mwgames188 com We Don’t Yet Understand What Warehouse Work Is Doing to Communities
No place symbolizes the profound shifts that have taken place in the U.S. economy like Bethlehem, Pa., a city that lost its mighty steel mill but has been reborn with the help of a casino, a hotel and a couple of Walmart distribution centers. Thanks to the rise of online shopping and the proximity to so many American doorstepsmwgames188 com, warehouses have become a major source of blue-collar employment in Bethlehem and beyond. In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, more than 19,000 people work in the warehouses that prepare our packages. Thousands more drive the trucks that deliver them. The total number of workers in this industry almost replaces the number that Bethlehem Steel employed in the city during its heyday.
But the political power that blue-collar workers once wielded has not been replaced.
Despite their large numbers, their importance to the economy, and their presence in Northampton — a swing county in a crucial battleground state — warehouse workers don’t form an influential voting bloc in the way that steelworkers did. During an election year, when voters in this county and in the broader Lehigh Valley could well determine who sits in the White House, elected officials are scratching their heads about how to engage them.
“It’s really hard to reach out to these folks,” Lamont McClure, the county executive in Northampton County, told me.
It turns out that making stuff isn’t the same as distributing it. Working in a steel mill is a communal act that lends itself to the pursuit of political power in a way that warehouse jobs do not. Steelworkers toiled alongside one another, forming lifelong bonds, bowling leagues and unions that delivered a reliable voting bloc. Back when thousands of workers streamed out of the gates of Bethlehem Steel at quitting time, “politicians would come out to shake our hands,” Jerry Green, retired president of United Steelworkers Local 2599, told me.
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Factories were so good at political mobilization, in fact, that some credit them for democracy itself. Women and working-class men won the right to vote in the United States, Western Europe and much of East Asia after about a quarter of those populations were employed in factories, according to recent research by Sam van Noort, a lecturer at Princeton.
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