Cleveland — Start with this: When you call us the Rust Belt, you demean our work and diminish who we are.
To create wealth in America, we make it, we grow it or we mine it. In the industrial Midwest, we do all three. Ohio has the largest manufacturing work force in the country aside from California (which has three times our population) and Texas (more than twice our size). And we make things with dignity.
Many years ago, as a state representative, I spent countless hours at United Steelworkers Local 169 in Mansfield, a small industrial city north of Columbus. I would listen to workers who stopped in at the hall before or after their shifts. I learned how they made steel and how they built cars. I learned that strikes are always an act of back-against-the-wall desperation because workers never make up for the wages lost, no matter how good the new contract is or how briefly they are on the picket line.
They worked hard. Most gladly accepted six-day workweeks because of the overtime pay. Most of these workers, especially those lucky enough to carry a union card, had a shot at upward mobility. They owned modest houses, they could buy new cars every four or five years, and they could send their children to the local Ohio State campus or to North Central Technical College.
Few of these workers, white or black, expected to have the opportunities I had as a doctor’s kid. But they understood intuitively that their daughter at Johnny Appleseed Junior High could have more than they did.
Their goal — to achieve the American dream and send their children up the economic ladder — was more difficult for them to reach than it was for my parents. More things could go wrong for them: a layoff, a strike, a work injury, an illness in the family, each coming with more devastating consequences than those life deals out to more affluent white families.
I learned about the role circumstance played in success — where you were born, how much education and income your parents had, what neighborhood you lived in, what school you attended. At the union hall, we often discussed books, articles and news about strikes and heroes of the labor movement. They were novels like Wallace Stegner’s “Joe Hill” and John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” that tell the very real stories of the lives of American workers, stories that too many in Washington have forgotten or ignored for far too long.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, all work has dignity and importance, whether done by a street sweeper, Michelangelo or Beethoven. People take pride in the things they make, in serving their communities in hospitals or schools, in making their contribution to society with a job well done.
But over the past 40 years, as people have worked harder for less pay and fewer benefits, the value of their work has eroded. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it.
American workers understood then and understand now that you build a society and an economy from the middle class out. Trickle-down economics was discredited decades ago. Workers paid good wages are also good consumers, which means companies can sell more of their products. Executives have always been paid well, but nothing close to the 300 to 1 pay ratio separating chief executives from workers today. Most Americans have always wanted to believe that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
Ohio workers know they toil harder and are paid less than their parents, and have less power to control the hours they work and their share of the wealth they create for their employer. This diverse force feels betrayed by trade and tax policies that create immense affluence at the top and take wealth from workers. Much of Washington — and that now includes Donald J. Trump — doesn’t seem to understand this.
Ohio families will watch to see if the new president follows the billionaire agenda of the Republican leadership in Washington, which has called for overturning a new rule that increases overtime pay for many workers — an action that would strip thousands of dollars in wages from 130,000 of Ohio’s moderate-income workers. They will measure this president to see if he continues to oppose increasing the minimum wage, which is worth nearly 20 percent less than in 1980. Workers will expect the president to keep his promise of a trade agenda that puts their jobs above corporate profits. And they will scrutinize whether he will throw in with Washington’s moneyed interests at the expense of middle-class and working-class families.
If President Trump takes the likely path that almost all Washington Republicans hope — tax cuts for the rich, an easing up on Wall Street, more voter suppression — Ohio workers will feel betrayed. Again. And they will respond.
