From a Building-Trades Union Member: People Can Change
As a building-trades union member, I work with a lot of white working-class men. A recent national poll in my union said that forty-eight percent of our members plan to vote for Donald Trump. That’s up from forty percent two years ago. So heartbreaking and scary.
The conventional wisdom in my union is (1) that this a “f— you” [profanity] to the ”establishment” (based on the survey data) and (2) that there is nothing we can do to change people’s minds.
I believe that racism is a key driver of this. (I have to stop for a minute to remind folks that working-class men are not more racist than middle-class and owning-class men. In fact, they have the least amount of power to enact racism systemically. If everyone keeps seeing their form of racism as worse than that of middle- and owning-class men, everyone has successfully been distracted from the key issues. Please take any stereotypes about white working-class men to sessions—thank you!)
I believe that people can change. This is my perspective from RC and also because I have seen it in my union.
I’ve been advocating for women in my union, particularly women of color, for thirty-one years. I have seen many things and many individual people change to having a more liberation-focused perspective. (This is not because my union has a history or culture of having hard conversations and trying to convince people. Many other unions do have a wonderful history of that work.)
About two months ago a group of tradeswomen met via Zoom in one of our monthly women’s liberation groups. A Black union laborer said that the union members hadn’t learned enough labor history and that we should create a class. So we did! We figured out topics and recruited leaders, and we will have a four-week series for union building-trades members (men and women) on Zoom.
Topics will be labor history (with a race and gender lens), racial justice today, key building-trades issues, and the November U.S. election. Each two-hour class will include breakout sessions in which people get to practice talking to union members who are Trump supporters about the issues discussed in that class. It will end with setting a goal to talk to a Trump supporter. Three women, including two women of color, and one white man are leading the classes. All are recognized mainstream labor leaders in our state.
We just finished the flier today and will be sharing it via e-mail and social media as well as texting it directly to about forty thousand union members in the state. We’ll also share it with our network of about three thousand tradeswomen around the United States and in a few other countries.
This was entirely imagined and framed by a small group of working-class tradeswomen. As a raised-middle-class/owning-class tradeswoman, I am playing a supporting role. I’m assisting with logistics and contributing some of my office skills and my thirty-year relationships with leaders in the labor movement.
I’m excited about this. I know it won’t “fix” everything, but I also know many good things will come out of it, and we will learn a lot.
USA
(Present Time 202, January 2021)