.