Workers of the United States Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Being Called the Enemy From Within
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Remember during the last election the narrative was all about the vote of suburban women? This year it seems to be about the vote of Black men, or the schism between bicoastal elites and flyover America. What about the disappearing middle class and growing inequality? Behind these narratives is a much simpler and larger binary that remains unspoken: workers against business.
The very term worker has Marxist undertones. Workers/proletarians were the driving force in the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And given that Donald Trump has accused Kamala Harris of being a communist and her father a Marxist economist, the obvious negatives of talking about workers risks bringing to the forefront the 1950s Joe McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood blacklists, the Alger Hiss hysteria, the loss of security clearance for J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
For isn’t it a return to communist scare-mongering when Trump threatens to use the military to squelch “the enemy from within”? If it’s not invading hordes of migrants, Trump’s enemies are un-American lefty sympathizers. What does Trump mean when he says he will “Make America Great Again”? Does Trump’s MAGA mean to continue quashing unions and workers’ rights in order to further enrich his business millionaire/billionaire golfing friends?
Why not use the term worker for all those not speed dialling their latest calls on the stock market or crypto currency? Why can’t Kamala Harris use the term worker when she describes how she workedat a McDonalds one summer when she was a student at Howard University? (Trump’s flipping burghers at a McDonalds in Pennsylvania is beyond absurd.) Why can’t Harris just say she will work for workers when workers make up the middle class she keeps trying to appeal to? Being president, after all, is a working job.
The non-use of the term worker is a denigration of what most Americans do. What’s wrong with punching a time clock every day? The real problem may be that because of the low minimum wage workers have to punch two or three time clocks every day to earn a liveable wage. The working poor are still workers.
My friendly banker once explained to me his point of view on how to make money: “If you’re working, Danny, you’re not making money.” His suggestion was that I place my money with him. He would then invest my money in stocks, bonds, gold, bitcoin or whatever else he had invested in to become a successful banker. If I invested with him, he tried to sell me, I would not have to work; my money would work for me.
Years after the demise of the Soviet Union, the ideological battle between capitalism and socialism/communism has not disappeared. In 2024, we should be able to realize that economic, cultural and social rights are as essential as civil and political rights. The two sets of rights are interdependent. And we should be able to discuss minimum wages and reducing poverty by talking about the importance of work and workers’ rights without being accused of being “fellow travellers” if not card-carrying members of the CP.
The business of the United States may be business, but business cannot exclude workers.
In his final report as U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, NYU Law Professor Philip Alston was dubious about the role of the private sector in reducing poverty. He said: “…multinational companies and investors draw guaranteed profits from public coffers, while poor communities are neglected and underserved.” His description of extreme poverty and the working poor in the United States was revealing, but it has had little impact for fundamental change. Trying to increase minimum wages at the state and federal levels remains contentious.
President Trump crushed labor. Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Act was diluted, and the National Labor Relations Board was stacked with pro-business people. The Democratic Party’s union backing, as shown in Biden’s early 2020 Pittsburgh campaign speech surrounded by major union leaders, has faded. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will not make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election. The Teamsters supported the Democratic nominee in each election since 1996. (The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation with 12.5 million members, did, however, endorse Harris.) Harris’s stint at McDonald’s does not overcome her image as elite San Francisco Kamala.
The major multilateral institution dealing with workers’ rights and social justice paints a grim future. The International Labor Organizations’s January 2024 report on World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2024 “forecasts a slight increase in global unemployment in 2024, signalling emerging labour market challenges…” The report points out that “a significant portion of the global workforce remains in informal employment” with few guarantees. It predicts “eroding prospects for greater social justice.”
Why “eroding prospects”? Are social justice, economic, social and cultural rights and workers’ rights still part of “Red Rights”? Over thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we are still fighting the ideological Cold War with workers paying the price. To be concerned about work and workers’ rights is not to be a card-carrying member or sympathizer with the Communist Party. It is to respect basic human dignity for all.
Neo-Liberal narratives have taken workers off the radar. Trump’s statements to use the military to hunt “enemies from within” resonates with a most disgraceful period in American history. Let’s put workers back in front. More and more people should look at the United States in 2024 and its corporatist, business obsession and say, “I have seen the future, and it doesn’t work,” as Professor Alston perceptively documented.
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