Matt Rourke/Associated Press
A worker gives a thumbs-up to a passing motorist outside a GM facility in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, Tuesday, September 17, 2019.
In his column in today’s Washington Post, my buddy E.J. Dionne wrote that “every Democratic candidate for president should be joining the UAW’s picket lines.” Of course they should; the fact that General Motors employs temps to do the same jobs—often permanently—that the company’s official employees also perform is pure exploitation, and a practice that is becoming the norm in the auto industry. Making those temps employees and ending the reduced pay scale of workers whom GM hired post-2007 are among the solidaristic demands that the autoworkers are making—for themselves, for their underpaid co-workers, for a nation that needs a huge dose of egalitarian economics.
But I’d make E.J.’s prescription a little more specific. If I were Elizabeth Warren’s scheduler, I’d have her on the UAW picket lines 24/7. Warren has waged a brilliant campaign that has placed her in the top tier of candidates, but like all the candidates, she has vulnerabilities. From what I can see, her biggest vulnerability is with blue-collar men, and not just white blue-collar men, either. In her stump speeches, as in her debate performance last week, she relates how ever since she was a little girl, she wanted to be a teacher, and recounts the joy she experienced when she became one. In a sense, she’s still a teacher, both in substance—her campaign is, of course, abrim with proposals she explains to her avid listeners—and in manner. But the manner of a teacher is often off-putting to guys who didn’t like school and didn’t like teachers. There are some data suggesting that Warren would have trouble winning much support from those guys, who are legion in the postindustrial Midwestern states the Democrats need to carry in 2020.
How can Warren overcome this resistance? I’m not sure, and I don’t think her campaign knows, either. But surely, one way she can try is to walk the walk with those guys (and women) as they fight for what’s justly theirs. And, if she’s serious about making that breakthrough, to walk it and walk it and walk it.
