Description
Book SynopsisLainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats.
Trade ReviewWhen workers decades ago spoke the words, 'This is a union town!' they were describing not just a statistical fact but, more importantly, a lived and embedded reality. Unions, as Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write, represented 'a dense social web of interconnected workers, family members and neighbors.'
Rust Belt Union Blues is an immensely important book, both for politics and for the social sciences. Politically, it explains why many white workers strayed from their old Democratic loyalties not because their views changed radically but because of transformations in their reference points and the ways they answered the need for community.
Rust Belt Union Blues also calls on social scientists to enrich and go beyond survey research by paying far more attention to the networks people build and the lives they live. This book deserves wide readership—and may it encourage more volumes like it. -- E.J. Dionne Jr., author of
Why the Right Went Wrong, coauthor of
100% DemocracyIn recent decades many working-class voters have turned away from the Democratic Party, especially in the country's former industrial regions.
Rust Belt Union Blues shows how the decline of labor unions contributed to this trend. Unions historically built solidarity around shared values in working-class communities; the erosion of union strength has weakened these communities and this solidarity, profoundly changing working-class life.
Rust Belt Union Blues is fascinating and important reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of working-class politics in America. -- Jeffry Frieden, author of
Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century and Its Stumbles in the Twenty-FirstHow refreshing to read a challenging account of how and why the Democratic Party lost a major constituency that attends to the people themselves, their communities, their organizations, and their struggles to make meaning of a politics that ceased to see them, hear them, or value them—to even respect them. For once, the authors enable us to hear the voices of human beings—not data points, utility functions, ideological categories, or labels. This work challenges us to focus on what a real constituency is—not a 'base' to be managed, but people who learn to stand together, work together, decide together, and act together. -- Marshall Ganz, Harvard Kennedy School
Read this book to better understand the roots of today’s political polarization. Newman and Skocpol document local unions’ historical role in the social life of manufacturing communities and show how deindustrialization and the disappearance of local unions helped turn these communities from blue to red. -- Frank Levy, MIT
A more granular look at the pre-Biden Democrats’ abandonment of working-class America...that illuminates the decline of an economic, social, and political world that once bolstered progressive and Democratic prospects. * American Prospect *
Newman and Skocpol’s diagnosis of the causes and basic solution to the problem of working-class dealignment in the rust belt is right on the mark. * Jacobin *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
List of Figures and Tables
1. Understanding Social and Political Change in the Rust Belt
2. The Social Underpinnings of the “Union Man”
3. The Economic Breakdown of Big Labor from Without and Within
4. Union Membership Transformed
5. From Union Blue to Trump Red
6. On Union Decline and the Potential for Resurgence
Appendix A. Voting Patterns in Western Pennsylvania
Appendix B. Sample Interview Questions
Appendix C. Photographs in IBEW and USW Newsletters
Appendix D. Local Union Mentions in IBEW and USW Newsletters
Notes
Glossary
Index
