In this episode, we dive deep into some of the big questions every left-of-center political observer has been asking: what the hell went so wrong in the last election? Why did so many urban working class voters in blue cities swing hard towards Trump? And is there any reason to think that the Trumpist right is making a credible and serious economic (as opposed to cultural) play to build a durable blue collar, multi-racial Republican majority?
To answer these questions, we sit down with veteran progressive labor movement strategist David Rolf, who until his retirement was a national leader in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and who ran the biggest union local in Washington State, representing 55,000 home care workers. A little over a decade ago, Rolf lit the match that sparked the $15 minimum wage movement that swept big blue cities from Seattle to New York.
The author of The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America (2016), Rolf is also one of the smartest thinkers in the country about the role of organized labor in our broader economy and politics. In our conversation, he breaks down the historical trends around the union vote, and explains why working class Americans have been drifting away from the Democratic party in recent years.
We also ask Rolf why an ardent progressive trade unionist like himself has entered into dialogue with conservatives like Oren Cass, whose think tank, American Compass, is pressing the Republican Party to adopt a pro-blue collar policy agenda. And we get Rolf's take on the emerging debate within the GOP around economic policies aimed at appealing to workers. Plus, he shares his insights into the apparent cultural disconnect between union leadership and their rank-and-file members, and what the labor movement needs to do to reconnect with the broader working class.
Our editor is Quinn Waller
About Blue City Blues
Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.
America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming.
The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?
Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, this is, I think, like the first time we've actually been in an official podcast studio. How are you feeling about this experience? There's some like back purple lighting and these awesome chairs. It's just a whole... Big microphone. Yeah. And we're in person, which is a little kind of disturbing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't actually like you. Yeah. It's better over the phone. Anyway, today we've got a very special...
[00:00:40] Distance makes the heart grow less unfond. Today we've got a very special guest, David Rolfe, one of the key architects of the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. In fact, he wrote a book about it called The Fight for 15, The Right Wage for a Working America. David also founded the largest labor union local in Washington State, represents more than 40,000 home healthcare workers. 55,000. 55,000. Thanks so much for joining us. Of course. Happy to do it.
[00:01:08] So basically, everybody serious on the left, at least, has been asking what just happened in this last election. How did Trump win? And a sort of sub-question is why did so many urban working class voters in big blue cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles swing a little bit more in Trump's direction? It's not like these places went red, but how is Trump doing well there? We've had a number of guests on the podcast. Blue City Blues talking about this question.
[00:01:35] Musa Al-Gharbi, Congressman Adam Smith most recently. Dan Savage to kick off the podcast. So today with you, we kind of wanted to focus in on your area of expertise, organized labor, and the fact that the AFL-CIO says vote for Kamala. And a lot of their members didn't listen to that advice. So the first question is really just are big labor unions in blue cities out of step with average workers?
[00:02:03] And if so, I mean, what's going on here? Why did rank and file voters kind of not go the direction of leadership? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think I want to start just for some context. Historically, the union vote, that is the vote of union members and members of the households of union members, has enjoyed generally a double-digit Democratic advantage. Or has performed, I guess, at a double-digit level of support, margin support for Democrats. So the elections where this doesn't pan out are the ones Democrats lose.
[00:02:33] So 1980, 3% union margin. 1984, 8% union margin. 2016, 8% union margin. 2024, 8% union margin. So anytime the union margin drops below about 10%, you see that the Democrats lose the bid for the White House. Now, there were counter examples where unions still voted, union members still voted overwhelmingly Democratic, like the year 2000, but the Republicans still won.
[00:03:01] But it does seem to be that it is a precondition for a Democratic president to be elected. They have to enjoy at least double-digit support among American union members and their households. And that did not happen in either – in two of the last three elections when Donald Trump was on the ballot. But something perhaps more sinister and worrisome from a progressive or Democratic standpoint also happened in the last couple of elections,
[00:03:24] which is that for the first time since the advent of modern polling, working-class voters voted more red than blue. The Democratic – the core Democratic coalition of the 20th century was really built in the aftermath of the New Deal in large measure thanks to the nation's first political action committee, which was run by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, which is today part of the AFL-CIO.
[00:03:50] And the enduring Democratic majorities in Congress and significant – sort of holding their own at the presidential level for much of that time was based on a coalition of which working-class Americans were the backbone. And I think that if you are a Democratic strategist or a partisan on the left, right now you have to be asking yourself,
[00:04:12] how did we go from a world where 62 percent of working-class Americans, of those in the lowest 20 percent of incomes, working-class and poor people, you know, you go look at 76 and it's sort of by quartile 62 percent of the poorest, 57 percent of the next level up the income scale,
[00:04:35] 60 percent of the middle class and only 38 percent of the wealthy voted for Democrats in the 76 post-Watergate election, where Carter versus Ford and post-Nixon pardon. This last time around, the highest group of income earners that the Roper poll studied – and they've segmented it out in different ways over the years.
[00:04:58] But in the most recent election, 51 percent of more affluent Americans voted for Democrats and 48 percent of the working class. Now, those are obviously really close numbers, and it was a really close election as the last several have been. But the story here is that there is something happening with the historic base of the Democratic Party, which is working-class Americans that the Democrats should be exceedingly worried about.
[00:05:28] It's not only that they sort of failed to fall in line and follow the AFL-CIO's voting instructions, you know, okay. But the AFL-CIO, unfortunately, unions only represent 5.9 percent of private sector workers in America, about 10 percent of workers overall. And they're the ones – I mean, union members did vote for Democrats, just not by a giant enough margin to make a determinant of this election.
[00:05:53] But the loss of the working class is something that is historic and goes – you have to go back almost 100 years to find an election where working-class Americans did not support the Democratic candidate. And so the question, though, is why, right? I mean, that's – you had a much more detailed and eloquent framing of what the fuck's going on here, right? But the question is, what the fuck's going on here?
[00:06:20] And so I'll give you an anecdote, which is the city's largest umbrella union – the county, sorry, here in Washington State, King County Labor Council, after George Floyd voted to kick the police union out of the council. And they had some really good reasons for doing this, many of which I completely agree with personally.
[00:06:40] If you ask me, Seattle Police Union has been really reactionary on the question of police reform, on making sure that we have constitutional policing behind the scenes, and not terribly responsive. They probably – they've got their reasons they're not here. I don't want to adjudicate that. But on the other hand, as a union, they've been incredibly effective in getting higher pay for cops in Seattle, which is what labor unions do.
[00:07:03] And a lot of rank-and-file working class folks, as it turns out, are not on board progressive ideas about policing and police reform. And so I wonder about decisions like that happening from union leaders where is it something that working class people generally would agree with? Or is this a situation where it looks like union leadership sounds a lot more like a guest on an NPR show than somebody who working class Americans agree with?
[00:07:32] And so in that sense, is there a kind of political and cultural way in which unions and rank-and-file working class folks are out of step? You know, I think that the core constituency for defunding the police is graduate school-educated white people who live in safe neighborhoods. It's a luxury belief. Yeah, right. It is absolutely a luxury belief.
[00:07:53] It does not reflect – any public opinion survey I've seen simply doesn't reflect where the majorities of black and brown communities are in their opinion around this question. That's different than saying do they want constitutional policing? Do they want police to treat them fairly? Do they want a justice system that treats people fairly? Obviously. But – Which the Seattle Police Union Guild may or may not want. You should ask them. Yeah.
[00:08:17] But I do think there is a – you know, there's something that happens at the leadership of unions where if you were a union leader, it is the most natural thing in the world that you spend your time talking to other union leaders, to the 10 percent of union members who are most active in the union, to Democratic Party politicians who support you, to other leaders of left-facing organizations.
[00:08:38] And also the employees of unions, the staff of these large unions, you know, many cases come from sort of urban progressive politics, not always from the rank and file. And I think there is a – you know, I'm not going to try to second guess some Labor Council vote from five years ago.
[00:08:56] But I will say that I think that we are not at the point right now anymore where either Democrats or unions should be inattentive to the actual underlying opinion dynamics among working-class Americans. What I think Donald Trump offered working-class Americans – now, I'm not a Trump supporter just to be – get that out there appropriately running the other direction.
[00:09:22] But whether he meant it or not, he told people he was going to tame inflation and he told people that immigrants were taking their jobs and he was going to fix that. And as it turns out, when you polled Americans about the two most motivational issues as they cast their votes last year, unlike two years earlier when it was an abortion rights and choice election and two years before that, which it was a bring normalcy back election, this election was very much powered by public opinion on inflation.
[00:09:53] And on immigration. And those are the messages that the Republicans carried and what sort of powered them through to carry the working class for the first time in almost 100 years. Yeah, I would just add on top of that, you know, when you look at the closing argument that the Trump campaign made, I mean, it was a straight up – they didn't talk about inflation. They talked about cultural progressivism, right? You know, President Trump is for you. Kamala Harris is for they, them.
[00:10:18] They were making a very blunt cultural argument. That was more – it was about trans rights stuff, but it was more than that. It was about migrants getting all sorts of money, including free sex change operations in prison. And, you know, they did this very – what I thought was kind of ugly ad, but also a very effective ad. And they ran it all over sports. You know, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the TV ad, right?
[00:10:41] Yeah, I mean, I would say that what motivated voters most when you look at the post-election polling really was these twin issues of inflation and immigration. Now, that is different than what the closing argument the Trump campaign made, which was really to go deep on sort of cultural issues, cultural resentment. Culture war.
[00:11:01] Yeah, culture war stuff, but the underlying message that ad sent, I believe, was to tell the majority of Americans who are worried about their pocketbook, worried about their bank account and can't afford a – depending on which stat you believe, a $500 or $1,000 emergency expense.
[00:11:15] That the Democrats were more concerned with culture war issues than – and cultural issues that, you know, frankly, a lot of people associate more, again, with college-educated elites than with people who put on boots or rubber gloves to go to work. Right. And it's clear there's data that shows that that kind of culture war appeal was very, very effective with swing voters, right, the voters that actually moved in the election.
[00:11:41] But, David, I want to come back to unions, and I want to complicate the question a little bit because we're sort of talking about kind of union rank-and-file and union leadership kind of being more like and performing more like and thinking more like educated progressives than their own kind of working-class memberships or the working-class generally.
[00:12:00] But isn't there a sort of – isn't there also, though, a split within the union movement itself between kind of the more – you know, some of the more blue-collar unions, some of the building trades or the Teamsters unions versus some of the more overtly culturally progressive, you know, unions? So – You know, I don't think it's that simple. I mean, I come from – my home union is SEIU, which is a very progressive union.
[00:12:31] It has very working-class members. There are some SEIU members, certainly, nurses, say, who are kind of upper-middle class. But the majority of SEIU members are people like home care aides, nursing home aides. You're 55,000 home care workers. Right. Janitors, security officers in big office buildings, child care teachers. And so it's a very working-class union. It's also a very progressive union. And I think that, you know, part of that is the demographics of SEIU members and part of it is the geographics of SEIU members.
[00:13:00] It's very strong on the two coasts and less certainly so in the south and the mountain states. And so I think unions do actually – more often than not do a reasonably good job at channeling the views of their own members, which you see with the fact that the majority of union members still voted Democrat when the Democrats lost. But the problem is there just aren't enough union members anymore.
[00:13:21] That we've seen a decline in labor membership from 48 percent of eligible private sector workers in 1946 to 5.9 percent of private sector workers today. That means that you could win at the hearts and minds of every single union member in the country and it still might not be enough to stave off a Republican victory because there aren't that many union members left.
[00:13:47] Yeah, but I guess what I'm thinking of like – so very publicly in this last election, the Teamsters union sort of broke ranks and said we're not going to make an endorsement at all in this election, right, where other unions – or traditionally they would have – you know, you would have assumed they would have supported the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. The head of that union actually spoke at the RNC.
[00:14:06] And since that election, I think in large part because of Teamsters' influence, Donald Trump has nominated for the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez de Ramirez, Oregon congresswoman who lost her election but is generally seen as kind of sympathetic to blue-collar workers, right, and the plight of blue-collar workers. And so that seems kind of consequential to me like that. You know, I mean maybe the Teamsters are an outlier here but what's going on with that?
[00:14:36] Well, what the Teamsters said publicly at the time of their non-endorsement and at the time of the acceptance of an invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention was that they had polled their own members and their members were deeply divided. And that they'd use several survey methodologies from voluntary survey responses to scientific polling to focus groups.
[00:14:57] And they generally found that although their – the Teamster officials were generally more pro-Harris, rank-and-file Teamsters, according to their own numbers, you know, supported Trump by a hair. But what they said is that they weren't going to sort of take an endorsement against where their own members were. That was a very controversial thing in the labor movement because other labor leaders said, well, it's your job as a labor union leader to lead, not to follow.
[00:15:26] And your members deserve your best views of what they should do, not the other way around. That you got elected to be a president of the big union for a reason and that reason was to be able to discern the facts and bring them back to your members. So it was a lot of debate within the labor movement over the summer, a lot of angst over this. And I think the jury is still out. Was Sean O'Brien crazy or was he crazy like a fox? So you've been consulting, talking to? Advising, I would say.
[00:15:55] Or sometimes collaborating with? An organization called American Compass. Their chief economist is a guy named Orrin Cass. And it's surprising to us in the sense that you're the guy who wrote the book called The Fight for 15. You're a progressive labor leader here in Washington state and really a national figure in that movement. And you're talking to conservatives who seem to have designs on the labor movement or working class voters or they've got ideas about it.
[00:16:23] And so we wanted to explore with you kind of what's the Republican case or what's the conservative case, I guess, from their point of view. I'm not going to try to make the conservative case because I'm not a conservative.
[00:16:33] But I can say some of what I've heard and some of what I think is true about a small, and I think we should acknowledge it's small, but it is growing, faction within the Republican political coalition that is questioning whether that party's 90-year-long indifference at best to the working class and to unions is smart.
[00:16:58] And some of them are saying we need to relook at this and that maybe it's time to cast out sort of the Reaganomic neoliberal doctrine that sort of said, you know, we're trying to shrink wages so we can grow the economy at the expense of rank and file workers. And instead, you know, I think there are a lot of people who are religiously motivated in that part of the party who said, well, what about families being able to afford the basics?
[00:17:23] What about back when one parent could choose to stay home if they wanted because the family had an income that someone could devote their full time to parenting? And so I think there are people who are quite authentically interested, not just for electoral reasons, but for, I think, authentic policy reasons within the Republican coalition in pursuing a different path on economic issues than that party has been associated with certainly all of my lifetime.
[00:17:50] I mean, the last arguably somewhat pro-union Republican president, we don't have one now, by the way, I should clarify, but the last arguably pro-union Republican president was Richard Nixon. And that is, you know, most people, most people who are voting today weren't alive when Richard Nixon was the president. So there was no memory of that.
[00:18:09] But I do think there are people who in the Republican coalition, or you mentioned Oren Cass, I would say a woman named Bacia Ungar-Sargon, who's an editor at Newsweek, but who on her own is an author and has sort of personal right of center politics. She wrote a book about how both parties have betrayed the working class. Yeah, terrific book. Betrayed the working class, right? Yeah, her sort of thesis is, although she comes from a Republican perspective, her second book, her first book was sort of an all assault on anything woke.
[00:18:37] Her second book was really making the case that both political coalitions had abandoned the people they need most to form majorities. And you mentioned Trump, clearly anti-union. He's been anti-union. He's pretty explicitly anti-union. Elon Musk doesn't seem like a friend to labor to me. But, you know, certainly when it comes to trade deals, at least, I'm not certain when it comes to tariffs.
[00:19:02] But when it comes to trade deals, Republican Party is sounding a lot more like Democratic critics sounded like 20, 30 years ago. I worked in the campaign to oppose, this unsuccessful campaign, to oppose the passage of NAFTA in 1994, which was a Republican treaty negotiated under the Bush administration, but then embraced by Bill Clinton. You know, one of a series of neoliberals, neoliberal Democrats who held office.
[00:19:30] And, yeah, I mean, the people who – I mean, it was sort of the Tom Harkins and Dennis Kucinichs of the world at the time who were opposed to – and strangely, Ross Perot opposed to NAFTA and sort of a coalition of all the Republicans and sort of the younger, less class-conscious Democrats that were its supporters.
[00:19:55] So, yeah, I think it is certainly true that on trade, it may be the one area where Trump could honestly say that in his first term he actually made some things better than they had been. And interestingly, Biden kept in place most of the tariffs from Trump won, Trump's first term.
[00:20:15] Now, talking about – I mean, talking about 25% tariffs on our closest trading partners is something of a different order of magnitude than 10% against China or something. I think that is going to not be good for the economy. It was my personal prediction. But, yeah, I think that there are – putting Trump aside because someday, God help us, he'll be gone.
[00:20:39] There are underneath – I think this now younger generation of Republican thinkers who are more open-minded towards organized labor. And I may have a hundred policy issues I would disagree with them on, on immigration or energy or environment or reproductive health, any number of those things. But they are making an effort to appeal to American workers on economic issues.
[00:21:05] Recently, Josh Hawley, the guy who gave the fist bump to the January 6th insurrectionists in 2021, actually introduced a very pro-labor, labor law reform bill that has been supported by several unions. He himself was endorsed by two major unions for his re-election. And, you know, J.D. Vance – I'm sure listeners in our market have a lot of strong opinions about J.D. Vance for a lot of good reasons.
[00:21:32] But quite interestingly, last spring, before he was on the presidential ticket as Trump's running mate, told Politico in a long-form interview that the reason he didn't support the AFL's CIO's favorite labor law proposal in Congress was because it didn't go far enough towards establishing European-style sector-wide bargaining. And that is not something you would have heard from any Republican even 10 years ago.
[00:22:00] So, first of all, as you've said, this is a small faction within the Republican Party right now. It is not by any means the dominant sort of worldview where, as we see Trump has come into office and what's the first thing he wants to do is to re-ratify the massively tilted towards the wealthy tax cuts that they passed. And lay off hundreds of thousands of government workers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And cut them and inevitably pass a tax plan that would require a cutting of Medicaid, which is really where most of the working class gets their health insurance.
[00:22:28] I mean I tweeted this right after the election where I said if Trump actually had a brain and they really did want to cement a working class – a dominant working class coalition, a multiracial, multiethnic coalition in the Republican Party, that he would come out of the gate and say we're going to raise the fucking federal minimum wage. Right. Which is at $7.25 an hour and that is still the minimum wage in 30 states in the United States of America. It's a fucking scandal.
[00:22:56] Which the Democrats haven't done yet. Right. Didn't do. Haven't done. I mean we should get to that. Yeah. Well, there's a story there. Yes, we should. And now first of all, I think you are answering your own question about how serious is Trump personally about the working class. Trump is serious about Trump and as far as I can tell, nothing else. Right. Autocracy. Yeah. Power, wealth, you know, et cetera.
[00:23:24] But I think that underneath that – this is where this contest is happening inside the Republican coalition where you've got people like Grover Norquist now launching websites attacking Orrin Cass. A website called Orrin or Warren quizzing people who said this. Was it a progressive Democrat or it was a supposedly conservative Republican? Because they both are starting to sound the same on some worker and economic issues.
[00:23:52] I've seen this with Tucker Carlson before he got booed to a fox. Between the racist shit he was saying, there was some stuff that sounded like Bernie Sanders. Correct. And yes, and I think that's – you are now beginning to see this debate between the Orrin Cassis and Chris Criswolds and Josh Hawley's of the Republican coalition and sort of the traditional neoliberal kind of – sort of the people whose economic models don't allow for the perspective that higher wages is good or higher wages are good for the country.
[00:24:22] Michael Strain, for example, and a bunch of folks that were associated with the Bush family economic philosophy. And so I think that what we're seeing is a fight within that coalition about where they're going to land on worker issues. And for that reason, Democrats and progressives should be very concerned because they are starting – we are starting to see some inroads.
[00:24:40] And it's harder to dismiss all those inroads as sort of flyover country racial resentment and opposition to modernity when we also see migration towards Republicans in urban diverse cities, which is sort of to the point of your podcast. Yeah. I mean I saw a lot of excuse making by Democrats and their allies in the media right after the November election trying to say, well, there was this working-class shift, but it's just due to inflation.
[00:25:10] And look, all these other governments are falling all over the world over inflation, whether they're on the right and the left. And obviously that was a big factor. But I think if you look at the data, you can go back to 2016 and you will see a clear pattern of movement of working-class voters, particularly non-white working – right, the white working-class moved to the Republicans in significant numbers back in the 70s and 80s or whatever.
[00:25:35] But non-white work – non-college educated, working-class voters, there's been a steady movement, particularly among Latinos but also among black men towards – And some Asians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Asians too towards the Republicans. If you look at the lowest income group in Roper polling, I'm just picking one set of polls that I researched on my way over here. Since 2008, the support of the lowest group of – roughly the lowest third to a quarter.
[00:26:05] So encompassing essentially the core working-class and the poor. The support for Democrats in that group in 2008 was 73 percent, 2012 60 percent, 2016 53, 2020 55, and 2024 48. So from Obama's first election to Trump's second, we've seen a 25-point drop in support for the Democratic top of the ticket amongst working-class Americans.
[00:26:32] Now, and by the way, yes, there are some people on the Republican side who are clever enough to figure this out and some of whom I think authentically believe what they're saying. The Oren Cassis of the world, for example. And I should note when I say I advise – I'm an unpaid advisor, someone who agreed to be listed on a website as someone who – sort of interested in their project. So I said I would be the second Democrat, not the first one. And it's Roy Teixeira being the first one.
[00:27:01] Who is a political analyst. Yeah, analyst, author. Who's responsible for the idea that if we just have an emerging Democratic majority that's non-white, that's it. Game over. Democrats will reign supreme forever and he's since completely reversed himself. Which is now – he's singing a very different tune. Yeah.
[00:27:24] Just one sort of pushback question for our progressive friends who are listening to this and just going – and you've already said it, but just for the sake of folks who are like, what is this guy talking about? Donald Trump, Elon Musk, like labor, like seriously? Just, you know, can we even take that seriously? There were no significant unions that endorsed Donald Trump in any of his elections. Right, right. Just to be clear. But I mean, is there –
[00:27:52] One big union declined to make an endorsement. The rest of the labor movement – I don't know about the border guards union or something, but all the big unions – Yeah, yeah, yeah. But more and more to the point, like, is there really an opportunity here for Republicans? And if there was one – let's say there is for the sake of argument. Is this Republican Party actually going to seize that opportunity?
[00:28:12] Is there any chance of them, in a significant way, making a bid for union households, you know, in a way – like, it just goes against the core of what the – Well, I think union house – The plutocrats stand for, doesn't it? I mean, first of all, I 100% agree. We are sort of an emerging – whatever you want to call it – plutocracy, oligarchy. I mean, that is the flavor of the moment, certainly. And no, none of that is going to be good for organized labor.
[00:28:40] On the other hand, Democrats, even when they had power, failed consistently to deliver for organized labor. Labor law reform under Obama, under Biden, nowhere. In fact, the last time that the labor law was amended in a way that was even remotely pro-union was the early 1970s, 50 years ago. And that was the inclusion of healthcare workers, which had been excluded from the original National Labor Relations Act under the America's labor law framework.
[00:29:08] And we've seen between 1975 and 2018, which is the data – the year I have most recent data for, the migration of $50 trillion of gross domestic product away from America's hardworking majority into the pockets of its mega wealthy. So you have – and that occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations and under Congresses of both political majorities.
[00:29:36] So if you were a full-time prime age worker in 1975, had you merely held on to your percentage of our national economy, whatever your personal percentage was, your income would have been twice as high by the time you hit 2020. Right. But what the Republicans are saying is I'm going to bring back manufacturing jobs by giving Elon Musk a giant tax break or something. Well, that's – yeah. This is where they're talking out of both sides of their mouth, clearly.
[00:30:05] You know, giant tax breaks for the mega wealthy don't create economic growth. What creates economic growth is lifting up the bottom. So, for example, when we did the nation's first $15 law in SeaTAC, we hired some economists to debunk this right-wing talking point that high wages is bad for the economy. In fact, it turns out that for every dollar in tax breaks that you give the wealthy, 80 cents of it comes back into the economy because, of course, some of that goes to offshore bank accounts. Some of it just is speculative in the stock market.
[00:30:35] But when you give a wage increase, the same dollar applied to a low-age worker multiplies 2.5% because that worker spends it locally. They go to the grocery store. They buy stuff. They have – maybe at first they have some credit card debt, but then they buy stuff. And so higher wages are ultimately good for everybody. And it is only a tiny faction of the National Republican Party that can get their head around that fact. It's not only good for the poor and for the middle class.
[00:31:02] It's actually even good for the rich too because when workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Right. And just for the benefit of our audience who don't know this history, right? I mean we said at the beginning you were one of the main architects of this $15 minimum wage movement that swept across blue cities about 10 years ago. But that started with a suburb of Seattle called SeaTac. And, David, you ran a ballot – you basically organized and ran a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage in this suburb of $15.
[00:31:28] And then it spread to Seattle where you endorsed a mayoral candidate who agreed to push for $15 in the city of Seattle. And from Seattle, it spread all across the country, right? Yeah. There are really two stories for the fight for 50. The fight for 50 was really two things at once. It was a worker protest movement that sort of started with workers walking off the job in Brooklyn demanding $15 and a union at a bunch of fast food restaurants in November of 2012.
[00:31:56] At the same time, that was a demand aimed at corporate America and aimed at their employers in the fast food industry. At the same time, we had knocked on 100,000 doors in South King County during the Great Recession and talked to workers about what was going on in their life economically, whether they were registered to vote or not, whether they were citizens or not. We knocked on doors not knowing if someone was a union member or not or whether they were employed or not.
[00:32:22] And one of the data points that came up is the sheer number of people living in poverty and working full time at the airport at SeaTac. And that was what became then sort of a winding path over two or three years to a ballot measure in SeaTac that raised the wage there to $15 and indexed it to inflation.
[00:32:41] It was a campaign that I don't know what was – there was money that was reportable to the PDC, to the state's political watchdog, and there were other – I don't know what got spent in that race. But in a city with 27,000 residents at the time and at the beginning of the campaign, 10,000 registered voters, millions of dollars were spent on both sides. And you won by 77 votes. And we won by 77 votes after recounts and litigation. Because it was pretty radical.
[00:33:09] I remember telling you, I was like, man, you are throwing the Hail Mary. It was – it turns out that, yes, it was a big deal. It was a big move. And that then sort of led to the much larger city, 20 miles up the street in Seattle, 15 miles. Literally, we did a march from SeaTac, the 15-mile march from SeaTac up to Seattle City Hall in the early days of the new administration or right after the election in 2013.
[00:33:38] And Seattle became the first major city to adopt a $15 law, then followed very shortly thereafter by San Francisco, by Los Angeles, New York first for the fast food industry alone, but then for everybody else, at least in downstate New York. And so now I think it's something like – I mean, Florida is now at $15, passed by a ballot measure. Right. In a red state, right? In a red state, yes. They started winning – these things started winning in red states, right? Absolutely.
[00:34:03] I mean, the last time I saw polling, the only state where $15 was not – did not have majority support was Wyoming. The other 49, it was very popular. So this leads me to a question, though, because – so we're talking about 10 years ago, right? This movement sweeps across blue cities. It's incredibly tangible and productive and popular, right? And it's obviously been clear that unions have enormous political power in blue cities, right?
[00:34:29] I mean, and with progressive elected officials and politicians. That's been the case for a long time. But 10 years ago, it seemed to me it was actually leading to very concrete results for blue-collar workers, whether it's the minimum wage stuff or things like paid sick leave. Or there was a whole series of pro-worker kind of legislations that were birthed in the laboratories that were big blue cities, right?
[00:34:58] And now we're 10 years on and Trump just won and blue-collar voters in all these cities are moving kind of in a clear way in the other direction. And I wonder if it's not because what exactly are unions and the labor movement tangibly delivering for them right now in the same way? Aren't they – it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. Aren't they more obsessed with like sort of upscale, progressive luxury belief stuff?
[00:35:27] I don't think that's true of the labor movement. I think it may be true of the Democratic Party. You know, unions are far from perfect, but the reality is that union leaders are elected by union members. I mean, you know, for a while there were a bunch of, you know, rich billionaires. I guess all billionaires are rich, but a bunch of billionaires prescribing charter schools and standardized testing as the panacea for education. And, of course, the teachers' unions were against that and they became the bet noire for this group of billionaires.
[00:35:55] But the truth is that teachers' unions are against standardized testing and charter schools because their members are against it. I learned the evils of standardized testing not from the teachers' union but from my mom who was a public school classroom teacher. And that was – those were nearly religious beliefs on the part of a majority of teachers. I mean we have a very – the very powerful teachers' union in Chicago that basically almost single-handedly elected their mayor, Brandon Johnson.
[00:36:20] Now, I will say he's got a 6 percent approval rating right now in part because he's sort of doing their bidding on some stuff in ways that I think a lot of voters are. Yeah, I don't think the problem is that most unions are out of touch with their members. I don't actually believe that is true. I think they're actually – they are oriented to be very in touch with their members because that's where they both – that's who likes the leadership and who pays the bills in the union. Labor unions have their own challenges including, I think, a failure to innovate business models, a failure to grow really at any point. This is maybe not true of every union.
[00:36:50] The NSCIU grew quite a lot for a couple decades. But, you know, the decline of the labor movement at some point has to be something the labor movement takes more seriously. Why aren't Democratic Party leaders nationally giving us the minimum wage that was popular in blue cities? The momentum was there. Why are – you know, you go across the border in Idaho, it's still $7.25 or whatever. I mean it's an amazing gap between nearly $22 here in Seattle and $7 and change minimum wage in Idaho.
[00:37:19] Why is that? Why didn't we get – you know, why wasn't there more blue city congressional leadership I guess would be the question. Well, I think the answer we know is that the chamber of our federal legislature designed for – by the founders specifically to facilitate the preservation of slavery still operates 250 almost years later as a graveyard for progressive policy ideas.
[00:37:49] Because Joe Manchin ends up with the same number of votes to prevent filibuster reform or prevent policies from coming to the floor as the senator from California. Right? So literally, I mean, a place like Wyoming, which I think has fewer people than King County, has just as many senators as Washington State. And so – And Republicans have been unified and blocking all this sort of – Yes, right. So the traditional – that said, like just to, again, complicate this story, Joe Biden comes into office.
[00:38:18] In 2021, right, in January of 2021, he ran on raising the minimum wage, right? He talked about a $15 minimum wage when he did it. He comes into office. There's a conversation that starts about it. Joe Manchin says, I'm not going to do $15, but I'll do $11. I think West Virginia could do $11 an hour. Mitt Romney, right, Republican in Utah, says, I could go to $10, right?
[00:38:41] And I think you know this as well as I do, David, that the Joe Biden people went to the progressives in Congress and they said, look, we want to make a deal. Maybe we can get $10 an hour, right? We can't get $15, but maybe we can get $10 or $11. And the progressives said no, right? They didn't want them to make a deal at that level.
[00:39:02] And I still believe if they had made that deal and gotten a $10 an hour federal minimum wage, like Joe Biden would probably get reelected even if he doesn't have, you know, a braiding war, right? Yeah. I mean, it is clearly true that 12 is far better than 7. It is facially correct. Whether that was smart political strategy or not, you know, I'm not part of the congressional leadership. I don't know.
[00:39:27] What I will say, though, is that time and time again, I have witnessed elites within the Democratic Party, including in the donor community, including in the elected world, and mainly speaking nationally here, by the way. I think we've done pretty well in Washington State the last few years with progressive policy change, and the Democrats keep getting elected here. So I think that, you know, the story in Washington is probably very different than the story in the other Washington.
[00:39:56] But I think I've seen time and time again where the folks who are really operating at the elite levels within the Democratic Party and its allied set of social movements seem to only remember to care about workers when it helps them on election day and not when they have to govern.
[00:40:11] And, you know, whether it's a minimum wage that hasn't increased since the first year of the Obama administration or whether it's 50 years of failed efforts to reform labor law and bring more unions to more people. I think there is a clear pattern that is emerging that looks a little bit like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football when it comes to whether American workers are going to get something out of Democratic majorities at the federal level.
[00:40:38] I wanted to say that that's distinct here from what I think is happening in Washington State, which I think we've done pretty well. And you hear a lot of voters saying this after the election. Democrats come here and they promise, you know, at election time, they promise us all this stuff and they don't deliver anything when they get elected. Why the fuck should I vote for them? Well, they're still getting a better deal from Democrats than they are from Republicans unless you, you know, want to take some of these issues. The Democrats are probably not going to cut their Medicaid benefits. That is true. Right, right, right.
[00:41:05] And the typical conversation is very unlike the one that we're having right now, which we're seeing nationally and sort of parodied in a New York Times video that Sandeep and I were looking at, where it's like, you know, this election happens. And everyone's asking themselves, why aren't people voting for their own economic self-interest? And the answer on social media among some progressives seems to already be, see, we told you so. See, look what's happening. See, we told you it was going to turn out this way. You dumb shit. You dumb shits.
[00:41:34] And you racist as well. But like also you dumb shit racists. And it's kind of like, I guess my question is, how does that thinking change on the part of Blue City progressive leaders, some of whom are also union leaders? And, you know, what you don't want to blame unions here. I get that. But like, what should leaders, let's say progressive leaders, some of whom are also union leaders, be thinking about doing differently? I mean, are there any lessons from this last election?
[00:41:59] I mean, I do think that, you know, the American electorate is famously attuned to what is happening in their pocketbooks when they vote. And causal historical stories about how did things get this way or what were the preconditions for inflation that happened in the earliest months of the Biden administration before he had any passed any economic policies. Just not how most low information voters behave when they get their ballot or go into some states into a voting booth.
[00:42:29] And yeah, were we warned? We were warned, right? We were warned about what would happen in Trump, too, especially if it was accompanied by Republican majorities and by an already significantly corrupted judiciary branch full of cronies and appointees and followers of sort of obscure and cultist legal theories. That's what we thought we were going to get is what we got. And we're seeing that play out every day. But I don't think that means that there should be no self-reflection.
[00:42:57] I told you so is not a very good answer. It is not. It works in my personal life. Yeah, sure. I mean, it may be very vindicated. You may feel vindicated by getting to say it, but it's not very future facing. And I think that the most enduring Democratic majority of the 20th century, you know, for presidential terms and control of Congress for all but two years in a 50-year period of time, it was because of the New Deal.
[00:43:25] Because Democrats got in office and they fundamentally changed the economics for everyday Americans in big ways and small ways, giving them the right to a union, not just increase their wages once, but every three years at the negotiating table.
[00:43:38] Social Security, the beginnings of policy change around racial segregation, the electrification of rural America and, you know, enough federal money moving through the economy to pull us out of the Great Depression and win a war against fascism in Europe and in the Pacific Rim. That was a very enduring majority because people remembered who did what for them.
[00:44:04] And right now, with the exception, I think, of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, it is hard for most working Americans to remember the last time that the federal government did anything that was new and big and good for them. In fact, most people only have the experience of seeing their lives become more precarious over the last five decades. And so when both parties say we're going to make things better, but the party that supposedly is the party of the working class fails repeatedly to do that when they hold office, they might not make things worse. They might, in fact, protect against deep cuts.
[00:44:33] They might protect against all sorts of bad things. But I think there has not been an experience like that that has sort of solidified a lasting majority because the Democrats haven't delivered as much as they need to at the national level, again, for America's working class. By the way, I don't want to let unions off the hook.
[00:44:53] I mean, I am sort of famously a heretic in the world of organized labor because I think that unions haven't done enough to grow, that they have sort of doubled down on sort of building a time machine to the union world of 1946 rather than to massively transfer resources and talent into the development of new models that might not be proven yet.
[00:45:16] But you sort of look at the key periods of union growth in the past, and they were accompanied by a set of factors that included embracing new organizing methodologies like the CIO did in the 1930s, as well as competition between unions. For example, the AFL-CIO and the CIO unions competed with each other for 12 years in the 30s and 40s, resulting in both coalitions of unions getting a lot more members.
[00:45:44] So I think that I don't mainly blame the union movement for the decline of the Democratic Party amongst non-union working class voters. Non-union voters are the ones that are not hearing the union message almost by definition. I like to think of my grandfather on my mom's side, who was an autoworker for the last 25 years of his career. He had an eighth grade education, went to work in a sawmill at age 13 for a dollar a day.
[00:46:10] He bought his first house with a cow in Appalachia and then migrated like J.D. Vance's family back and forth from Appalachia to the cities in the north to take factory jobs. Ended up landing outside of Cincinnati and worked for 25 years into the job that allowed him to become a member of the middle class, working as an industrial carpenter at General Motors. He was not a party-line Democratic voter.
[00:46:35] He was an Ohio swing voter, but he had, for those of us who are progressives and Democrats, an angel on his shoulder called the United Auto Workers Union. That was, that was, that could countervail the weight of the National Rifle Association and his Pentecostalist church on the other shoulder. So the material stuff had a, had a strong enough voice. Had a strong enough voice that sometimes it was, right.
[00:47:00] So he was a culturally conservative, gun-owning Christian and a proud union member who believed the union was the way he put food on his, on the table for his family. And he was very proud of that. Very, very proud of having gone on strike three times. Very proud that he was part of an organization that could tell the world's, what that was then, the world's largest company to say yes when it wanted to say no. And that was the power that the labor movement had and still has in certain industries and in certain geographies.
[00:47:26] But I think that, you know, the labor movement in a different way than the Democratic Party really does need a moment of introspection and business model development for the 21st century. Because, you know, if we're waiting for Congress, as we've seen for the last 50 years, if we're waiting for Congress to come and repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that was an anti-union legislation passed by the only Republican majority Congress in that period of history. You know, well, we've been waiting for five decades for that to happen.
[00:47:56] And, you know, I would suggest new strategies are probably the order of the day. So how does the labor movement, how do the union movement reconnect in an effective political and substantive policy way with the American working class? Well, I think we need to develop models that allow more people to be part of unions. And I mean, listen, I put it this way. We would not tolerate as a society a school system that served 6% of our kids.
[00:48:25] We wouldn't, some abolitionists notwithstanding, tolerate a police force that patrolled 6% of our neighborhoods. We wouldn't tolerate a Navy that guarded 6% of our shores or a power grid that only delivered electricity to 6% of our homes and businesses. But yet we tolerate a labor movement and a labor law structure that ultimately only benefits 6% of private sector workers.
[00:48:47] And one could be completely unsentimental about the decline of labor if there was a single rich democracy that had ever built and sustained an enduring middle class without a strong labor movement. And sure enough, if we were on a screen together instead of on a recording, an audio recording, I could show you a chart that point by point for the last 50 years tracks the decline in middle class income with the decline in labor unions.
[00:49:15] And at exactly the same rate, the increase of the incomes of the top 1%. So this is not an academic or theoretical exercise. The decline of unions has meant worse lives and worse jobs for more American workers. And reverse engineering that problem so that 50 years from now, Americans are looking back and saying when the middle class was at its great and the democracy were at their greatest moment of risk, what did leaders then do?
[00:49:43] And did they act with sufficient urgency and sufficient direction to bring us an America that is still prosperous and has inclusive prosperity 50 years down the road? Are we going to take the middle class and the democracy we built in, always imperfect, in the 20th century and throw it out? And I think that's ultimately what's at stake at this moment. David Rolfe, thanks so much for joining us. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues.
[00:50:10] I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kashuk and our editor is Quinn Waller. And thanks everybody so much for listening.