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CAMPAIGN 2024 - In recent decades, populist presidential campaigns have arisen from the left (Bernie Sanders) and the right (Pat Buchanan). Both of these campaigns had limited appeal across the political spectrum or even attempted to engage Americans of diverse political views.
Over the past year in his independent presidential campaign, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has sought to bring together members of both major political parties, with a form of economic populism that expands ownership opportunities. In contrast to Sanders, Kennedy’s goal is not to grow the welfare state or state control over the economy. His economic populism is free-market oriented, aimed at building a broader property-owning middle class. It is aimed at widening the number of worker-owners with a stake in the market system, through their ownership of homes, businesses, employee stock and profit sharing, and other assets.
Whether Kennedy’s economic strategies can achieve the goals of ownership and the middle class he has set, remains to be determined. But his “ownership economy” is one that should be discussed and debated. Currently, it is largely ignored by the legacy media—or subsumed by the parade of articles speculating about of how many votes he will “take away” from President Biden or President Trump.
I wrote about Kennedy’s heterodox jobs program late last summer. In the eight months since, he has sharpened his jobs agenda, and connected it to a broader platform of worker ownership. It is time to revisit the campaign’s economic themes, briefly noting three of the subjects Kennedy often speaks about in 2024: the abandonment of vast sections of the blue collar economy, low wage workforces, and the marginalization of small businesses.
Abandonment Of Blue Collar Economy
“Compensate the losers” is the way that political scientist Ruy Teixeira characterizes the Democratic Party approach to the blue collar economy since the 1990s. According to this approach, workers whose jobs are impacted by environmental policies (oil and gas workers) or trade polices (heavy manufacturing workers) will be retrained for jobs in the green economy or in advanced manufacturing or even as white collar fields like information technology (the oil worker as coder). Since the 1990s a vast network of dislocated worker programs and rapid-response programs have arisen and are prominent under the Biden administration.
As might be expected, retraining hasn’t proved so easy in practice. One example: here in Northern California, the Marathon Oil MRO-1.5%-1.5% refinery closed in October 2020, laying off 345 workers. The federal and state government immediately came in with the union offering a range of retraining and job placement services. A study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that even a year after closure, a quarter of the workers were still unemployed. Those that were employed earned a median of $12 less than their previous jobs. Other studies similarly have identifiedthe gap between theories of skills transference and re-employment and the realities for most blue collar workers—including the realties of alternative energy jobs today that usually pay considerably less than oil and gas jobs.
Each refinery closure or plant closure has its own business dynamics, and in many cases, like the Marathon Oil refinery, the facility will not be able to avoid closing. Re-employment cannot be avoided. Kennedy has spoken of improving the re-training and re-employment process for laid off workers, implementing best practices in retraining with the participation of unions and worker organizations.
Manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have been in decline for the past four decades, and even as he urges trade policies for reshoring jobs, Kennedy recognizes that manufacturing going forward will be a limited part of the blue collar economy. The blue collar jobs of the future will increasingly be in the trades and services. Kennedy has enlisted “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe to highlight the importance of the trades, and identify policies that can improve conditions and wages for the trades. Among these policies: a greater share of the higher education federal budget redirected from colleges into training in the trades, and support for the workers who seek to enter and remain in the trades.
Improving the economic position of blue collar workers also means expanding employee stock ownership and profit sharing. While worker cooperatives have failed to gain traction in America, forms of employee stock ownership and profit sharing are being implemented in companies with significant blue collar workforces, such as Procter & Gamble PG +0.3%+0.4%, Southwest AirlinesLUV +2.8%+2.8% and Chobani. Kennedy poses the challenge: Let’s have workers-as-owners more fully share in the economic success of their employers.
Inflation Impact On Low Wage Workers
In nearly all of his talks on the economy, Kennedy addresses the issue of affordability, and how inflation has undercut wages of America’s lower wage workforces. He posts regularly on the increased cost of food, transportation, and housing, the financial strains on working class and middle class families, the number of workers who live paycheck to paycheck. When the March national jobs report was issued earlier this month, he noted the slowdown in year-over wage growth (at 4.1% the lowest year-over increase since 2021) and the increase in part-time jobs.
Kennedy recognizes that many of the low wage workforces are in such sectors as long-term care, retail, and hospitality, in which profit margins for employers are tight, and employers have limited flexibility individually to raise wages. Kennedy continues his calls for a higher minimum wage, reducing health care costs, strengthening protections and benefits for workers in the gig economy. He urges a reconsideration of trade and tax policies and the need for immigration policies that secure the nation’s borders. Kennedy’s strict border policies reflect both the “humanitarian crisis” he sees with the drug cartels and migrants, as well as the impact of unchecked immigration on the wages of low wage service and production workers.
Home ownership has a special place in Kennedy’s ownership economy, as part of bringing more workers into the middle class, and he has stepped up his advocacy on home ownership. Across society, widespread home ownership stabilizes communities, promotes civic involvement, serves as a hedge against social disorders.
Small And Independent Businesses
During the pandemic, Kennedy warned that economic lockdowns were devastating the small business economy. Today, in a regular series of podcasts on small business, he highlights the ongoing small business struggles. Just this past week, the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small business organization, released a survey showing small business optimism is at its lowest level since 2012.
As with home ownership, Kennedy characterizes widespread small business ownership in terms of the social values as well as the values to the individual owners. Small business drives enterprise and service to others, in providing goods and services that customers value and will pay for. It drives job creation, including for individuals who do not fit easily into larger employment venues. A Kennedy Administration will prioritize rebuilding the small business economy, particularly in rural and inner city communities.
Kennedy’s small business agenda goes beyond a laundry list of small business grant and loan programs. As with the wage question, Kennedy seeks to tie a vibrant small business economy to underlying trade and tax policies. He also seeks to tie this economy to reforms in federal government procurement policies, which he describes as ineffectual.
Economic Challenges And Alternatives
The middle class society and economy of the 1950s that Kennedy grew up in and is central to his worldview was the product of unique economic forces and America’s dominant position in the post-World War II period. There is no way to get back to it, and recreating it will be more difficult than in the past, in the now global economy, and with rapidly advancing technologies.
But a broad middle class of worker-owners, is the right goal, and private sector ownership the right approach. People may find Kennedy’s strategies insufficiently detailed or unrealistic or even counterproductive. But Kennedy raises thoughtful challenges and alternatives to the economic platforms of the two main parties—just as he is raising serious challenges on a range of other issues.
(Michael Bernick served as California Employment Development Department director, and today am Counsel with the international law firm of Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow and Fellow with Burning Glass Institute, and research director with the California Workforce Association. My newest book is The Autism Full Employment Act (2021).)
