The 2024 US presidential campaign has been distinctive for the place of American workers at its rhetorical heart. Over the past half century, they had been made to disappear from the US political landscape. One of neoliberalism’s greatest accomplishments is to have effectively replaced workers in political discourse with consumers and taxpayers, now easily recognisable in American political life. These two groups not only became central to the framework of US politics and social policy, but they emerged in direct proportion to the decline of the symbolic presence of the real working class.

With the systematic dissolution of workers’ rights, manifest in wage stagnation, the growth of a precarious workforce, reduced work benefits and a breakdown in the right to strike, it became commonplace to gauge economic progress by the expansion of consumer rights (the right to choose, obtain credit, shop at all hours, have goods delivered to one’s door).

Taxpayers began to loom large in American political discourse, and now are routinely invoked to limit social spending and devalue any government expenditures not calculated to enhance ‘investment’, ie private profit. This symbolic shift was pressed almost as determinedly by Democrats (Carter, Clinton and Obama) as by the Republican Party of Reagan and the two Bushes.

United Auto Workers in action

In 2024, however, the election process has seen workers repositioned at the forefront of the US political landscape. From early in his presidency, Joe Biden signalled to Americans that workers, ‘union jobs’ and unions were to be its legislative, regulative and administrative priorities.

In autumn 2023 the United Auto Workers (UAW) mounted an intense six-week strike against the Big Three manufacturers in an effort to reverse a long string of concessions granted to the auto industry over two decades, causing wages to decline and working conditions to deteriorate. In the months prior to the strike the (...)

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(3) ‘Yanks to the rescue’, Time, New York, 15 July 1996.

(4) James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: US Policy toward Russia After the Cold War, Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC, 2003.

(6) See Hélène Richard, ‘Lonely Russia’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, October 2018.

(7) Partnership for Peace: an organisation of non-member states cooperating with NATO that served as a route for former East Bloc countries to join it.

(8) James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, op cit.