This Fall, What Will Working People Vote For?

Six years after the financial crisis, an alarming concentration of wealth and income at the top of this country is, he writes, “hobbling our economy and strangling our democracy.”

Wage stagnation is a fact of life for the vast majority of the United States. The bottom 90 percent of wage earners have experienced falling wages since the end of the Great Recession, and 95 percent of the income gains since June 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent. But the problem predates the recession. Census data show that household income for the typical family in 2012 was lower than it was in 1989 and that the median income for men working full-time is lower than it was 40 years ago.

The winners in our society, the top 10%, belong to both political parties, as do the 90 percent experiencing stagnant and falling incomes, says Trumka.

The winners in our losing economic game have pushed policies that benefit the super-rich instead of helping most of the United States: bank bailouts and fiscal austerity, [North American Free Trade Agreements]-like trade agreements, attacks on Social Security. The more this agenda gains ground in both parties, the more working-class voters get discouraged and don’t turn out.

But if candidates support solutions that would make a difference in the real world, and reject the empty, poll-tested gestures designed as political props, working people will turn out to support those candidates.

Most important, writes Trumka:

We are going to turn out to support candidates who offer a better future: candidates who squarely acknowledge that our society faces a choice between plutocracy and a future of shared prosperity—and who choose shared prosperity. That means candidates who stand for investing in the United States to create jobs and make our country more competitive, not giving tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas or signing trade agreements that benefit corporations and not people. Those who stand for raising wages for the 90 percent, not cutting taxes for the 1 percent; those who support comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship and oppose mass deportations of families from our communities; those who have the courage to say that mass incarceration is a blight on our country; and those who know that unequal pay for women is an injustice.

Read the full column here.

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This has been reposted from the AFL-CIO.