Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Thomas Frank

The two-class system that those men-in-factories spoke of during the strikes has pretty much come to pass. I mean this not only in the sense that Wall Street traders are very rich, but in the highly specific way that the two-tiered system the Caterpillar workers were protesting has been installed in workplaces across the country; as a result, younger workers will never catch up to the pay earned by their seniors no matter how many years they log on the job. In 2015 I went back to Decatur to catch up with veterans of the war zone like Larry Solomon, who had been the leader of the local United Auto Workers union at the Caterpillar plant. He went back in after the strike ended but retired in 1998. When I met Solomon in his tidy suburban home, he talked in detail about the many times he got crossways with management in days long past; about all the grievances he filed for his coworkers over the years and all the puffed-up company officials he recalls facing down.