Union Leader: It’s Time for the Democrats to Wake Up
Painters’ union leader Jimmy Williams Jr says that the Democrats have a messaging problem with working-class voters — and it isn’t just going to cost them a single election.
Painters’ union president Jimmy Williams Jr tells Jacobin that Democrats “appealing only to the management class but not the members of the class who need the government’s support the most has been a recipe for failure.” (IUPAT)
The Democratic Party continues to bleed working-class voters. Despite four years of labor-friendly policies under Joe Biden’s administration, workers expressed discontent with the economy and showed increasing distance from the party of the New Deal.
International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) represents over 140,000 workers in North America, and its president, Jimmy Williams Jr, spent the past few months on the campaign trail in an attempt to deliver a message to his members that Democrats have been unable to: the economy is hurting working people, and the answer is a transformation of the economy. But it wasn’t enough to combat what Williams describes as “forty or fifty years of failed policy.”
Now workers must prepare for a brutal organizing landscape under the Donald Trump and J. D. Vance administration. Williams spoke with Jacobin contributor Peter Lucas about the Democrats’ messaging problems, working-class dealignment, and how we can forge a winning coalition around populist economics.
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