Working Class Unionism; Some Exclusions Apply: On Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s “Rust Belt Union Blues”
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol | Rust Belt Union Blues | Columbia University Press | September 2023 | 328 Pages
Immediately after Trump’s election in 2016, it was difficult to avoid commentary that placed particular emphasis on the “decisive” role of the “blue-collar foundation” that apparently handed him electoral victory. Proponents of this analysis primarily referenced Trump’s substantial margins of votes from white, non-college-educated men and women from Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Some also noted that Trump gained more of the union vote than Mitt Romney had in 2012, which was especially visible at the state level—in Ohio, for example, 54% of union households voted for Trump and 41% voted for Clinton. Nationally, although she still won more of the union vote than Trump, Clinton also did worse among union households than prior Democratic presidential elections.
To be sure, not all union households are white, and indeed union membership in the U.S. is increasingly less so. But data gathered prior to and after the 2016 election suggested that union and blue-collar support for Trump derived in large part from white working-class voters in former industrial strongholds in Ohio and Pennsylvania. When paired with high profile investigative pieces into Trump’s popularity among some white workers in industrial unions that had once served as reliable hubs of Democratic Party voters, an impression of Trump’s popularity among the Rust Belt region’s white working-class and union men in particular quickly congealed into established common sense.
It soon became clear, however, that talks of the decisive power of the so-called “Trump Democrat” in the 2016 election and beyond suffered from a number of analytical problems. Chief among them was its overemphasis on the presence and power of white working class voters in Trump’s base. As Mike Davis wrote in an immediate post-mortem of the 2016 election that analyzed county-level voting patterns, “the phenomenon is real but largely limited to a score or so of troubled Rust Belt counties from Iowa to New York where a new wave of plant closure or relocation has coincided with growing immigrant and refugee populations.” While these “substantial beachheads” of white working-class support could be “expanded in the future,” he argued they had been “over-interpreted as the key to Trump’s victory.”
Given these challenges, or at least hefty qualifications, to this presentation of Trump’s white working class base, it is curious that Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues appears to accept its premise hook line and sinker. Their study, which interrogates the “loyalties” of white blue collar workers in the once union dense, steel manufacturing region of Western Pennsylvania, takes as given that white working class and union voters in the Rust Belt were the most important force in propelling Trump to high office. To be sure, they do compellingly demonstrate the presence of conservative pro-Trump sentiment and dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party among the region’s white union men. Moreover, their research unearths some useful insights into local and community level shifts that likely helped transform white blue-collar workers’ partisan affiliations from Democrat to Republican, adding texture to discussions about the spread of conservative politics among this demographic.
But their refusal to contextualize their findings within a now more robust conversation about the actual class character of Trump’s base, and within a broader analysis of the U.S. working class and labor movement, severely hampers the seriousness and utility of their study. To give just one example, their claims that Trump’s 2016 win was propelled by “large shares of blue-collar votes, including from unions” is, according to their footnotes, drawn from a single Washington Post article from November 2016. Such sweeping but thinly supported proclamations mirror their tendency to interpret their findings (which come from a relatively small, highly localized study of white current and former union men in Western Pennsylvania) as straightforwardly instructive for the entirety of the Democratic Party and labor left’s political strategy.
The stakes here are not merely that of scholarly rigor. Beyond their imprecise insistence upon the decisive force of a Trumpian white working class, Newman and Skocpol frequently present the grievances of the Trump-voting white male union workers with whom they spoke as objective and universal truths rather than partial, historically constructed, and heavily subjective assessments. In doing so, they frequently present as legitimate—if perhaps lamentable—that white blue-collar union men in Western Pennsylvania have left the Democratic Party because it is “whiney or overly concerned with political correctness,” by which these workers often mean, Newman and Skocpol report, that the Party supports “efforts to help the poor, minorities, or women.”
This may be an accurate portrayal of what these workers told Skocpol and Newman, and their views are worth acknowledging and contending with. But the authors fail to scrutinize such positions as reactionary and materially harmful to masses of working-class women, people of color, immigrants, and queer and trans workers, who come across in their study as less authentic or worthy representatives of the U.S., labor movement and of working-class politics more generally. In their quest to “understand” the white male industrial worker’s conservatism, they end up merely reifying a racist and patriarchal tradition that positions white blue-collar men as the most sympathetic and valuable working-class subject. Rather than contextualizing this as, to put it broadly, the problematic product of New Deal liberalism’s “in-built faultlines” and organized labor’s historic missteps, Newman and Skocpol suggest that white Rust Belt union men’s racialized and gendered “resentments” and “yearning to be respected” must be taken at face value. In doing so, their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches.
To be clear, Newman and Skocpol do not advance a full-on screed against the Democratic Party or labor movement’s alleged “wokeness.” Indeed, many of their concluding prescriptions are unobjectionable: unions should reinvigorate member engagement and communal institution-building in abandoned deindustrialized regions, and Democrats should invest in and build out local leadership in the rural Rust Belt on an ongoing basis. Moreover, interrogating the phenomenon of white working-class conservatism is relevant and worth probing for those serious about building a powerful labor movement and left politics more broadly.
But approaching the question through such an analytically confined and ahistorical lens threatens to cloud rather than clarify what must be done, uncritically platforming revanchist and discriminatory proposals where more capacious visions of liberation are possible. It gives credence to chauvinistic visions of white working-class power that jettisons the masses of nonwhite, non-male, and queer and trans workers for whom this traditional paradigm has long proved materially oppressive—and, who increasingly make up the beating heart of the nation’s most vibrant labor and leftwing political movements.
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As “one of the most fabled twentieth century industrial regions,” Western Pennsylvania used to be a powerful hub of steel and manufacturing industries and a stronghold of industrial unionism, namely the United Steelworkers of America. During the mid-twentieth century apex of the US labor movement, support for unions, liberalism, and the Democratic Party soared. Today, Newman and Skocpol observe, the tables have dramatically turned. To flesh out their analysis, they draw evidence from a mix of 50 interviews with western Pennsylvania union members at industrial plants or in the building trades, archival research, quantitative analysis of industrial union newsletters, reconstruction of present and past locations of union and other organizational institutions (such as gun clubs and megachurches), and ethnographic observation.
The crux of their argument revolves around changes in “social embeddedness.” Where once unions, and by proxy the Democratic Party, had a significant local presence in the region, they have since dwindled. Greater social isolation and an influx of conservative organizations and networks, namely gun clubs and megachurches, filled the void. Absent a strong union community presence, and instead awash in more conservative extracurricular and community network infrastructure, white blue collar workers, and especially men who historically and presently make up industrial and building trades unions, moved rightward.
As they explain, mid-twentieth century unions used to be “involved in almost every dimension of life for workers,” including permeating religious institutions, local politics, and the realm of family, leisure, and community engagement. Workers lived close to their workplaces and to union facilities, allowing the union to serve as a hub of community life, civic engagement, and neighborhood solidarity. As Newman and Skocpol write, “the social choreography of union locals rhymed with longstanding community routines that U.S. workers and their families already understood very well.” This in turn had helped tether a broad swath of workers, whether out of genuine belief or mere “social expectations,” to support Democratic Party politics and priorities.
The authors do not entirely gloss over the most obvious problem with this picture of mid-century industrial union worker cohesion: that of well-documented white male workers’ racism and sexism against Black workers and white women workers. But they build on prior scholarship and pull from their interviews to contend that, on the whole, union membership and a strong institutional presence of union locals fostered “mutual solidarity across ethnic, religious, and racial lines…more fully than in other spheres of U.S. life at the time.”
With the late-twentieth-century decline of industry in the U.S., however, Western Pennsylvania’s industrial workers not only lost their jobs but the entire social and civic infrastructure of their community, too. As Newman and Skocpol track, the shuttering of union halls and other labor, community, and civic groups mirrored the devastation of manufacturing jobs in Western Pennsylvania. They find that in the 1960s, there were “at least 119 local USW unions in the twenty-county region of Western PA,” which they note is a “likely conservative estimate.” Of these locals, they found sixty-eight with union halls. But by the new millennium, only sixteen of these USW locals were left, only eight of which had operating halls.
Institutions with historic union ties, like fraternal lodges, ethnic church parishes, and ethnic clubs, also precipitously decreased. In their place, Newman and Skocpol suggest, came National Rifle Association-affiliated gun clubs or hunting leagues and megachurches, both of which offered the kinds of communal spaces, recreation, and social life that union halls once did. There are now over 250 NRA-affiliated gun organizations within 100 miles of the Western PA region and six megachurches that attract over 2,000 attendees weekly. Even those who may not participate in gun clubs or churches suffer from a decline of social life and civic culture once provided by union halls and affiliated clubs. Newman and Skocpol report that workers still “formally enrolled in unions” are in general less “socially or civically interconnected,” more likely to be “driving alone or watching television or playing videogames at home alone.”
In mapping this transformation in communal life, Newman and Skocpol offer their most valuable contribution. While they recognize that the political attitudes and affiliations of Western Pennsylvania’s white union men have roots in bigger structural shifts—namely, the ascent of an increasingly hostile anti-union political infrastructure and the ruinous decline of most domestic manufacturing—charting how these developments also upended the presence of influential union and/or Democratic Party-affiliated institutions at the neighborhood level offer compelling additional explanations for how Rust Belt conservatism became pervasive.
While reasonably instructive, Newman and Skocpol’s analysis suffers from a myopic and empirically unsound mystification of the true relationship between Trump and the white working class. In particular, Newman and Skocpol appear completely unaware of—or uninterested in—a raft of research that makes clear the interpretive misstep of sustaining the image of Trump as a principally white working-class hero. Political scientists Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu’s analysis of the 2016 election, for example, indicated that a majority of Trump’s supporters were middle-class and affluent. This included many of the 69% of white Trump voters without college degrees, which had previously been touted as a metric for demonstrating Trump’s white blue-collar support. Sixty percent of these voters were “in the top half of the income distribution,” and one in five had household incomes over $100,000.
More granular voter breakdowns revealed that Trumps’ greatest electoral gains came from upper-class, wealthy townships within seemingly blue-collar counties. As Kim Moody writes, this “relatively high income level of much of Trump’s vote” suggests not a picture of majority “left behind” white industrial workers but rather a “majority petty-bourgeois and middle-class base for Trump.” An investigation from Slate similarly myth-busted the “rust belt revolt” narrative. In an analysis of exit-poll data in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they found that, compared with 2012, Republicans gained 335,000 voters who made under $50,000. But Democrats lost far more voters from this category (1.17 million), suggesting not a clear swing towards Republicans, but rather a growing refusal to engage at all or, in the case of states with voter ID laws, growing barriers to entry. Notably, Slate found that these “lost voters” were not exclusively white, raising questions about the tactical wisdom—commonly espoused by vocal members of the Democratic Party establishment—of catering to the political views and behaviors of white, blue-collar Trump voters only. Finally, like Carnes and Lupu, Slate’s analysis found that Republicans actually gained almost as many wealthy voters as they did working class in these states between 2012 and 2016, further diminishing the argument that there was some straightforward and pivotal blue-collar wave for Trump in these states.
On the flip side, the fact that white working-class union voters “provided strong support” for Biden in 2020 disrupts claims that Trump’s 2016 election produced some kind of stable realignment in white working class political affiliation. Though Newman and Skocpol contend, for example, that Trump “retained much of his blue-collar support,” studies have found that while Trump continued to win a majority of union households in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2020, his “gains were erased” in Wisconsin and Michigan, ultimately assisting in the ascent of Biden to office. If anything, it is Biden’s striking “underperformance” with working-class Black and Latino voters that organizers and analysts might turn their attention to—a trend that has only worsened in recent months, and one that could have serious implications for the 2024 election.
It may be true that, in other words, that a majority of the few dozen white male steelworkers that Newman and Skocpol spoke with feel that Democratic Party is “too pushy, especially in its moral stances on certain issues” and that “the excessively woke segments of the party are tiring and irritating.” But positioning this sentiment as straightforwardly decisive in propelling Trump’s victory—and therefore necessary for the labor left and Democratic Party to bend themselves to—is both empirically unsound and politically noxious, suggesting a concerning tolerance for a politics that champions the restoration of white male worker power and enrichment on the backs of marginalized communities. Indeed, their decontextualized assessment romanticizes rather than interrogate the exclusionary foundations of the “midcentury union man” of “yesteryear,” a deeply racialized and gendered construct that forged white male union workers’ privileges through the subjection of Black workers (including those in their own locals) and the relegation of white women into patriarchal nuclear family arrangements where they performed unpaid domestic labor.
Beyond implicitly suggesting that the concerns of marginalized workers facing the brunt of state violence should be dismissed and disregarded, Newman and Skocpol’s perspective bizarrely overlooks very real evidence that union members and unionized industries are increasingly diverse, with workers demonstrating every day that demands for racial, gender, and queer and trans justice are in fact labor issues that energize many workers. Such oversights are curious given Newman and Skocpol’s emphasis on the importance of ground up, member driven, and community oriented unionism.
“Local union leaders who manage to keep their members socially engaged and involved in more than just dues-paying and union business affairs are more likely to be able to advance labor’s political priorities,” they write. Yet Newman and Skocpol appear uninterested in some of the more radical experiments in just this kind of grassroots, community-focused unionism.
To give one example, Amazon warehouse workers Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, both Black men who named their experiences with racism in the workplace as central to their politicization, defied the company’s notoriously difficult union organizing ground in large part by providing food and heat for workers at a bus stop workers frequented on their way home. They also prayed with workers, sang songs, and fundraised for a worker that had become homeless. Their community-oriented efforts resulted in an historic win for their upstart, newly formed Amazon Labor Union.
Of course, Newman and Skocpol are not expected to cover every aspect of the contemporary labor movement, and their focus is squarely on white Rust Belt industrial workers. But their refusal to even briefly think with these very clear articulations of worker-led, community-oriented unionism—often led by marginalized workers—is revealing.
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Thankfully, we do not need to merely dream of a different and more liberatory path for the U.S. labor movement. Across the country, working people are advancing visions of multiracial, feminist, and queer and trans-affirming worker and union power that refutes the racism and misogyny of mid-century liberalism and organized labor.
While numerous organizing hurdles abound, there’s evidence that this more expansive and radical approach is galvanizing rather than alienating the majority of the working class. And this is not only the case in unions that Newman and Skocpol suggest are less legitimate members of the working class, such as graduate worker or museum worker unions. Echoing the steelworkers they interviewed, they fear these groups will “skew the union’s priorities” by representing “more diverse groups of employees” (a talking point that could have been cribbed from the employers of these workers themselves—but I digress).
At the time of writing, workers at Volkswagon’s Chattanooga, Tennessee plant voted in remarkably high numbers to form a union with the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a victory that comes after two prior failed attempts. Reflecting broader trends that suggest Black and Latinx women are “leading union growth,” Black women workers in Tennessee were pivotal to the union’s win, even helping to win over other female workers worried about how unionizing (and potential retaliation) might impact their families. Anecdotes shared after the win similarly suggest that leaning into rather than recoiling from questions of racial, gender, and sexual injustice can propel the kind of politicization necessary to build politically powerful and worker-led unions, even among workers who don’t share the same identities.
In an interview with Alex Press, VW plant worker Zach Costello described how, at a prior job in fast food, a feminist co-worker broke down why a YouTuber he followed was right-wing, advancing his own politicization away from a more conservative politics. “Don’t ever let people tell you that those people are not inclusive,” he told Press, “because they absolutely are.” Newman and Skocpol would do well to heed Costello’s call.