America Needs a Working-Class Resurgence
Back in the 1930s, the United States was weathering one of the worst economic downturns we as a nation have ever seen. This much-discussed Great Depression led to one of the most substantial and impactful realignments of politics and economics in our country's history. Elected as President in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the nation embark on one of the largest working-and-middle-class-building projects in human history. The New Deal Coalition, as it came to be called, dominated political thought through to the 1970s, and still has a major pull on the Democratic Party today. Social Security for the elderly, banning of child-labor, setting a national minimum wage, empowering labor unions, setting a 40-hour standard workweek, requiring overtime pay and more were all accomplishments achieved during this halcyon era. In these heavy-industrial days when the United States was truly making itself great, labor unions and worker protections allowed for the creation of one of the ...