Has the American Labor Movement Lost Touch with the Urban Working Class?

Blue City Blues

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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?

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