whole, but bad for people working in specific industries without providing for job training
for people in those industries. I’m no expert, but my friend Joel Paul is. “We live in a
world in which capital can move easily across borders but workers can’t, so workers
always get the short end of the stick in free trade agreements,” he told me. In roughly the
decade after 2000, more than 42,000 U.S. factories closed, some due to recession; but
most moved overseas. Around 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost. The most
straightforward approach is, as part of the trade treaty, to have the U.S. government give
vouchers to finance retraining in communities that lose many jobs. In 2015 house
Democrats voted down a provision in Obama’s trade program that provided assistance to
displaced workers.^263 Typical support is for one semester in community college—“not
enough so that the machinist can retrain as a plumber,” Paul pointed out. We’ve also
built into our tax code incentives for companies to move overseas. Changing the tax code
and trade adjustment vouchers should both be bipartisan objectives.^264
Abortion. Kristin Luker’s 1984 study found most pro-choice advocates were college
graduates who had incomes in the top 10% of working women, whereas pro-life women
were less likely to be employed, earned less when they were, and were married to blue-
collar workers or small business owners.^265 The abortion debate is about gender, but it’s
also about class conflict.
To many in the working class, abortion signals the elite’s obsession with self-development
and self-actualization, its idolatry of work, and the professional class’s devaluation of
family life. As the abortion rights movement has gradually learned, the best slogans are
not “My Body, My Choice”—too self-focused to resonate outside the movement—but
“Pro-Child, Pro-Choice, Pro-Family.” Anyone who truly values healthy families should
support the choices of adults who don’t want children. Raising them is rewarding but
difficult—so difficult that everyone who values families should help ensure that adults
who don’t want kids don’t have them. This framing won’t resolve the conflict, but at least
it deflates the argument that abortion rights are anti-family.
Immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment is very real; the first step is to attend to the
economic woes of the working class. An important message is that immigrants typically
do jobs whites don’t want, from backbreaking farm work to bussing tables. Many
working-class whites have a stake in immigration reform. Small business owners will be
hurt by criminalizing the hardworking bussers and dishwashers who keep their restaurants
open. Here in California, farmers are nearly as concerned about the lack of immigration
reform as progressives, because strict immigration laws prevent farmers from employing a
stable work force.^266
- Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values and Allies?
