Achi news desk-
In recent decades, populist presidential campaigns have arisen from the left (Bernie Sanders) and the right (Pat Buchanan). Both of these campaigns had limited appeal across the political spectrum or even sought to engage Americans of diverse political views.
Over the past year in his independent presidential campaign, Bobby Kennedy Jr has tried to bring members of the two major political parties together, with a type of economic populism that expands ownership opportunities. Unlike Sanders, Kennedy’s goal is not to grow the welfare state or state control over the economy. His economic populism focuses on the free market, with the aim of building a wider property-owning middle class. Its aim is to expand the number of worker-owners who have a stake in the market system, through their ownership of homes, businesses, worker stock and profit sharing, and other assets.
It remains to be seen whether Kennedy’s economic strategies can achieve the ownership and middle class goals he has set. But its “ownership economy” is one that should be discussed and debated. Currently, it is largely ignored by the legacy media – or covered by the parade of articles speculating how many votes it will “take away” from President Biden or the President Trump.
I wrote about Kennedy’s heterodox jobs program late last summer. In the eight months since, he has sharpened his jobs agenda, and linked it to a wider platform of worker ownership. It’s time to revisit the economic themes of the campaign, briefly identifying three of Kennedy’s frequent talking points in 2024: abandoning large sections of the blue-collar economy, low-wage workforces, and the marginalization of businesses small
Abandon the Blue Collar Economy
“Compensating the losers” is how political scientist Ruy Teixeira characterizes the Democratic Party’s approach to the blue-collar economy since the 1990s. According to this approach, workers whose jobs are affected by environmental policies (oil and gas workers) or trade policies (heavy manufacturing workers) will be retrained for jobs in the green economy or in advanced manufacturing or even such as white collar fields such as information technology (the oil worker as a coder). Since the 1990s a vast network of displaced worker programs and rapid response programs have sprung up and are prominent under the Biden administration.
As might be expected, retraining has not been so easy in practice. One example: here in Northern California, the Marathon Oil
MRO
the refinery closed in October 2020, laying off 345 workers. The federal and state governments immediately stepped in with the union offering a range of retraining and job placement services. A study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that even a year after a shutdown, a quarter of workers were still unemployed. Those who were employed earned a median of $12 less than their previous jobs. Other studies have similarly identified the gap between skills transfer and reemployment theories and the reality for most blue-collar workers—including today’s alternative energy jobs that typically pay far less than oil and gas jobs .
Each refinery or shutdown site has its own business dynamics, and in many cases, such as Marathon Oil’s refinery, the facility will not be able to avoid shutdown. Re-employment cannot be avoided. Kennedy has talked about improving the retraining and rehiring process for laid-off workers, implementing best practices in retraining with the involvement of unions and employee organizations.
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Manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have been in decline for the past four decades, and even as he encourages trade policies for job realignment, Kennedy acknowledges that manufacturing will be a limited part of the economy going forward. blue collar. The blue collar jobs of the future will increasingly be in the trades and services. Kennedy has appointed “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe to highlight the importance of the trades, and to identify policies that can improve conditions and wages for the trades. Among these policies: a larger share of the federal higher education budget redirected from colleges to trades training, and support for workers trying to enter and stay in the trades.
Improving the economic position of blue-collar workers also means expanding worker stock ownership and profit sharing. Although worker cooperatives have failed to gain traction in America, forms of worker stock ownership and profit sharing are implemented in companies with significant blue-collar workforces, such as Procter & Gamble.
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Southwest Airlines
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and Chobani. Kennedy sets out the challenge: Let’s get workers-as-owners to share more fully in the economic success of their employers.
The Impact of Inflation on Low Wage Workers
In almost all of his talks on the economy, Kennedy addresses the issue of affordability, and how inflation has undercut the wages of America’s lower wage workforce. He posts regularly on the rising costs of food, transportation, and housing, the financial pressure on working and middle class families, the number of workers living paycheck to paycheck. When the March national jobs report was published earlier this month, it noted the slowdown in year-on-year wage growth (at 4.1% the lowest year-over-year increase since 2021) and the increase in part-time jobs.
Kennedy acknowledges that many of the low-wage workforces are in sectors such as long-term care, retail, and hospitality, where profit margins for employers are tight, and individual employers have limited flexibility to raise wages. Kennedy continues his calls for a higher minimum wage, reducing health care costs, strengthening protections and benefits for workers in the gig economy. It encourages a reconsideration of trade and tax policies and the need for immigration policies that secure the nation’s borders. Kennedy’s strict border policies reflect the “humanitarian crisis” he sees with the drug cartels and immigrants, as well as the impact of unchecked immigration on the wages of low-wage manufacturing and service workers.
Home ownership has a special place in Kennedy’s ownership economy, as part of bringing more workers into the middle class, and he has increased his advocacy of home ownership. Across society, widespread home ownership stabilizes communities, promotes civic participation, acts as a hedge against social ills.
Small and Independent Businesses
During the pandemic, Kennedy warned that economic lockdowns were devastating to the small business economy. Today, in a regular series of small business podcasts, he highlights the ongoing struggles of small businesses. This past week, the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small business organization, released a survey showing that small business optimism is at its lowest level since 2012.
As with home ownership, Kennedy characterizes small business ownership broadly in terms of the social values ​​as well as the values ​​for the individual owners. Small businesses drive enterprise and service to others, providing goods and services that customers value and will pay for. It stimulates job creation, including for individuals who do not fit easily into larger employment settings. The Kennedy Administration will prioritize rebuilding the small business economy, particularly in rural and inner-city communities.
Kennedy’s small business agenda goes beyond a laundry list of small business grant and loan programs. As with the wage issue, Kennedy is trying to tie a vibrant small business economy to fundamental trade and tax policies. He also tries to tie this economy to reforms in the federal government’s procurement policies, which he describes as ineffective.
Economic Challenges And Alternatives
The middle-class society and economy of the 1950s in which Kennedy grew up and which is central to his worldview was a product of America’s unique economic forces and dominant position in the post-World War II era. There is no going back to it, and it will be harder to recreate than in the past, in the now global economy, and with rapidly developing technologies.
But a broad middle class of worker-owners, is the right goal, and private sector ownership is the right method. People may find Kennedy’s strategies insufficiently detailed or unrealistic or even counterproductive. But Kennedy raises thoughtful challenges and alternatives to the economic platforms of both major parties – just as he raises serious challenges on a range of other issues.
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