I Am Not The Working Class

This is not another article about how we have to listen to the white working class men of the Upper Midwest. This is a story of how we have to listen to everyone who voted for Trump. And, it starts, in all the unlikely places, with a make up shift at that bastion of liberal values, the Park Slope Food Co-Op.

Yes, that food co-op, the one that hates Israel, where liberal elitists grab onto issues as if they were moral life rafts. Brooklyn is now a borough in which we all feel guilt, every day, for our own wealth and financial well-being. The food co-op has therefore become one more opportunity for well meaning left-wingers like me to clutch onto our ideals as if they are a floating door in the North Atlantic. Membership is nominally open to anyone who would like to purchase high quality food at just above cost in exchange for a monthly shift of menial labor. Forty-three years later though, the member base has shifted. Members are as likely send their nannies to work their shifts as they are to be the nannies themselves because the Co-Op is located in a district where the rents and housing prices have skyrocketed with gentrification.

Still, the co-op is relentlessly left wing, leading me to expect that the majority of the members share much of my worldview. I had just finished chatting about why Orthodox Jews voted for Trump with a pair of older ladies working the entrance membership check station, when I was asked to handle the shift’s coffee run. As I walked around taking coffee orders, I heard a black woman announce that she had “never seen an election where the losing side made such a fuss.”

I did a double take. Hearing a POC talking, at the Park Slope Food Co-Op, about how proud she was to vote for Trump was so unexpected that I instantly became curious as to why. So I asked, politely, and without judgement, “Could you tell me why you voted for him?”

“I didn’t vote for the man,” she told me. “I’m religious and I believe in the ways of the Church. So I voted for the party.”

“I see,” I said. “So you have always voted Republican because they support Christian values,”

“Yes. But I also voted for Trump because I’m a garment worker, and I make 25% now of what I made in 1992. Can you believe that?”

I couldn’t. Whether she meant 25% in real value or 25% of what she made in 1992 dollars was irrelevant. That explained a lot.

It has been my experience over the past two weeks that us over-educated urban elitists still want to tell people that a vote for Trump was a mistake. When we hear that someone voted for Trump, we immediately start arguing about civil liberties and concentration camps and the Cabinet becoming the KKKabinet. We assume the Trump voters are racist or ignorant of racism, because it makes no sense to vote for a rich white man if you are working class. That’s why all many of us well meaning white liberals assume that all the POC in Brooklyn voted Democrat, because we all saw the racism and xenophobia as issues only white people would embrace or ignore.

I am realizing now, in my slow, white-girl way, that it is pointless to continue trying to force arguments about civil liberties and equality if that’s not a high priority issue for the Trump voter. At best, it’s arguing a vote and election that’s already happened. At its worst, it can be considered demeaning and infantilizing. How much of my shock at hearing a POC say they voted for Trump is based on the threat to their civil liberties, and how much of it is based on a white, liberal assumption that POC’s themselves should all agree with what I think is good for them? I’d like to think that I am “woke” enough for it to be the former. In my heart, I am afraid it is the latter.

I also went into this election assuming the Democrats were the party of the working class. I am not sure why I was so sure of that now because I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the working class. The closest working class association I have is my father’s apprenticeship in a steel mill in Cumberland (now Cumbria). Dad went to night school to become an engineer rather than remain in the steel mills, but continued to remind my sister and me that we could be “working an eight hour day at a Bessamer furnace,” or “down in a coal mine twelve hours a day,” whenever we complained about our own teenage part-time jobs. He told us that we were lucky to be destined for university and not technical school, that we were extremely fortunate to not be working class as the steel and coal industries died a horrible, gasping breath across Britain and America. We knew we weren’t working class growing up. We knew we had bright futures. We believed no shift in industry or trade could bring us down.

Even though I am not the working class, I still greatly respect those who have worked to learn a trade. That’s why I wanted to listen to my fellow co-op worker and understand her story. After she gave me the 25% wage statistic, I asked, “is that because you no longer have union protection”? No, she told me. “It’s because the Asians and the Mexicans came in, and they’ll do my job for a quarter of what I get paid.” Seeing the look on my face, she repeated it, “Can you imagine? Making a quarter now of what I did in 1992?”

“And you’re a professional,” I said. “You learned that trade.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I have worked my whole life in the garment industry and the Democrats have destroyed it.”

“I’ve been hearing that,” I said. “That people voted for Trump because of the how the bad trade deals the Democrats made cost them their jobs.”

“Yes,” she said. “And I don’t like anyone saying I’m homophobic or I’m this or I’m that. I work in the fashion industry. People are just people. They’re not gay or straight, we just all work together, and we gotta bring the garment industry back here in America.”

Here’s where we have failed the trade workers of America: we have not valued their skills or their trade. A way to get serious about economic equality may have been refusing to purchase from the companies using destabilized labor pricing. We chose fast, cheap fashion (along with other consumer goods) and failed to keep our fellow Americans working. We should have, at the least, demanded full transparency and accountability from the companies that sell us our consumer goods, so we could have made the choices to keep fellow Americans working. Perhaps if we had held corporations accountable, the trade deals would have had less impact on the working class of America.

Liberal women, right now, are working on getting Ivanka Trump’s clothing and shoe line banned from stores where it’s sold. Why can’t we apply that kind of mentality to making the clothing manufacturers accountable, not for who their parents are, but for what their pay practices are? What if we had made America’s garment industry great again ourselves? I realize if we did this now, Trump would take the credit for it, just like he did that Ford plant that wasn’t moving to Mexico anyways. The question is: do we owe it to our working sisters to do so?

Another point of consideration is that unionized workers traditionally vote Democrat. Pushing not only the garment manufacturing industry to re-unionize and make clothes in America but also pushing for stores like Target and Wal-Mart to unionize would give us a tremendous voting bloc back. I am not working class…but I have been pro-union my whole life, starting with my first strike with my father and the Provincial Employees’ union as a toddler. Unions gave New York garment workers a safe, humane work environment a hundred years ago, but the last garment union in New York disappeared by 1995. It is no coincidence that my new co-op friend had seen her wages drop dramatically since then.

I cannot claim to be better or worse than anyone else who participates in the vicious cycle of lower pricing of consumer goods. I do, however, have to ask: for all of us who know we are not of the working class, all of us who have the means to do so, could we have averted any part of this by holding accountable the commercial supply chain for our consumer goods? It is not lost on me that many of the Trump voters themselves who complain their jobs have been sent overseas are shopping at Wal-Mart, which continues to decimate their Main Streets, drive their wages down and send their manufacturing jobs overseas. Still, that does not absolve us urban dwellers from doing our part as well.

The working class found a horrible, awful way to make their voices heard, like a megaphone made of plutonium. They are being heard, but may poison all of us in the process. How do we listen and act moving forward so that when offered a poisonous amplification option, they do not feel compelled to ignore the damage it will do to us all? And how hard will it be for all of us liberal elites to stop and admit: we are not the working class, and we must learn how to speak with them, not for them.