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Review of Daniel J. Clark’s “Listening to Workers” for IRSH
Common to failing and fallen empires is a nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Americans like to believe that we miss working on assembly lines in auto factories.
The fantasy that “good jobs” are inherently and automatically generated by factories, or even that unionization magically converts working on an assembly line into the kind of job that workers would want their children to aspire to, motivates much of Donald Trump’s trade war. Likewise, the mixture of domestic tax incentives and narrowly tailored tariffs that comprised his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better”, aimed to “create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead”. Biden frequently waxed nostalgic about his 1950s’ childhood in Scranton, PA, and a work ethic instilled by his dad: “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community”.
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