Harold Meyerson

This week—from Wednesday through Friday—employees at Volkswagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee may well make history. Actually, they may make it twice.

If a majority of the roughly 1,500 workers vote to recognize the United Auto Workers as their union, their plant will become the first unionized auto factory in the South. It will also become the first American workplace of any kind to have a works council—a consultative body of employees who regularly meet with management to jointly develop policy on such work-related issues as shifts, the best way to use new machinery, and kindred concerns. Mandated by law in Germany, works councils do not bargain over wages and benefits, but they do provide a way in which workers can have input into policies that affect their lives. They also have led to countless productivity increases in German manufacturing.

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New York and Los Angeles have a lot in common. Each city suffers from income polarization, a shrinking middle class and a vast low-wage service sector. Each is heavily Democratic and is home to an effective labor-liberal political alliance. Each elected a progressive Democrat as its mayor.

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Two things to know about Henry Waxman: First, during his 40 years in Congress, he authored and steered to enactment the legislation that provided health care to millions, that put nutritional labeling on food, that gave rise to generic drugs, that provided medical care to people with AIDS, that greatly reduced smog and acid rain, that strengthened the safety standards for drinking water and food, and that signally reduced the number of Americans who smoke.

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For Democrats, for liberals, today’s political climate poses a singular challenge. On one hand, poll after poll shows the public believes the economy is rigged against all but the rich. On the other, poll after poll shows that the same public—particularly after the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare—doesn’t believe government is the answer to the failings of the market economy. Indeed, recent polls show that the public mistrusts big government more than it does big business (which does not mean it holds big business in high, or even middlin’, esteem).

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“Sore winners” was the phrase critic John Powers came up with to describe the George W. Bush administration, but the term seems more lastingly applicable to those members of the 1 percent who decry the broad economic populism across the land. The most notoriously sore winners are those mega-wealthy investment bankers who have likened critics of economic inequality to the Nazis — most recently, Tom Perkins, founder of the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, who last week equated “the progressive war on the American one percent” to Kristallnacht.

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My colleague Charles Lane, a stellar product of the equally stellar, unionized Montgomery County school district, has opined that collective bargaining should be banned for public employees. However, he writes, “No one is saying public workers have no right to organize. They are free to associate and lobby government, openly, for better wages and working conditions.”

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