We’ve been having a jolly old time for the last 50 years sneering at union blue-collar workers losing their jobs. Learn to code, etc.
But now, with the sudden increase in short-term interest rates for the first time since 2008, experts are noting that, all of a sudden, corporations are shedding useless white-collar workers.
If Elon Musk can shed 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce, how about the rest of Big Tech. And Big Finance, and Big Drug, and Big Beer, and Big Everything?
And as Jeffrey A. Tucker says, these workers are woke.
This was the very class of workers who rallied around woke management theories and developed the most profound psychology of entitlement of any workers in the history of capitalism.
So what will happen when they all lose their jobs? Will they all reject wokism and demand that the ruling class purge politics from the market economy?
I doubt it. Look at what happened with blue-collar workers. Did they tell the politicians back in the 1870s, in the midst of deflation as the US got back on the gold standard at the pre-civil war parity: enough already with the wars and inflations and deflations. Just go away and let the economy find its natural balance point?
Not a bit of it. The solution offered by the ruling class and endorsed by the workers was wage and hour laws, labor unions, and screw the employers.
Expect to see the same thing develop as the wokey class gets its comeuppance. They have already been taught that capitalism and the patriarchy are to blame for everything. If they lose their jobs from increased interest rates it will just confirm everything they were carefully taught.
Meanwhile is it possible that labor union leaders are waking up to the implications of the Green New Deal? Stephen Moore:
Could it be that union bosses are finally waking up to the cold reality that the greatest threat to steel workers, the United Auto Workers, miners, machinists, and the Teamsters is the radical climate change agenda of the environmentalists?
Well, if they do, it will be about a century too late. In my view — based solely on my understanding of the science — it was always a bad idea for the workers to get in bed with the politicians. Oh, it seemed to work for a while, but by the 1970s union manufacturing workers were priced above the market and consumers started buying cheap imports. For the last 50 years workers have been half in and half out of the Democratic Party that cares about people like them.
So my prediction is that the wokeys will continue to believe, continue to vote for the Democrats. Until they are almost all dying deaths of despair like the white working class today.
I would that it weren’t so.