Where Have the Blue Collars Gone?

I meant to get this blog out much sooner, but some work on my chest pump delayed things a bit. My 90 year old arteries needed some plumbing work to clean them out, and that’s what Dr. Lawson did. Okay, lets get on with it.

Barack Obama goes to Butte, Montana for the 4th of July parade. The headline in the Missoulian, the local paper, reads “Obamas hit the town.” A great front page picture shows the Obama family waving to the crowds. I can not for the life of me understand what on earth he was doing in Butte?

I have very fond memories of Butte back in the fifties when I was a Representative of the MIne Mill & Smelter Workers Union assigned to win back the union from decertification. At that time there were about seven thousand miners in Butte and a couple of thousand smelter men in Anaconda, about 50 mikes away. It was a blue collar place. Now the mines and the smelter have been shut down and the place is slowly but surely being gentrified. So Obama, what are you doing in Butte? Someone on his staff must have thought Butte is a good place to get Obama connected to the blue collar folks that he needs to get elected. Ah, now here’s the question. Where have the blue collars gone?

Look at the declining membership of my old union, the International Association of Machinists (the IAM). It is down to 300,000 from over a million a few decades back. The same is true of the United Auto Workers (the UAW). It has about the same membership loss. Some of that loss is strictly attributable to the failure of many unions to attract blue collar votes. The UAW has not been able to organize the Toyota, Nissan and BMW plants opened in the South. But another part of this story is simply the loss of blue collar jobs to cheap labor outsourcing. So where are the blue collars?

(This is where living in the boonies makes it difficult to get data. None of the local libraries had a copy of the Labor Department's “Handbook of Labor Statistics.” I tried to get the data on line, but just couldn’t find it.)

My hunch is the blue collar vote constitutes a large number of retirees. The UAW’s “30 and out” created whole Florida villages of retired auto workers. Many of the unemployed in places like Ohio are blue collar workers whose jobs have gone to globalization. To me that’s a fancy term for a modern version of imperialism. So what’s Obama to do to appeal to this group of people?

Having spent many years toiling in the vineyard of retraining the unemployed, the answer is there is no simple answer. There are a whole variety of variables that impinge on what the answers might be. One variable is geography--for example, in Butte the primary job market for almost a hundred years was dominated by the mining industry. That’s where the jobs were. What’s there now? Nothing much in terms of employment opportunities. An employment policy has to consider factors like age, relocation, and retraining. Age because people who are over 50 are going to find it very difficult to find jobs, even with retraining. That leaves us with a large number of people who have had to skid down the job market and take much lower paying jobs in the service industries. The really good blue collar union jobs were the path to the middle class. These are the jobs that have been going overseas or been outsourced. You can see Obama’s dilemma.

There is no simple solution to the blue collar policy issues. Politicians try to find fast fixes in their appeals to various groups. Election campaigns have become more about image than substance; witness Hillary Clinton in a saloon drinking whiskey with the boys, John Kerry on his motorcycle, or Obama shooting hoops with the troops in Iraq. That’s nice, but I would hope Obama doesn’t continue down that road because the McCain, Rove, Bush Boys crowd are gonna keep chasing him down a dead end alley. Try as he will, he won’t be able to prove he’s just another blue collar Joe off the assembly line. And why should he be? What’s that got to do with being President? Nothing. Obama, don’t let the Carl Rove crowd create your agenda. If you do, you will get lost in their dark woods from which there is no escape. Stick to your agenda for the future. It’s yours and our only hope.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.