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    Kamala Harris needs to mobilise people around class not race | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

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    How things can change in a matter of weeks. In early July, populism seemed to rule the day in American politics.Donald Trump selected JD Vance, a figure who’s been trying on producerist rhetoric in recent years, as his pick for vice-president and invited the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, to speak at the Republican national convention. Joe Biden, facing a flagging campaign and internal pressure to step down, met with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to lay out a pro-worker agenda for a potential new term.Everyone was trying to claim the mantle of an American working class once maligned as politically expendable or morally corrupt.It was a pivot to politics at its most basic: make promises to people, win, deliver on them and reap the rewards of their loyalty. Democrats, once the party of the working class, seemed in need of a reminder of who their base was. A recent study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that less than 5% of TV ads by Democrats in competitive 2022 congressional races mentioned billionaires, the rich, Wall Street, big corporations or price gouging.Still, congressional progressives were getting concessions from an unpopular president who had little chance of winning re-election and Donald Trump remained committed to the Republican party’s traditional pro-corporate, pro-tax cut agenda. The populist moment seemed like it would stick around, but more in the realm of rhetoric than policy.Then came Kamala Harris’s rise as the presumptive Democratic nominee. The energy around the Harris for President campaign has put into doubt the inevitably of Trump’s election and given hope to millions. For leftwing populists, however, the problem might be less Harris and her most stalwart supporters.Economy or identityInstead of thinking that all politics is identity politics, many on the left have traditionally argued that the best appeals tap into universal concerns that all workers share. When Gallup regularly asks “what do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”, the responses are remarkably consistent across different ethnic groups. It’s the economy. It’s wages. It’s the rising cost of living. “Speaking to issues that people of color care about” generally means speaking to issues that all working-class people care about.The emerging Harris platform seems to have digested this idea. Her campaign promises aren’t too different than those pushed by Joe Biden. Her early ads highlight the need to bring down insulin prices, take on the power of the big banks, corporate price gouging and other concerns that most ordinary working Americans can relate to. That’s all for the good. It demonstrates that Harris has learned some of the lessons that prior generations of Democrats have long known: that speaking to workers’ economic interests is a path to the White House.But there is a danger that all of that political acumen could be drowned out by the hubris of her more well-to-do supporters. A number of grassroots efforts to rally Harris activists have caught fire. Among the most prominent of these efforts, White Women: Answer the Call demonstrates everything wrong with the political instincts of liberals today and it threatens to lead Harris’s campaign down the same path as Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 effort.Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with supporters gathering to support their candidate by forming some kind of affinity group to express their shared commitment. In fact, it’s often a mark of a successful campaign (think Veterans for Bernie Sanders). But when these groups are organized around the narrow, misguided, notion that racial affinity is paramount, the results will not be good. The star-studded “White Women for Kamala” call – which garnered more than 200,000 attenders and raised millions for the candidate – featured actors, social-media personalities, liberal philanthropists and activists for various causes. Also prominently featured was a strange, navel-gazing and antiquated version of identity politics.One call organizer counseled attenders: “If you find yourself talking over or speaking for Bipoc individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat and instead we can put our listening ears on.” This kind of condescending racialism should raise red flags for Democrats. Is this what Kamala Harris is about? Does the campaign really think it’s good to head down the path of Clinton’s inscrutable summoning of “intersectionality”? It’s not just that these supporters use language that makes ordinary voters cringe, it’s also that they embrace an ideology predicated on the idea that we are each essentially different. Such a political theory can only result in more fractiousness amid our already roiling culture wars.Shortly after the White Women: Answer the Call there was a White Dudes for Harris follow-up featuring Pete Buttigieg, Josh Groban and Lance Bass (it’s good to see the voices of blue-collar America so well represented). While many of the “dudes” chuckled about the “rainbow of beige” represented on that call, few seemed to notice the strange spectacle of the call itself: liberals organizing people into groups on the basis of skin color and gender. After that, a South Asian Zoom was organized, later a Latina Zoom and most recently a call for Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala (AANHPI for short), all also divided on the basis of gender.A subset of Harris’s supporters are doubling down on the idea that says we can only unite if we embrace our racial and gender differences.Instead, progressives should insist that working people have a lot at stake in this election regardless of their skin color, nationality or ethnic heritage and that our shared class interest ought to be the basis for our political appeals. The fact that this narrative – one the official Harris campaign seems at least slightly sympathetic to – was so quickly and enthusiastically overshadowed by an emphasis on identity politics says a lot about the Democratic party’s contemporary base.The Democratic party needs working-class voters more than ever, but unfortunately the party increasingly represents well-heeled white-collar professionals primarily concentrated in and around big cities. It’s these voters who crave appeals to identity over appeals to shared class grievances. Ironically, the wild popularity of the white affinity group fundraisers mentioned above demonstrates just who is most motivated by appeals to race and gender. While there were plenty of calls for various other race-based affinity groups, none came close to the attendance and fundraising power as the Zoom event mobilizing white female voters. Identity politics is, after all, a class politics. A political style embraced by the professional class.Then the question becomes, is that a set of political appeals that can win? The answer is: maybe.That should be worrying for those of us who care about working-class politics. On the one hand, Democrats ought to do what it takes to win the election. But, on the other hand, winning with a political ideology and program that largely appeals to six-figure-income deep-blue counties will be a pyrrhic victory. If Democrats win the election but again lose a majority of the working class, they will fail in one important part of their duty and they will have paved the way for the right to make deeper inroads into blue-collar communities. Further, if liberals continue to insist that workers ought to focus more on their race, gender, nationality, ethnic heritage or whatever else than on their shared class interests, they will have given the right wing all the ammo needed in the culture war while making it that much harder to unite workers across those cultural divides.In that sense, there may not be a right way to lose, but there could be a wrong way to win.

    Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623

    Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      New Biden rule aims to protect US federal employees if Trump is elected

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      Joe Biden’s administration issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off the risk that if Donald Trump wins back the White House in November he won’t be able to bully and decimate the workforce as he imposes the radical ideologies he’s been pushing on the campaign trail, escalating what he did while in office.New regulations coming out of the government’s chief human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers – who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.The move comes in response to so-called “Schedule F”, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2m federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump were to win the election for the Republicans and revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase number of federal employees – about 4,000 – who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.In a statement issued Thursday, Biden called the rule a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people”.The potential effects of the change are wide-reaching because the number of federal employees who might have been affected by Schedule F under Trump is unclear.The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers such as office managers and specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification.The Biden administration’s new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.“It will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists,” said Doreen Greenwald, president of National Treasury Employees Union, in a statement.Groups advocating for ethical government, and liberal think tanks and activists, praise the rule. They viewed cementing federal worker protections as a top priority given that replacing existing government employees with new, more conservative alternatives is key to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page playbook known as Project 2025.That plan calls for vetting and potentially firing scores of federal workers and recruiting conservative replacements to wipe out what leading Republicans have long decried as the “deep state” governmental bureaucracy that allegedly worked against Trump from the inside. This is a debunked concept that even Trump acolyte Steve Bannon has dismissed as untrue despite being part of the hard right movement that first aggressively promoted the idea and continues to market it.Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which has led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations supporting the rule, called it “extraordinarily strong” and said it can effectively counter the “highly resourced, anti-democratic groups” behind Project 2025.“This is not a wonky issue, even though it may be billed that way at times,” Perryman said. “This is really foundational to how we can ensure that the government delivers for people and, for us, that’s what a democracy is about.”The final rule, which runs to 237 pages, is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month.Trump as president could direct the Office of Personnel Management to draft new rules, although those would face legal challenges.Rob Shriver, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the new rule ensures the protections “cannot be erased by a technical, HR process” that “Schedule F sought to do”.“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs,” Shriver said on a call with reporters.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      American children are working hazardous jobs – and it's about to get worse | Robert Reich

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      When I was secretary of labor 30 years ago, one major goal was to crack down on companies that employed children, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. I remember being horrified to discover that even in the early 1990s, children who should have been in school were working, often in dangerous jobs.We made progress. Child labor declined in the United States. But it was a hard slog. By law, the highest fines I could levy against companies that put children to work were relatively small. Some firms treated them as costs of business.Other businesses dragged their feet. The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying groups argued that almost any minimum standard of decency at work – whether barring child labor, setting a minimum wage, or requiring employers to install safety equipment – was an intrusion on the so-called “free market” and therefore a “job killer”.My argument was that the nation’s goal was not just more jobs; it was more good jobs, safe jobs, jobs that allowed kids to go to school, jobs that upheld minimum standards of decency.In the years since then, I’ve assumed that progress was continuing on eliminating child labor in America. Sadly, I was wrong.Serious child labor violations are once again on the rise, including in hazardous meatpacking and manufacturing jobs. Children are working with chemicals and dangerous equipment. They are also working night shifts.In just the last year, the number of children employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.You might think that in the face of this mounting problem, lawmakers around the country would rush to protect these children.You’d be wrong. In fact, state legislatures are rushing in the opposite direction, seeking to weaken child labor protections.This month, after young children were found working at a factory owned by Arkansas’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods, the Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed legislation making it easier for companies to employ children – eliminating a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed.In the past two years, 10 states have introduced or passed legislation expanding work hours for children, lifting restrictions on hazardous occupations for children, allowing children to work in locations that serve alcohol, and lowering the state minimum wage for minors.Already in 2023, bills to weaken child labor protections have been introduced in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota. One bill introduced in Minnesota would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work on construction sites.Across the country, we’re seeing a coordinated effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations to protect children from abuse – regulations that had been in place for decades.Why is this going on now? Four reasons.Since the surge in post-pandemic consumer demand, employers have been having difficulty finding the workers they need at the wages employers are willing to pay. Rather than pay more, employers are exploiting children. And state lawmakers who are dependent on those employers (such as Tyson) for campaign donations have been willing to let them.A second reason is that the children who are being exploited are considered to be “them” rather than “us” – disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting “our” children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided, while lawmakers and voters look the other way.Third, some of these children (or their parents) are undocumented. They dare not speak out. They need the money. This makes them vulnerable and easily exploited.Finally, we are witnessing across America a resurgence of cruel capitalism – a form of social Darwinism – in which business lobbyists and lawmakers justify their actions by arguing that they are not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but rather providing jobs for those who need them and would otherwise go hungry or homeless.Conveniently, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers are among the first to claim we “can’t afford” stronger safety nets that would provide these children with safe housing and adequate nutrition.Yet when it comes to handouts from the government in the form of tax loopholes, subsidies and bailouts, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers claim that the nation can easily afford them and that businesses need and deserve them.Obviously, the Department of Labor needs more inspectors and authority to levy higher fines. But that’s not all that’s needed.America seems to be lurching backward to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when workers – including young children – were treated like cow dung and robber barons ruled the roost. The public must demand that child labor once again be relegated to the dustbin of history. More

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      Andrew Cuomo's unraveling: hold on power appears weak amid multiple crises

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      Earlier this month the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, sat down in front of TV cameras in the executive chamber of the state capitol in Albany to deliver one of the most awkward messages of his decade in office.By then three women had accused him of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Among them was Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development adviser who in a Medium post alleged that while they were on board an official flight he proposed a game of strip poker and, in a separate incident, forced a kiss on her.Given the uproar, Cuomo, 63, managed to remain remarkably composed. He struck a posture that could be described as contrite aggression, or aggressive contrition.Speaking slowly and emphatically, as though addressing a class of pre-schoolers, he apologized while denying he had done anything wrong.“I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,” he said, adding: “I never touched anyone inappropriately.”To drive the point home, he repeated the phrase. “I never touched anyone inappropriately”.The remark was intended to buy time, shoring up a crumbling political position while an independent investigation by the state attorney general, Letitia James, ran its course. It was not intended to deepen Cuomo’s travails by triggering a traumatic reaction in another alleged victim who happened to be standing a few feet away.[embedded content]The Cuomo staff member was dutifully listening when he punched out that line about never having “touched anyone inappropriately”. According to the Albany Times Union, she grew emotional, later telling a supervisor he had done precisely that to her.The female staffer said Cuomo had summoned her to the second floor of the executive mansion – his private quarters – supposedly to help him fix his phone. Then he shut the door, and in the Times Union’s account “allegedly reached under her blouse and began to fondle her”.The allegation of aggressive groping took the maelstrom surrounding Cuomo to a new level. What began as a dispute over the apparent cover-up of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and escalated with claims of bullying against a fellow Democrat, Ron Kim, exploded into a fully-fledged sexual harassment scandal involving seven women.The bush fires Cuomo is fighting have gained a momentum of their own, with a new revelation or political setback seemingly erupting with every hour that passes. Renowned for having an iron grip on his own political narrative – to the extent that last year he wrote a book heaping praise on himself for his handling of the Covid crisis, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic – Cuomo is looking increasingly impotent as he watches his image unravel in what is fast becoming a fall from grace of legendary proportions.“The governor is fighting day to day right now,” said John Kaehny, executive director of a watchdog group, Reinvent Albany. “He’s looking terminally afflicted with scandal – he’s going down.”On Friday, several of the most prominent Democrats on the New York stage, including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jerrold Nadler, who chairs the House judiciary committee, called for Cuomo to go. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand followed, joining a growing army of Democrats demanding the governor’s head, notably 59 state lawmakers who the day before signed a joint letter calling on him to “put the people of New York first”.We need to be unwavering in our values and hold on to those standards for anyone, no matter their political affiliationsSuch a large and growing rebellion has the potential to render Cuomo only the second New York governor to be impeached – the first was William Sulzer in 1913. It is not an idle threat. The judiciary committee of the state assembly has already opened an inquiry into the sexual harassment allegations that is the initial step towards impeachment.‘We need to be unwavering in our values’Jessica González-Rojas, a Democratic assembly member representing parts of Queens and one of the 59 calling for resignation, said she was now going further and pressing for impeachment. It didn’t matter that Cuomo was a leader from her own party, she said. What mattered was accountability.“We need to be unwavering in our values and hold on to those standards for anyone, no matter their political affiliations,” she said. “Enough is enough – we must stop being distracted by the misogynist behaviour and abuses of power of this governor.”González-Rojas said she saw a strong common threat connecting the scandals battering Cuomo. To her, they all flow from the same source: his abusive wielding of power and the toxic and cruel culture that has proliferated around him in Albany.“What we’re seeing here is a pattern of overarching behaviour that for years has been accepted by New Yorkers because they saw it as strength. But as we peel back its layers we can see it more clearly as deeply undemocratic and morally repugnant, and we are starting to hold him accountable.”For González-Rojas, Cuomo’s misogyny was evident even in the mantra he championed during the devastating early days of the pandemic when New York was at the core of the crisis: “New York tough”.“There are ways to lead,” she said, “that are about being compassionate, vulnerable, as opposed to the tough-guy image he puts forward.”That tough-guy image continues to prevail, remarkably so given the opprobrium Cuomo is facing. In his responses to his female accusers, he has belittled one woman as a “known antagonist” and accused others of peddling falsehoods. In the case of Boylan, questions are being asked about who leaked damaging details from her personnel file.On Friday, Cuomo maintained his pugnacious profile when he repeated his determination not to resign, insisting “I never harassed anyone, I never abused anyone, I never assaulted anyone, and I never would”. Throwing down the gauntlet to the growing band of Democrats turning on him, he cast their call for his resignation as an act of “cancel culture” and said: “I was not elected by politicians, I was elected by the people.”But his bombast belies the fact that his hold on power looks increasingly weak as he is whiplashed by so many crises. Paradoxically, the scandal that could prove to be most perilous legally is the one receiving least attention – the nursing homes furor.This is a defining moment for survivor justiceThat is where Cuomo’s unravelling began, with the revelation – admitted in part by his top aide Melissa DeRosa to state lawmakers – that the administration suppressed the number of nursing home deaths by several thousand in order to avoid a federal inquiry. DeRosa claimed the move was made to avoid Donald Trump tying them up in knots, but it sounded suspiciously like a cover-up.‘We have a duty to remove him’The nursing home crisis sparked a federal investigation that could haunt Cuomo for months or years. But it was not until the storm turned more personal, with details emerging of his bullying behavior, that his stumble turned into free-fall.It came in February from an unlikely party – the relatively unknown state lawmaker Kim, who told the New York Post that after he spoke out about nursing home deaths he received a call from Cuomo. According to Kim, the governor threatened him.“You have not seen my wrath … I can tell the whole world what a bad person you are and you will be finished. You will be destroyed,” he said, according to Kim. Cuomo denied the account.In an interview with NPR on Friday, Kim said the call was part of “a pattern of ‘[Cuomo] abusing his position of power”. The lawmaker added his voice to the calls for impeachment, saying: “We have a duty to remove him.”Kim’s action in going public opened the floodgates. Since then a host of politicians, employees and reporters have lined up to add their own strikingly similar stories about the toxic culture Cuomo has nurtured around him. Among those emboldened individuals was Lindsey Boylan – and in her wake the six other women who came forward with reports of inappropriate sexual conduct.The fate of the man lauded as recently as a year ago as “America’s governor” is rapidly taking on a significance greater than his own political future. Many see it as the next big test of the MeToo movement.“This is a defining moment for survivor justice,” said Shaunna Thomas, a co-founder of the progressive women’s group UltraViolet. “We need to send a very clear signal – that harassment and abuse in the workplace must have consequences, and that includes not being governor of New York state.” More

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      Warren and Sanders: Amazon must end culture that puts profit over people

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      More than a dozen senators tell Amazon chief Jeff Bezos of their ‘serious concern’ about worker safety at the tech giant Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are among more than a dozen senators telling Amazon chief Jeff Bezos of their “serious concern” about worker safety at the tech giant. Related: ‘I’m not […] More