By Steven Wishnia

Every Democrat running for election this year should get a tattoo on the back of their writing hand: “You’re Supposed to Be the Party of Working People.”

That means proposing policies and programs that help working people, that reverse the decline in their standards of living and security over the last 50 years. The economic indicators might look good on the surface, but they don’t show the undertow below. Outside of some rural areas in states with high minimum wages, there is almost nowhere in the nation where a low-wage worker can rent a one-bedroom home for less than 30% of their income, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Homelessness, now a ubiquitous national problem, was insignificant before 1980, when housing costs began their great escalation.

I seriously worry that Democrats will lose the election by not reaching voters who are frustrated by their economic situation. People need real change, not inspirational platitudes about “turning the page.”

It's hard to fathom why wannabe dictator Donald Trump has often received better ratings from poll respondents on his ability to handle the economy, given that his history of cheating workers and going bankrupt evokes Jimmy Breslin’s line about a mobster who “couldn’t run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers’ cars.”

Over the last few decades, however, Democrats, once the party of the New Deal, have accrued a long record of neglecting or rejecting workers’ concerns. President Bill Clinton’s response to the decimation of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s was pushing through the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement over the explicit objections of labor unions. President Barack Obama’s heroic litany of “Selma, Stonewall, and Seneca Falls” didn’t include Flint or Delano. Democrats have often acted as if the solution to economic inequality was giving young people the opportunity to become doctors, lawyers, and computer programmers.

Vice President Kamala Harris echoes that attitude when she talks about creating an “opportunity society.” Opportunity is great. But it ignores the reality that there is a limited number of high-end jobs. There are thousands of college graduates working at Starbucks.

It also ignores basic economic justice. There are millions of supermarket cashiers, taxi drivers, office cleaners, and home health-care aides. They deserve the right to make a decent living. From railroad engineers to fast-food workers, they deserve the right to have paid sick days and not to be constantly on call, at the very strained mercy of a scheduling algorithm.

“Run to the center,” the advice incessantly given Democrats, means running away from anything more than token, symbolic efforts to change this.

The Green New Deal is one such idea. In reality, it’s based on two very common-sense principles. First, we need a massive social transformation to avert a global-warming catastrophe. Second, that transformation should be accomplished in a way that creates good jobs instead of destroying them. If fracking is banned, for example, there should be union building-trades jobs installing solar panels and constructing wind farms.

It’s predictable when climate-change denier Donald Trump calls it “the green new scam.” It’s a betrayal when Democrats who are supposed to care about labor and the environment mock it as “the green dream, or whatever they call it,” as then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Politico in 2019.

Housing costs might be the biggest obstacle to people keeping their heads above water. If the minimum wage had gone up as much since the late 1970s as the rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, it would be more than $30 an hour. The free market has failed to provide affordable housing, except maybe on the fringes of Sunbelt metropolitan areas. Government policy has failed, too. With public housing chronically underfunded since the Reagan administration and a 1998 federal law banning local governments from building more units, it has largely relied on complex tax-credit schemes to create trickle-down from luxury development.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have proposed a bill intended to create permanently affordable nonprofit housing, largely aimed at people making less than $75,000 a year. Why aren’t Democrats campaigning on that?

Joe Biden accomplished more for working people than any president since Lyndon Johnson, particularly his National Labor Relations Board’s expanding workers’ rights and his funding infrastructure construction. But intransigent Republicans and renegade Democrats stymied any further-reaching ideas. If Biden could have gotten expanding Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing care through the Senate, that would have directly improved Americans’ lives immediately.

Failing to address the decline in working people’s lives leaves the field open for charlatans like Trump and JD Vance to claim they’re pro-worker–when their arguments for that amount to ‘when we deport the cat-eating immigrant vermin, you’ll get your jobs back’ and ‘company unions are better than the adversarial strife of collective bargaining.’

Vance, even though he scabs against newspaper workers in Pittsburgh, can at least say the phrase “working class.” Harris and Governor Tim Walz always say “middle class.”

I also wish that Democrats would defend immigrants, instead of taking the stance of ‘we’ll be tough on the border, but nicer than the Republicans.’ Trump and Vance’s vitriol against immigrants is tapping the deep vein of vile bigotry in the American character. There is a direct historical line to their venomous myth that Haitians eat dogs from the Mississippi county sheriff who, at the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers in 1955, testified that Till was probably alive and living in Detroit, and that the NAACP had faked his death by putting Till’s father’s ring on another corpse’s finger and dropping it into the Tallahatchie River.

If you want to be pro-worker, remember that immigrants have been part of the American labor movement since its 19th-century beginnings: Irish coal miners and Jewish garment workers, Jamaican nurses and Mexican farmworkers, Somali Amazon workers and Bangladeshi cabdrivers.

Democrats would do well to look back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal brought Social Security to the elderly and electricity to the Tennessee Valley, built hundreds of clinics and schools and post offices, and established an explicit right to organize unions and the federal minimum wage. That laid the foundation for decades of working-class prosperity.

And when the specter of fascism was looming over the world, and the forces of “organized money” denounced his policies as “communistic,” Roosevelt didn’t back down. He declared, “I welcome their hatred.”

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