Labor’s Reawakening
Over a decade and a half ago, Josh Marshall described the phenomenon that he came to call “dominance politics”. The purpose of dominance politics is to attack, attack, attack, and make it appear that the opponent has not fought back. To quote Marshall, “Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you”. (As a side note, the “popularism” debate that is currently roiling the Democratic consultant class in some ways revolves around whether Democrats have fought back hard enough against Republicans dominance politics over the years.) Republicans’ decades-long game of dominance politics reached its apogee with Donald Trump. Trump is the supreme master of dominance politics, which is not surprising when you consider he is a serial sexual predator, and he has used his mastery to destroy Democrats and Republicans alike. As Marshall also notes, “the inherent appeal of power and the ability to dominate others…has a deep appeal to America’s authoritarian right”. And I would not be the first to note that, for much of America, the Trump presidency, and now even its aftermath, has been akin to being in an abusive relationship.
For many American workers, the Trump presidency just brought to the political arena an element of abuse that they were enduring at the workplace. Ever since Reagan destroyed PATCO and the emergence of globalization, American workers have been abused by their employers at all levels of the wage scale. The wages for full-time employees at Walmart and other large retailers still leave a family of three earning below the poverty line, leaving American taxpayers to actually subsidize those workers. The psychological distress and family disruption caused by unpredictable work schedules has been well documented. Wage theft is rampant, with the Economic Policy Institute estimating that workers lose over $8 billion a year to wage theft, misclassification of jobs, and minimum wage violations in just the 10 most populous states.
Even under revised regulation, truckers can work 70 hour weeks and long-haulers only are required to be given four hours of rest from 1am to 4am on two consecutive nights as well as potentially forced to do 11 hours straight of driving. (Wage theft is also rampant in the trucking business, with LA and Long Beach port drivers recently winning a $30 million settlement from XPO Logistics…
