What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class (Joan Williams) from the Harvard Business Review
"“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. White Working Class men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need."
So far, this is the best examination I have seen about why the Dems lost the white working class so badly in this election. A must-read for anyone looking to win them back. Just one key point for Dems: STOP talking about minimum wage and parental leave! Start figuring out how to deliver to the working class a middle class level of income and life as they had had in the 1950s and 1960s. This is what Trump promised and what Dems STOPPED promising 25 years ago. Impossible? We'll need to figure it out.
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