Labor Day lost

President Barack Obama’s Labor Day speech was everything you would expect.
He gave the speech in Cincinnati, a rust belt city in one of the most competitive swing-states.

He gave nods to past accomplishments associated with the labor movement like Social Security and the minimum wage while disparaging an old economy of rich bankers for causing the recession. He even plugged Cincinnati’s chili.

Yet his fairly predictable speech comes at a time when the lives of blue-collar workers have never been less certain. The address served as further evidence that the agenda of Obama and the Democratic Party remains far from what unions would like.

Even though there is a temptation to be sentimental around a holiday dedicated to labor movement triumphs, this is mostly a good thing. 

It is not that Obama’s policies have done nothing to help manufacturing workers. The stimulus package probably helped plenty of manufactures keep jobs. Health care reform, the part of the Labor Day speech Obama invested most of his energy into, could help many blue collar workers, too. But it won’t necessarily make American manufacturing firms more competitive, as Obama has implied.

Obama’s push to cap carbon dioxide emissions won’t necessarily help industrial workers either, but that claim figured into his speech prominently.

He mentioned creating green jobs that will never be outsourced. Capping carbon will drive people toward different kinds of energy consumption only as they abandoned the old ones so the idea that going green will result in more jobs is based on false pretenses.

The idea that those jobs cannot be outsourced are similarly false pretenses. We could easily buy windmills from China or solar panels form Korea and should if it is economically advantageous.

When it comes to the issues most important to unions, Obama has offered only lukewarm support. He claims he supports the Employee Free Choice Act but he has shown little interest in fighting for it.

He bashed the North American Free Trade Agreement during his presidential campaign but took his first trip abroad to Canada to assure their prime minister he didn’t mean it.

Again, this is hardly a bad thing. Free trade displaces some workers while increasing the well-being of others. Unions generally negotiate higher pay at the expense of others’ employment.

Given the regulations and benefits unions imposed on American car manufacturers, it hardly seems that the Employee Free Choice Act would solve many problems in the manufacturing sector.

The government should do something to help struggling workers, especially in this recession, but extending unemployment insurance through the stimulus was a better bet than trying to bail-out GM and Chrysler. And it is certainly a better move than raising the minimum wage or putting up trade barriers.

Fortunately, the Democratic Party, which is now dominated more by educated professionals, shows less zeal for policies that view workers as fighting employers for benefits.

But this happens as they ignore the labor movement – what Labor Day used to be about.