Be Honest With the Working Class

Behold Bethlehem Steel. It basically closed when I was a child. The company ceased to exist sometime when I was in college. Thousands of people worked at the place in that picture above, every day. Members of my family worked there. First and second generation Americans made a good life there, as members of the United Steelworkers Union. America was built there.

They don't make steel there anymore. Sure, there is a little bit of steel production still in Bethlehem, but it is no longer the driver of the economy in the city. It hasn't been for a couple of decades now. Even with those losses, Bethlehem is doing great. Crime is low. Employment is high. Quality of life is good. People are not yearning for the plant to come back. Bethlehem is not suffering from a bad case of nostalgia. In fact, while Bethlehem has preserved it's heritage through careful protection of historic structures, the city has moved completely beyond the days of the steel mill.

Nothing angers me more than politicians lying to people who are perhaps incapable of understanding the issues they are being lied to about. Much has been made of West Virginia this election cycle, somewhat unfairly since the state has been "red" for a while, and how it has "fallen in love" with Donald Trump. Much of why West Virginia seems to love Trump more than they loved President Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney, has to do with his promises to bring back the coal mines. Much of the same was true in Western Pennsylvania. He went across the Rust Belt, from Iowa to Pennsylvania, and promised to bring back factories, bring back coal mines, and stop job losses. He even ran out to Indiana to tout a terrible deal with Carrier as President-elect. He promised a suffering people the Moon.

I've got bad news for these folks- he's not going to deliver it. No one is. The factory jobs may not be lost to Mexico and China if Trump carries through on tariffs, but they will be lost to automation, or the dreaded robots. If he does slap huge taxes on companies that outsource jobs and try to sell products here, the trade war that will follow would make it impossible for us to manufacture anything here that would sell abroad. If the market doesn't kill coal, it's finite supply and costs will do so. If the depression that would follow protectionism doesn't kill the factories, automation will. The factories aren't coming back. The coal mines aren't coming back either. At best, Donald Trump's de-regulatory policies on domestic fossil fuels will help practices like fracking. At worst, they'll do absolutely nothing for laid off workers.

The truth of the matter is that West Virginia, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania have already probably taken the worst of the hit from globalization and renewable energy. The job losses have been significant, and the impacts have been felt. The middle-class way of life that blue-collar workers once enjoyed is gone. Nothing that Donald Trump wants to do will change that. Not protectionism. Not tax cuts. Not de-regulation.

What these people need is some straight talk. They need re-training programs when their jobs leave. They need investments in developing renewable energy in places where the mines once were. They need a commitment to educating the children, so that they can compete in a new economy that is not like that of the glory day in that region. In short, they need to be told that the mines and factories are never coming back- but that there is a plan to make sure they are okay. In short, they need honesty. They are not getting that. That is not something we should be proud of.