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)
- Interview by
- Peter Lucas
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.
IUPAT invested heavily in the election, and you toured the country on a bus speaking with members about what was at stake. What did the campaign look like, and why did you think it was so important to defeat Donald Trump?
We invested heavily in our membership, which was our main goal, and we wanted to have those deep conversations with our membership about some of labor’s wins over the past couple of years under Biden. This was also coming off the heels of our national convention, where I was elected as president of the union, and so it was a perfect opportunity, beyond making sure Vice President Kamala Harris was elected, to reconnect with our members.
We have already seen how poorly workers fared under a Trump presidency, meanwhile labor enjoyed significant success with new organizing, a strong National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Teamster pensions, etc., under Biden. But clearly working voters still don’t trust the Democratic Party. Why don’t you think they trust Democrats when they say they fight for workers?
It’s forty or fifty years of failed policy, right? I think the narrative has been hijacked by corporate America even within the Democratic Party. There’s a lack of understanding about just how much working people are hurting in this economy. In labor, we have been grasping for so many straws that when we do win minor victories, they don’t impact the American workers as soon or as much as we would like them to. There are so many factors, and quite frankly, I think the Democratic Party often is tone-deaf when it comes to what average working people in this country are truly faced with, and we saw that on display in the election.
The Democrats have made it clear their strategy is to trade in working-class voters for rich suburbanites. According to exit polls, Harris won more voters with over $100,000 in income than Trump did, which flipped from 2020. Do you think the Democrats are setting themselves up for long-term success by prioritizing professionals over their traditional working-class base?
It’s a loss across the board for the Democratic Party, and more importantly, it’s a loss across the board for working people, because then you are left with a party that doesn’t understand workers and what’s truly needed. That means working people are left without a political home. Appealing only to the management class, the college-educated workforce, but not the members of the class who need the government’s support the most has been a recipe for failure, and it will be moving forward.
IUPAT, in particular, represents these types of voters that the Democratic Party is bleeding out. What were you hearing from your members on the campaign trail?
The Democratic Party could not speak directly to our members about the issues that were front and center. We heard consistently that immigration and inflation were killing our members. Now, when we spoke to our members, we could move them. When we could spend the time to educate our members about the realities of how corporate America is benefiting from both immigration and inflation, they were movable.
Union members voted at the highest percentage for Kamala Harris when you look at the broad tent that makes up the Democratic Party. That’s a message to the Democratic Party. But they weren’t speaking directly to our members, we were. The problem is that we don’t have enough union density in this country to be able to impact enough of the electorate.
The truth is, when union leaders can educate their members directly, when they’re engaged one on one with their members, we can have a much better conversation. But the Democratic Party is not speaking to those issues. When you think about immigration, we should blame the economic system that just feeds off of cheap labor and exploits workers — that has never been said by a Democratic candidate in my lifetime for any office. Our members need to hear that. They need to know that the Democratic Party understands the economic pain. Instead, they’ve blamed immigrants.
As far as job creation, industrial policy, and NLRB appointments, Biden did deliver in some areas. But even then, the party was unable to effectively communicate some of those successes and reach working voters. Why do you think that is?
Joe Biden was more of a legislator in chief than he was a communicator in chief. What you saw from within the Democratic Party was panic — instead of embracing some of the good things he had done, they reverted to a more corporate-centric, broad-based economic message that lacked substance.
When somebody who’s running for office says, “Well, when unions do good, all workers do good,” they need to understand that it doesn’t impact a nonunion worker who doesn’t have collective bargaining, health care, retirement, and security. The main pillars of what the labor movement stands for are not often recognized by the nonunion workforce in this country.
We need an organizer in chief. We need somebody that’s sending the message of what organizing means — and what it can win for the working class. And we lost it. We lost it time and time again, to the Trump administration and to the Republican Party as a whole.
Immigration was a massive issue in this election. Trump’s candidacy was christened at the Republican National Convention in a room packed to the brim with people frothing at the mouth to deport immigrants.
You have spoken about IUPAT’s agenda to organize and support these workers, instead of demonizing them, especially talking with your own members who might be inclined to treat these workers as competitors, as opposed to brothers and sisters. Why is it important to protect all workers, regardless of their legal status?
It works when talking to even white working-class members of our union. Now, look, there’s always going to be a percentage of the population that is driven by fear around racism and other -isms. You’re never going to have full unanimous consent, but when you talk to working people, meet them where they’re at, and explain to them that there’s a system in this country that has been set up since slavery that has completely abused the immigrant workforce for generations, not just this current version, and that there has been no immigration reform, and that there used to be a system for workers to come to this country and gain citizenship, they get it. Working people are not stupid. We just haven’t had an effective messenger.
[Democrats] moving further right, trying to compromise with Republicans on a border bill, and then getting the rug pulled out was like Obamacare 2.0. When are we going to learn? You have to hold strong. You don’t negotiate with people that don’t identify with the interests of the working class. We should have learned our lessons. We didn’t when they tried to negotiate a border bill that had increased security and put more of a constraint on workers and less of an emphasis on employers that abused them. It was a recipe for disaster.
Another big point of conversation in this election has been about male voters, specifically white and Latino male voters, specifically working-class male voters. We saw some people try a sort of “White Dudes for Harris.” Other people have been talking a lot over the past couple days about the Left needing its own Joe Rogan, a male role model to speak to young, alienated men. Is joining a union the real answer to solving young male alienation?
It absolutely is. I think for anybody in the working class, joining and forming a union is the answer to most of your economic struggles, right? But that seems too far to be reached. Oftentimes, and especially in a world that’s changing, there need to be better forms of communication, similar to what Jacobin and others are doing. There is no mouthpiece for the working class that is recognized in this country when it comes to labor’s values.
One of the biggest takeaways from this election is seeing that my generation has moved further and further to the right, getting behind a message that, quite frankly, is not going to help them long-term. We need to communicate with them in different ways and in different venues. The corporate mainstream media is not the mouthpiece for the working class. It also needs to be stated, just like Fox News isn’t, guess what, neither is MSNBC and neither is CNN.
I’ve seen a lot of scapegoating over the past few days (and years) from ostensibly progressive people that treat certain demographics of voters as immovable or irredeemable. What is your response to that attitude that we can just cast off a wide portion of working people? And what do you think the solution is to winning them back?
That’s political punditry at its best. That’s not ever speaking to a young worker about the values that need to be on display when it comes to how workers are treated in this country. It’s so dismissive. It’s your typical liberal talking point that looks at political electorates like they’re linear, but they’re not. More and more people are identifying as independent, not identifying with a particular party and ideology, which means people are moveable in more ways now than ever before.
The problem is that deep education around the working class has been lost in this country, and so young workers, who identify more with the labor movement than ever, can still be swayed by a populist message that isn’t going to help them or set them on the right course for economic prosperity. Again, the message has to be around organizing workers to win material gains that they can feel in their pocket.
You’ve talked about how when your union reached out to workers to educate them, it was successful. Can you say more about that?
The program was way less of your prototypical political program where you identify voters and you knock on their door or give them a phone call. We were on worksites, in apprenticeship classes, at new member orientations indoctrinating our members into a set of values and beliefs, which is something that’s got to continue into the long term. It’s got to start immediately — as in today — and it’s got to be ramped up. Just talking to our members every couple years around politics is never going to work for building a strong working-class agenda in this country. I think we learned that. I think we knew it to be true anyway.
I think that’s where we lost our way a little bit within the labor movement over the years, and it’s time to bring it back. We have to arm our membership with the ability to organize one another, and we have to bring back that militant approach to what it means to be a trade unionist, first and foremost. That’s what we’ve got to double down on, because that’s winnable. People want to work in a union setting. They just aren’t necessarily comfortable with some of the old bureaucratic ways of the labor movement. We’ve got to reach and identify with younger people in a way that meets them where they’re at.
Dan Osborn ran as an independent in “deep-red” Nebraska on an economic populist message and outperformed Harris. As the Democratic Party continues to lose workers, do you think there is an appetite for independent politics?
Yeah, it absolutely is something we need to look into on how we can infiltrate these deep-red states that the Democratic Party has completely abandoned. The map has gotten so small for the Democratic Party, and the labor movement can’t sit around and wait for them to reorganize.
The labor movement, in and of itself, should always be independent of a party anyway. Look, we can align ourselves when we know we have shared priorities, and quite frankly, the Democratic Party has embraced certain pillars of the labor movement, like labor law reform, but just hasn’t been able to get it done. We have to explore how to use all means possible — including supporting independents who are running for office — and we can’t be so black and white. If we have candidates that support our values, but maybe don’t support an agenda that the Democratic Party is pushing, why would we turn them away? And with more and more people identifying as independent, we have to figure out a way to win elections again.
With the second Trump term just months away, labor is sure to be on the defensive, trying to protect the few gains made over the past four years. What do you think that will look like?
Look, it depends how far they go. When you have no guardrails at all, when you have a stacked Supreme Court and a stacked federal court system, we cannot rule out any possibility going forward. We can’t rule out the fact that the Republicans could completely dismantle the filibuster and pass their own version of labor law reform. Nothing is off the table. National right to work being implemented through the court system — the attacks that are going to come after the institution of labor are going to be real. They’re going to come at every single angle possible. As a building trades union, [we worry that] they’re going to look to dismantle prevailing wage in Davis-Bacon. He’s going to outlaw project labor agreements. Those are things he did in his first administration.
Secondly, he’s going to stack the NLRB. He’s going to remove the general counsel. I mean, organizing needs to take a different shape, and we have to be nimble. As we lose rights, we have to look to protect others, and we have to look to double down our organizing efforts in new ways. We have to look at how we can organize gig workers and organize in an economy that’s changing. We cannot take forever and we can’t work as theorists; we have to be out there trying new ways to organize workers, starting immediately.