If this administration valued workers , they wouldn’t speed up manufacturing lines, cause harms to labor and promote new industries now.
Tariff are never a good idea, don’t ever support their use.
The Inflation Reduction Act provides jobs for new infrastructure, use the money and create new jobs!
Good jobs don’t have to be in manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs aren’t always good
“McDonald’s workers in Denmark are paid more than Honda workers in Alabama.” That claim has been showing up in my inbox, so I checked it out. And it’s true. McDonald’s workers in Denmark are paid more than $20 an hour, in addition to receiving substantial benefits. Indeed.com says that “production associates” at Honda’s Alabama plants are paid an average of $14 an hour.
What this comparison tells us is that institutions that empower workers are more important in determining workers’ pay than what sector they work in. Two-thirds of Danish workers are represented by unions, while auto workers in Alabama aren’t unionized. Empowering service sector workers can make their jobs good; disempowering manufacturing workers can make their jobs bad.
There’s a lot of romanticism about what manufacturing jobs in America used to be like. It’s true that some industrial workers were well paid. But that was mainly because they had strong unions. Nonunionized workers in, say, South Carolina’s textile industry had low pay and terrible working conditions. Many came down with brown lung diseasecaused by breathing in lint. Why should we want to bring those jobs back?
And even in America, where many service-sector jobs pay poorly, there are also many jobs outside manufacturing that offer good wages. Employment in health care now greatly exceeds employment in manufacturing; well, according to Pew, 55 percent of health care jobs provide middle-class incomes. And policies that increase workers’ bargaining power could greatly expand the number of good jobs outside manufacturing.
The point is that Democrats shouldn’t engage in Trumpian nostalgia for an industrial era that isn’t coming back. They should be pushing for policies that will make jobs better in the 21st century, not harken back to a rose-colored vision of America in 1955.
And they should never, ever say that Trump’s tariffs have a point. Because they don’t.