Last November, Trump refused to accept the fact that he got trounced in a fair election, so he put forth the lie that the election was stolen from him by various nefarious entities (Dominion Voting Systems, the Deep State, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State… the list went on).
In fact, having been trounced, union activists now want to move away from elections altogether. After the loss at Bessemer, Jesse Case, a spokesperson for a Teamsters local in Iowa, told the New York Times, “We’re focused on building a new type of labor movement where we don’t rely on the election process to raise standards.” The Times also quoted Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the City University of New York, who noted that in many recent unionization efforts, “There are almost never any elections. It’s all about putting pressure on decision makers at the top.”
When Trump and his supporters insisted that the November election had been stolen from them, leftwing pundits sneered at their inability to accept the truth, dragging out the old canard that reality has a distinct leftwing bias. But the reality in Bessemer has a decidedly non-leftwing bias.
The election results there tell us that working-class people are not always eager to embrace labor unions.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
