Comment by TwoFerMaggie
5 days ago
> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.
I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.
Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.
> I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
Not very successfully. Only 6.9% of private-sector US workers have a union. That peaked at 35% in 1954.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-...
It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.
A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.