With that massive effort paying off, now is the time to turn to Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and see what he proposes for the workers in this country. The President wants to center an American work force on four national initiatives:
This last plank in Biden’s plan had been a focus, also, for the man he defeated in last fall’s presidential election. Donald Trump – never a slouch at branding - had run and won on the “Make America Great Again” slogan in 2015. As America’s 45th president, Trump took an aggressively vocal stance against outsourcing American jobs to foreign countries. Mind you, his talk didn’t always coincide with his actions - his own family’s companies have taken advantage of cheaper, offshore labor to manufacture Trump-brand merchandise. And a report issued last fall by Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, noted that the Trump administration awarded over $400 billion in government contracts to corporations that, according to database tracking since 2003, have been notorious for offshoring jobs. That trend continued during Trump’s term in office, when more than 200,000 jobs were specifically certified as lost to offshoring.
Let’s face it: the history of work in this country has always been complicated. While America prides itself on its work ethic – the treatment of its work force has been patchy from way, way back.
Farther back than European contact, in fact. Some Native American tribes were known to practice enslavement of war captives or debtors.
Then early Spanish explorers arrived in the Americas and imposed their own encomienda system. This practice dated back to the Middle Ages, and while it may have worked on the Iberian Peninsula when the Christians defeated the Moors, in the Americas, far from the Spanish Crown’s oversight, it was problematic. As encomenderos, Spanish conquerors were considered trustees of the land they “discovered,” and they were required by the Crown to protect the indios and instruct them in Catholicism. In return for this beneficence, the original inhabitants of the land were expected to pay tribute to the newcomers in the form of gold or, more often, labor. But encomenderos in the Americas ignored the responsibilities expected of them and treated their vassals as slaves. The Crown tried to intervene, but the system gradually dwindled into irrelevance anyway as the indigenous population succumbed to new diseases introduced by the Europeans.
In 1526, a Spanish effort to colonize North America brought the first enslaved African people to what is today South Carolina, but that colony failed within months.
· Investing in a clean-energy economy and modern infrastructure, including a program that would replace 100 percent of the nation’s lead pipes;
· Building and professionalizing a stronger caregiving system – not only for childcare, but also care for elders and people with disabilities;
· Galvanizing communities of color by supporting those entrepreneurs and small businesses, expanding affordable housing, increasing educational opportunities and working on criminal justice reform; and
· Mobilizing American manufacturing and innovation, while bringing critical supply chains back stateside. (In the past year, this country has been hamstrung by shortages not only of PPE, but also microchips and more – and unable to do much about it because the bulk of those products are no longer manufactured in the United States.)