Why Is There So Much Hate for Working People?

Continued from previous page

“Politicians take money from unions, but then when you need their help, they’re silent,” says Castelli. In contrast, he notes, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “if I worked in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.”

“The Democrats don’t want to talk about working-class people,” says Zweig. “They don’t want to talk about poverty either.”

A more subtle way this plays out is that almost no one in American politics says “working class” or “poor”; instead, they talk obsessively about “the middle class.” Reducing unemployment and poverty is usually discussed in terms of educating and training people for more highly skilled jobs, to be “competitive,” instead of improving wages and conditions for all working people. What if there aren’t enough of those better jobs? The result, says Antonette Jones, will be lots of “very educated burger-flippers.”

What to Do?

“The labor movement’s done a very poor job of explaining,” says Castelli. “No one is developing a strategy to win the public.” Being “beaten up by the cacophony” of right-wing media, he adds, “is not an excuse.”

The Chicago teachers who went on strike successfully last fall were “really good at building the support of parents and families,” says Judy Ancel, and that’s a lesson that “public-sector workers have to reflect the needs of the community.” Some unions, she adds, have known that for a while, but others, particularly at the federal level, are just beginning to learn it.

Overall, she says, the labor movement needs to “be doing things that are good for all working people” instead of focusing on narrow institutional issues. In Missouri, she explains, unions earlier this year turned back a so-called “paycheck protection” measure that would have limited union spending on politics, by persuading not-so-extreme Republicans to agree not to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto. That prevented a major defeat for organized labor, she says, but it didn’t help the rest of the public.

It would be better, Ancel contends, if unions built coalitions to campaign for things like paid sick days for all workers. In 2006, a ballot initiative to raise Missouri’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.50 an hour won more than 75 percent of the vote. Last year, the Missouri Jobs With Justice coalition, an alliance of unions and community groups, campaigned for initiatives to raise the minimum wage by $1 and limit “payday loan” interest rates, which she says were polling well before they got knocked off the ballot on technicalities.

“We need to tap into the overall feeling of malaise,” she says.

“We’re working a lot harder to get our message to the public,” Castelli says. The BART unions are trying to publicize safety issues, such as reduced train inspections, track workers being injured because of inadequate lighting in the tunnels, assaults on station agents, and shuttered station bathrooms. They also note that BART gave its general manager a $20,000 raise on her $300,000 salary, and spent $399,000 to hire an outside negotiator, Thomas P. Hock, who has a reputation for busting unions.

Before their July 1 strike, Castelli says, Oakland city workers won public support by making the issue personal, by holding community meetings and presenting themselves as the people who provide essential city services from Head Start to street sweeping, not faceless bureaucrats.

“We did a campaign, ‘We deserve this.’ We focused on who we were,” he says. “This is Myra. She’s a fire dispatcher. She works 12-hour shifts.” During the one-day strike, less than five people crossed the picket line, and the union won a “complete victory,” fending off concessions and winning a raise.