Welcome to the first issue of the bi-monthly newsletter of the White Working Class Roundtable project. A number of significant articles and other materials have appeared over the summer.

 

Several articles analyzed the challenges Democrats face in seeking to increase white working class support in future elections. Most notably, Newsweek ran a very dramatic cover story titled "Why working class white men make democrats nervous" that quotes no less than four different contributors to the June Roundtable (Karen Nussbaum, Andrew Levison, Stan Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira). Writing in The New Republic, Andrew Levison used unique data from Democracy Corps to show that, contrary to a number of analyses offered at the time of the 2012 election, white working class support for Obama was not extremely low only in the South but also across red states, small towns and rural areas of the country. Writing in The American Prospect Anna Clark noted troubling trends in the Rust Belt and James Oliphant reviewed the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will be able to gain a higher percentage of the white vote than did Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. Timothy Noah also raised an important point by noting that there are significant sources of tension and misunderstanding between Democratic liberals and labor leaders that both groups must address in the coming period.

 

Discussion of economic and social issues facing the white working class over the summer included an extensive New Republic interview with labor strategist Richard Yeselson on the prospects for the trade union movement, a American Prospect review by Harold Meyerson of "Labor's New Groove" -- seeking economic advances in city and state politics they cannot achieve by collective bargaining -- and Robert Kuttner's examination of the political implications of an economic recovery that is largely producing unstable, low-wage jobs.

 

Rounding out the materials in this first issue of the Newsletter are two papers presented at the 2014 American Political Science Association, one by well respected political scientist Jennifer Hochschild and another by Elizabeth Theiss-Morse as well as a survey about attitudes toward work, employers and government conducted by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Also noted is a provocative book that discusses "Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures."