A consensus is emerging across the political spectrum around the need for industrial policy. Whether in the form of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden in 2022 or the haphazard tariff policy of Donald Trump implemented earlier this year, political leaders on both sides of the aisle are clearly searching for answers regarding how to revive the United States’s flagging manufacturing base.
While the Trump administration places a lot of rhetorical emphasis on bringing back industrial jobs, its policies so far have displayed a profound lack of seriousness or coherence. Trump’s tariffs have not been focused on strategic industries or paired with the investment and planning required to make jobs actually materialize. Attacks on agencies like the Department of Energy will make it difficult to build out even those energy sources that Trump claims to favor, like nuclear.
At the same time, the “abundance” debate, kicked off by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name, has drawn additional attention to the need for increased state capacity to make things and deliver improvements for ordinary people. This, the book’s authors argue, is the way to revive both the American economy and the Democratic Party. The discussion, fraught and flawed as it is, has captured the attention and imagination of liberals who don’t usually make a habit of thinking about industrial policy.
But there’s one constituency whose voice is missing and sorely needed in that debate: industrial workers and their unions. A new report from the United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 6 titled “Organize, Industrialize, Decarbonize: A Pro-Worker, Green Industrial Policy for California” takes up the challenge, providing a…
Auteur: Paul Prescod
