Europeans Wonder: How Can Minimum-Wage Workers in America Side with the Republican Party?

My British, European, and Middle Eastern friends often ask me how it is that minimum-wage level workers often side with fiscal conservatives at the voting booth.  They wonder how and why the minimum-wage workers often vote against their own economic interests.

American sociologist James Petras addresses this issue when he explains that unionization in America has taken a different path between public and private-sector workers.   Public-sector workers have secured and maintained greater social benefits and wage increases, while private-sector workers have lost ground.

“The public sector workers draw on public financing to fund their ‘corporate interests’ while private sector workers are forced to pay increased taxes, because of regressive fiscal legislation. The result is an apparent or real conflict of interest between well-organized public workers organized around a narrow set of (self) interests and the mass of unorganized private sector workers who, unable to increase their wages via class struggle, side with “fiscal conservatives” (funded by big business) to demand cutbacks from public sector workers.”

So, unlike British and European systems, private-sector workers do not look to the government to “protect” their rights as workers.  Instead, they have been convinced that it is the government itself, taxes themselves, and government workers themselves that are the sources of society’s economic ills.

Government workers (who are jealously seen by many as having the highest salaries and benefits; yet are generally viewed as  incompetent, and as having obtained their jobs through “preference points” to make up for past discrimination against minorities) are the most despised of all workers by the general American society.  (Certainly America has plenty of dedicated, competent government workers.  However, the negative viewpoint of government workers dominates in American society.)

The minimum-wage public who votes as Republican are now convinced that the remedy to America’s economic woes is to cut back the government itself.  This involves cutting the the positions of most government workers, their services (sometimes without realizing the true cost of those services until they are gone), and the social programs that they feel others lazily take advantage of, while they themselves are out working hard for every penny, yet receiving no assistance.

As Petras points out, it is competition (not solidarity) between minimum-wage Americans, and the “near extinction of private-sector unionism” which is driving their behavior.

So, how do Republicans plan to cut back on the government, from this point forward?  By defunding it, of course, through additional tax cuts.

–Lynne Diligent

Tags: American culture explained for Europeans, cutting government spending in America, government protects British and European workers, minimum wage levels and workers in the United States, private-sector unionism in the United states, public-sector unionism in America, public-sector workers vs. private-sector workers in America, the future of trade unionism in America, the Republican plan for bringing back an economic recovery in America, the why of tax cuts in America, why Americans vote for tax cuts