The true meaning of populism is dawning on a Republican senator
Stop the presses. It was correctly reported that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-fla., voted on the same side as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez, D-N.Y., on a bill recommended by President Joe Biden.
So did Ted Cruz of Texas and four more unlikely Republican senators, prompting the congressional paper The Hill to hail them as “champions of GOP populism.” Really? They voted to give railroad workers paid sick leave, as most other Americans enjoy and 32 other industrial nations require.
That vote was the right thing to do. But, sorry, one such vote doesn’t make one a populist.
Moreover, populism is definitely not always good for the country. It has had and still has strains of isolationism, nativism and bigotry. By some definitions, former President Donald Trump is a populist. Rubio, Florida’s senior senator, has hinted broadly at cutting aid to Ukraine and has drifted far to the right on immigration.
A better word for the railroad vote would be progressive. To be worthy of populist praise, Rubio or anyone in Congress would also challenge the enormous power of corporations on a broad front. He would decry the widening gap in income and wealth between the top 10% and everyone else, and would vote to undo Trump’s unbalanced tax cuts.
Poisoned politics
A progressive agenda would demand a constitutional amendment repealing the Citizens United decision that has poisoned American politics with dark money and turned the nation into a corporate oligarchy. It would mean taxing excessive profits and hyper-inflated executive pay. It would mandate paid parental and family leave for all workers — without taking it out of their
Social Security credits, as Rubio has proposed.
It would raise the national minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for 13 years, to $15 an hour or higher.
Fundamentally, it would restore labor unions to the prominence and influence they had 50 years ago, when nearly a third of all U.S. workers were unionized. Now, only 10.3% are — some 14 million people, half of them in the public sector, where Republicans keep trying to cripple unions by various means, such as bans on payroll deductions.
Sick leave for all
Needless to say, a progressive agenda would include paid sick leave for all workers, not just those employed by the railroads.
The railroad sick leave bill, which passed the House but failed in the Senate, proposed to require what the unions would have gone on strike to get, had Congress and Biden not ordered them to stay on the job.
Transportation is the most highly unionized private-sector industry, particularly the railroads. But Biden and Congress deprived the rail workers of their leverage by enacting the bill to impose a settlement that two of the 12 unions had rejected for its failure to provide paid sick days.
The looming strike would have shut down all freight trains and devastated the economy. In holding out against paid sick leave, railroad managements were banking on the government to block the strike.
And so Congress did, at the behest of the most pro-union president since Harry Truman. Recognizing the unfairness of it, Biden also asked Congress to mandate railroad sick leave in a separate bill. The House complied, 221-207, with only three Republicans joining all Democrats in voting for it. But it failed in the Senate, 52 to 43, killed by a 60-vote majority rule that has no foundation in the Constitution.
Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the senator from coal country, was the only Democrat to oppose it. The railroads say they carry 70% of the coal shipped to power plants.
It’s not as if they couldn’t afford paid sick leave. The $688 million a year they claimed it would cost them is small change compared with the $21 billion in profits and $25 billion in stock buybacks they reported through the first nine months of the year.
Among the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only the United States and the Republic of Korea do not mandate paid sick leave. Here, it is law only in 14 states, the District of Columbia and in some cities.
Common decency
Paid sick leave is not only common decency, but also common sense. People who work sick because they can’t afford to lose a day’s pay will infect their co-workers. They shouldn’t be operating hazardous machinery or serving food to customers.
In his first annual message to Congress, President Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Rubio could have been channeling Lincoln on Nov. 29 when he said, “As conservatives, we should believe in the dignity of work — that work isn’t just a way to make money. … When workers are treated as little more than line items on a spreadsheet, they become indistinguishable from the freight cars they service.”
Keep it up, Senator. The progressive path is long and challenging, but it’s the right one for our nation — and for you, too.