JOEL KOTKIN: A Labor Day Dilemma For The Working Class.
The devastation extends beyond economics. A detailed 2017 study, “When work disappears: manufacturing decline and the falling marriage-market value of men,” shows that when towns and counties lose manufacturing jobs, fertility and marriage rates decline while unmarried births and the share of children living in single-parent homes rise. More of the working class, both white and minority, are also experiencing elevated rates of obesity, and rising incidents of what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”
Clearly, the working class has reasons to be alienated, and from both mainstream political parties. They have certainly been volatile. Working class whites were critical to the election of President Trump in 2016 but dissatisfaction with the president, particularly among working class women, helped Democrats to an impressive win in the mid-term election.
As recently as the 1960s, working class voters — then by far the largest part of the electorate — formed the core of the Democratic Party. That is certainly not the case anymore; roughly 40% of union members, including a majority of white males, voted for Trump, the best GOP Presidential performance since Reagan. When Trump lambasts free trade and China, he may alienate much of the corporate elite but the message appeals to people and communities that lost, according to one labor backed group, 3.4 million jobs between 1979 and 2017 to the Middle Kingdom.
In 2016, Trump won all the states with the largest percentage of working-class votes, while Clinton easily captured those with the most “creative class workers.” Trump does best with those who work with their hands, in factories, the logistics industry and energy; these working class voters, notes a recent study by CityLab report, are those who repair and operate machines, drive trucks and operate our power grid.
More important, Trump has a case to make with these workers, as real wages for blue-collar workers, even in services, are now rising for the first time in decades. His policies on energy clearly favor well-paid , often unionized people who operate the nation’s wells as well as factory workers who benefit from lower energy prices.
Naturally, all right-thinking people oppose this.