Come Home! (An Open Letter to American Workers)

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Dear Working Americans,

I’m a guy who’s been self-supporting ever since his sophomore year at university at age 18. I installed towel bars in dormitories until I got a break from someone who saw my talent and let me work with my head. On scholarships and fellowships, and working besides, I ended up with a Ph.D. in physics, no debt, and money in the bank.

Few like me could do that today. Why? Republicans have taken away free higher education and “privatized” our safety net. Most of the head-starts I had in life they’ve converted into for-profit businesses to make some oligarch rich. And they tell us this generational theft is all for our own good.

After a lifetime of hard work, I’m comfortable and secure in retirement. I’m a paid consultant to nobody. The only axe I have to grind is hating to see them deprive you and your kids of the chances I had to build a good life. That’s just not right. It’s not American.

I can’t stand to see how shrunken and battered our middle class has become. I can’t stand to see the country I love divided more bitterly than ever since our Civil and Vietnam Wars. I can’t stand to see you fighting among yourselves and cheering and voting for a party that has hung you out to dry for forty years.

Just like the Democratic Party, I’ve always understood that this nation rose to greatness on the backs of workers like you. But in my 75 years, I’ve seen you become an ideological punching bag. I’ve watched bosses and their Republican backers strip you of unions, worker solidarity, basic legal protection, the “safety net,” and the good jobs with dignity that you deserve. I’ve watched them push relentlessly to kill Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, for no good reasons but that these things cost the bosses money and reduce their power over you.

Then, in a final blow, I’ve watched you forced to compete with desperate peasants from China and Mexico. Our country has left you to rot like peons in the third world, and it did so deliberately. (We’ll get to how later.) But isn’t the real question who’s going to fix all this?

The superb free education I got from a once-great nation gave me some insight. I can see how we got here from there. I want to tell you how and how I think we can get back.

Unions. Say you want a raise, a few weeks’ paid break to bond with a newborn, or some masks or plexiglas shields at work to protect you from Covid-19. How do you get them? You’ve got to ask the boss.

And what will the boss say? He’ll say he’s so sorry, but he can’t do it. If he does what you ask, he’ll have to do it for others. That will raise costs. And competition is sooo, sooo fierce out there that raising costs will kill his business or cut his profit.

Suppose you ask someone like Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon. His managers will tell you that Amazon has well over a million employees like you. His shareholders will begrudge you every dollar you ask for, which will end up costing them more than a million. They’ll make you feel small and insignificant and sorry for asking.

So how can you improve your lot? There’s only one way. You can band together with others like you. You can form unions. You can make your just and sensible demands together. And the bosses will have to listen, suffer strikes or slowdowns, or replace their entire labor force at once, as Reagan did so disastrously with the Air Traffic Controllers.

That’s what things were like in my youth. Every few years, our whole nation held its breath while the United Auto Workers sat down with the “Big Three” car makers and worked out a deal. After these talks, auto workers improved their pay and working conditions as auto sales and profits grew. Their success bled over to other industries and other workers.

Those were great days for workers. Most had good homes, two weeks or more of vacation, good and steady jobs, and a middle class life. Many even had a boat to enjoy on a nearby lake or the ocean on weekends and holidays.

Now all that’s gone because the bosses busted the unions. Union membership, achieved at great pain through decades of struggle, is at a postwar low. Private-sector union membership has declined steadily, from its peak of 35.5% in 1945 to a rate of 6.6% in 2012. [Click on “Read Full Report” and scroll down to graph.] It’s even lower now.

How did the bosses do it? Their first trick was moving their plants to so-called “right-to-work” states in the South. There bosses had gotten used to abusing workers since slavery. Southern “red” states have been making it harder and harder to organize and finance unions for decades. Then they invited foreign bosses to build new plants that would hire only non-union workers.

Not surprisingly, the non-union plants had lower costs. So car plants and other factories started moving South, big time. It was a great regional development plan. But it rode on your backs. It left company towns in the upper Midwest reeling, with leaves blowing through empty factories. And it left workers in the South standing naked against their bosses, as union membership plunged nationwide.

Globalization. The second way the bosses busted unions was so-called “globalization.” When they thought that workers here were asking too much, they simply moved their plants abroad, to China or to Mexico. There workers are much poorer and more desperate. They’re eager to work for less pay and under harsher conditions. To put it plainly, the bosses sold your jobs to foreign peasants and your factories to foreign lands for greater profit.

At the same time, the bosses also “imported” millions of workers from Mexico. They did so to fill backbreaking, undesirable, low-paid jobs on farms and in slaughterhouses, restaurants and hotels.

Illegal immigration. Many, if not most, of these immigrants were and are undocumented. Eleven million still are today. Ronald Reagan wanted to give them “amnesty,” using that very word, and eventually to make them legal.

Although Ronald Reagan wasn’t with the bosses’ program, eventually the bosses got the Republicans under control. Keeping low-wage workers undocumented is a way to dominate them totally. If José even starts talking about unions, his boss picks up the phone, calls ICE, and has him deported. He’ll be gone in a day. If Maria picks up a picket sign, the same.

Keep these scut-workers undocumented, and they’ll never make trouble or ask for a raise. If they do, ICE will deport them and solve the “problem.”

How do we know it works this way? Have you ever thought how easy it would be to stop illegal immigration cold in its tracks? Just fine the bosses five times their annual wage savings for every undocumented worker they hire, and then raid their plants to find and remove workers without papers. The job magnet would disappear overnight, and so would most illegal immigration. Undocumented immigrants don’t come here for fun or to disrupt American commerce; they come here for jobs.

But the bosses don’t want any such easy solution. The party they control just wants you to hate these poor workers, whom the bosses utterly dominate for fear of instant deportation any day.

There’s another reason we know this picture is true. Ever hear of César Chávez? He organized the United Farmworkers Union and got immigrant farm workers some relief. But he did it at a time when farm workers had a bracero program. They couldn’t become citizens or permanent residents. But they had temporary legal status to come into our country and harvest our crops.

As weak and temporary as it was, that legal status was enough to let the farm workers organize unions and improve their lives. The Republicans—the party of the bosses—didn’t like that. So the bracero program is history, never to be replaced. Republicans want these workers to be “illegal” so they are forever under their bosses’ thumbs. And they want you to hate these immigrants so you forget that they’re oppressed and forgotten just like you. Do you get it now?

Trump. And so we come to Donald J. Trump, our current president. What’s he done to improve your families’ lives? Nothing. He’s made a lot of noise, but what’s he actually done? See if you can name one simple, solitary big thing.

The Republican-led union-busting movement, aka “right to work,” had already moved your Midwestern plants and jobs South. Globalization had moved them abroad. These trends took decades to ripen, but now you’re really feeling the pain.

Unfortunately, these decade-long trends are not going to reverse overnight. It takes years to plan, build and open a new plant. And the bosses’ incentives are still all in the wrong direction. You know, or ought to know, about Lordstown and the Carrier plants, which took millions in government subsidies and yet moved net jobs to Mexico.

They’re just two among many. The job drain continues, now pushed to warp speed by businesses closing in the pandemic.

There is one way to create millions of new, good jobs in months, not years. That’s reworking our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. That means repairing, rebuilding and improving our roads, bridges, sewer systems, water systems, railways, air traffic control, and Internet backbone.

Most of this work can be done in the open air, with better protection against Covid-19. The engineers who know this stuff say we’ve got to invest 4.5 trillion dollars just to bring our infrastructure back to international standards, which we used to set.

Think of all the good jobs that money would create! Infrastructure rebuilding is an obvious, easy, quick and necessary way to create millions of good jobs, which can’t be offshored. It’s such a “no-brainer” solution to the job drain that I touted it in early 2017, two months after Trump’s inauguration.

But what’s he done about it, in nearly four years? Nothing. Talk and promises are cheap, but action counts. Trump could have put millions to work by mid-2017. Both parties would have jumped on board. But he squandered $1.5 trillion on tax cuts, which let billionaires pay a lower tax rate than workers for the first time in US history. So Trump spent his political capital and your tax money on the bosses and his cronies, because that’s where his heart lies.

Hate. As far as you are concerned, Trump’s all about hate. He wants you to hate undocumented immigrants, who live in poverty and fear instant deportation every day. He wants you to hate Black people, who are just trying to stop police killing them for little or no reason. He wants you to hate Dems and “libtards,” who’ve been friends of workers since the Great Depression, and who still stand for strong unions, a high minimum wage, and lower-cost health insurance and higher education for your kids.

But answer me this: does hate put food on your table? Does it create good, secure jobs? Does it improve school or day care for your kids? Does it get you better health care? Does it protect you from Covid-19?

Deep down, you know the answers. You’ve been conned. You’ve been tricked. Hate gets you nowhere, except deeper into the pockets of Trump and his oligarch friends.

And what about China? Whatever did China do to your jobs? Our bosses offered China your jobs, your factories and our technology on a silver platter, and China took them. Who wouldn’t?

Economists love to brag that globalization raised nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty, mostly in China. So China gained, big time, and our bosses made it possible. Our bosses also made it rich, big time. But everyone seems to have forgotten about you.

Even Trump. His across-the-board tariffs on steel, aluminum and cars won’t bring back your jobs. All they’ll do is increase the prices you pay for cars and anything that has imported steel or aluminum.

Trump thinks you’re stupid. He tells you China pays the tariffs. But China doesn’t. You pay them, in the form of increased prices for cars and things that use steel and aluminum. The tariffs go right into our Treasury, where they help reduce the national debt that Trump raised by giving tax breaks to himself and his buddies. Get the picture now? (There are some ways that finely calibrated “rifle shot” tariffs might help bring back jobs—in years, not months. But they would have to be much cleverer and more complex than Trump’s tariffs, and they’d require close cooperation from American investors, i.e., the oligarchs.)

The Dems. Trump and Fox have made you hate the Dems and your fellow workers. They’ve gotten you to want to “own the libs” and trash the Dems.

How have they done it? Well, Trump has told over twenty thousand lies in his not-quite four years in office. And Fox has entertaining blowhards like Tucker Carlson, who make you think you’re in the know and in the in-group.

But are you really? Fox is a private, for profit, money-making business. Its paid blowhards like Carlson make millions, in part by making you angry. That’s their job. Its owners are the Murdochs, a family of Australians, who became billionaires after their patriarch, Rupert, got Congress to make him a US citizen in a so-called “private bill.”

So Fox has given you lots of anger and lots of pride. But where are your jobs? Where are your factories? Where is your health care? Where is your coverage of pre-existing conditions? Where is your kids’ affordable college? Where are the unions that made you strong?

All these things are gone or, in the case of health care, going. They are nowhere on Republicans’ radar screen. Republicans offer you nothing but promises and lies. Carlson and his fellow blowhards are laughing at you, all the way to the bank. They’re laughing at you the same way Trump scorned the men and women who died securing our freedom, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” Think they might be misleading you?

Ever since FDR, the Dems have stood for things all workers need. They’ve stood for good pensions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and health care as a right, not a privilege of the well-off. They’ve stood for higher minimum wages, and more affordable public education. Most of all, they’ve stood for strong unions so that you and all workers can help yourselves. That’s why your parents and grandparents mostly voted Democratic, in a “straight ticket,” as a matter of reflex.

Dems have been the workers’ party since FDR’s New Deal. Republicans have been the party of bosses ever since Reconstruction turned into lynching and Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” plunged the “party of Lincoln” into Southern bossism. Nothing about this has changed in the last four years. Only Trump has changed, becoming the trickiest con-man ever to set foot in American politics.

The Clintons. The Dems’ dirty little secret is that the Clintons sold you out. Bill drank the Kool-Aid of globalization, and he drank it deeply. He gleefully promoted and signed the banking bill that led directly to the Crash of 2008. He did so even after a real Democrat, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, warned of exactly what could and did happen. Hillary gave secret speeches to Wall Street for big bucks and called many of you “deplorables.”

But the Clintons are gone. They are history. Joe’s last name is not “Clinton.” Nor is Kamala’s.

Joe is a working-class pol who rode the train from D.C. to his home in Delaware every night so he could put his kids to bed. He never commuted by limousine. You can trust him, and you can trust Kamala, who rose from modest beginnings fighting sexism and racism every step of the way.

Conclusion. The Dems are baaaack! They are real Dems once again. So come home, workers! Come home to the party that cares for you and has stood on your side for nearly a century.

Dems stand for stronger unions, good, secure jobs, better wages, and universal health insurance. They stand for covering pre-existing conditions, with no extra cost, and they have a plan to do that. It’s called “Obamacare,” aka the “Affordable Care Act.” It’s also called “Medicare,” which Joe and Kamala want to make available at age 60, then lower.

Dems stand for bringing good jobs back. Unlike Trump and the GOP, they have plans to do that, which they won’t just talk about. The plans are infrastructure rebuilding and energy conversion.

If Dems have to go into deficit, the loans will create millions of jobs for workers like you, rebuilding and improving roads, bridges, and air traffic control. It won’t go for tax cuts for billionaires.

Other money will pay you to install solar arrays and windmills, and to connect them in a smart grid to make their power less intermittent. This work will bring control of electric power back down from big corporations right into your neighborhoods. Renewables don’t use huge, pollution-belching plants: solar arrays and windmills are local.

So wise up. Dems and “libtards” are not your enemies. They’re on your side. They don’t want to trick you into hating anybody, far less even people hurting more than you. They just want to make your jobs and lives better, your families stronger and our country more united.

The choice in this election is clear. You can go on believing the garbage that Fox and the GOP spew because it makes you feel stronger and in control. You can go on hating people who have done you no harm, are fellow sufferers and even have your best interests in mind. Or you can follow the Dems and their policies, which will make you be stronger and better off, and our nation more united.

Your choice. But whatever you choose, be sure to vote. Our nation will never get better or more equal with close to a third of us sitting on the sidelines. The more workers vote, the more we all win.

Yours in solidarity,

Jay

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