Reconnecting the Democratic Party to the working class is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life.
newrepublic.com
From Sherrod Brown.
I like Sherrod Brown. That was a pretty empty piece. I get it -- he's writing a short article; he's no longer a Senator so he doesn't have as much standing as he had; and Dems are still trying to find the answers.
What I took from that article is that Dems need to talk differently. Be less preachy. I'm not sure what else there is.
The wage/productivity concept just doesn't convey the information that many people think it does. One important reason that wages and productivity rose together was that workers didn't face much competition from technology. Technology could make an auto worker produce more, but you still needed the auto worker. Moreover, the technology itself created a skill -- namely, the experience with the machines, and workers weren't as replaceable.
Today, technology doesn't just aid workers; it replaces them. It will replace them more readily the higher the wage. And the people who run the tech are college educated. There's just no getting around that. It's not entirely and always true, but it's more true than not.
And can we make up for that with less-than-college training programs? Here's my experience: back when I was doing computer consulting, big companies had IT workforces trained at places like Chubb and IIT and DeVry. That created opportunities for me, because those people were terrible at what they did. They were basically incapable of solving any problem. At one point, they hired me an "assistant" who would help me build, and then take over when I left (I was more of a consultant). He was a Chubb guy. He was completely useless. Like, I would give him a project that I could do in an hour on Monday, and check in with him on Friday. It was usually a gigantic mess. He just didn't get it.
I would never hire from Chubb or DeVry or any of those places again. I mean, maybe I would now, because I would view my previous experience as stale, but had I stayed in tech and not gone to law school, that would have been my attitude.
The reason is that those places self-select in a bad way. Who goes to Chubb? Primarily it's people who want a tech career, but were not good enough students or smart enough to attend college. Sure, there were undoubtedly some who couldn't afford college, or who had dropped out for reasons and were trying to restart their careers . . . but from what I saw, the average Chubb grad is a C student in high school. And that just doesn't get it done in today's world. It's an A-student world.
I don't have any good ideas about what to do about these issues, if it's true that the working class a) wants jobs it can't do; and b) doesn't want to accept government assistance (except the kind they already get but don't consider).
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