What happens on Election Day, November 5, won’t just determine the next four years. It will, truly, set the course of our nation for the next four decades. And as we get closer each day, the rhetoric coming from MAGA Republicans grows more and more extreme, as they double-down on the most divisive, xenophobic fearmongering they can muster. It’s the same strategy carried out time and again from authoritarian figures throughout history: the scapegoating of people of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Irish, the LGBTQ+ community, and so on. All are deliberate attempts to divide working people against our common interests.
Most recently, we’ve seen vile attacks and lies spread about our Haitian immigrant communities, especially in Springfield, Ohio. We’ve witnessed Asian Americans falsely blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic. Central and Latin American refugees and asylum-seekers are regularly — and wrongly — accused of causing crime and taking jobs, when the actual data shows that this is simply false.
Let’s be truthful: working-class people in this country aren’t the perpetrators of our nation’s economic problems, we are the victims. Do you know what the greatest form of theft is in the United States? It’s not retail theft. It’s not bank robberies, home burglaries, or car theft. It’s wage theft perpetuated by employers against their employees — some $50 billion per year according to the Economic Policy Institute.
And in the Republican candidate for president, we have someone who proudly claimed just a couple weeks ago that as a business owner, he routinely schemed to avoid paying overtime to his workers (to say nothing of his many other criminal transgressions).
In Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by contrast, we have the opposite kind of leaders. Leaders who seek to bring us together across our differences, rather than tearing us apart. Leaders who value the immense contributions of immigrants to our nation. Leaders who put working- and middle-class families ahead of the billionaire and corporate interests who seek to take away our hard-earned wages, rights, and freedoms.
It is all too easy to want to cling to simple explanations of why the cost of living is too high, why healthcare, housing, and education are too expensive, and why wages aren’t growing as they should. Blaming marginalized people who don’t have the power and resources to fight back is no solution; we must not fall for this trap.
As working people, our similarities far outweigh our differences. We all want the best lives for our families. And rather than fighting among each other for a shrinking piece of the pie, we need to unite together to demand a bigger slice. That’s what this election is about, and why the healthcare workers of 1199SEIU are joining together in solidarity, rejecting the politics of hate and division, and doing all they can to win victory in the presidential race and beyond.
Early voting in New York starts on October 26. Let’s get ready.
George Gresham is the President of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest union of healthcare workers in the nation.