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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sum of Us, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Zero-Sum Thinking vs. Solidarity
The Toll of Racism
American Values and Identity
Research, Persuasion, and Policy Change
Summary
Analysis
In 2017, a Nissan factory in Mississippi narrowly voted against joining the United Auto Workers union. News articles about the events mentioned racial conflict among workers, so McGhee decided to go investigate. She met with several union organizers, nearly all of them Black, who told her about their expensive healthcare plans, poor pensions, and dangerous working conditions.
The unionization fight will reflect the same dynamics as American politics as a whole, just on a smaller scale. Just like elites turn white Americans against Americans of color in order to prevent them from supporting policies that would help the whole working class, management turns white and Black workers against one another to prevent them from forming a union—which would help them all achieve better wages and working conditions.
Themes
Many Americans still think of factory work as the classic stable middle-class job of past eras. But in reality, it was dangerous and low-paying until workers forced industries to change by unionizing, protesting, and striking. McGhee remembers her Uncle Jimmy’s pride in his stable union job, which made it possible for him to afford vacations, dental care, and a large house. The union was also a rare integrated organization in heavily segregated Chicago.
It's ironic that nostalgic tales of noble, middle-class factory work conveniently erase the unions that made those jobs noble and middle-class in the first place. This reflects the U.S.’s collective ignorance about what kinds of policies and institutions actually create prosperity. Of course, political and economic elites benefit handsomely from spreading this ignorance, which leaves Americans unaware that they actually can achieve better lives through solidarity.
Themes
The Nissan factory workers tell McGhee about the three-tier division within the company: there are full-time workers, subcontractors who only make half as much to do the same work, and in the middle, temps on the “Pathway” to full-time work. This hierarchy is a management tactic designed to keep workers competing with each other, instead of collaborating to improve working conditions. Notably, only the top-tier workers (around 60 percent of the total) could vote in the union drive. The less demanding and higher-paid jobs, like inspection, disproportionately go to white workers, while the more difficult, more dangerous, lower-paying assembly jobs are nearly all-Black. Nevertheless, management insists that these Black workers only want a union because they’re lazy. Of course, this is not true—it’s just a divisive stereotype.
The factory’s racial and labor hierarchies achieve the same purpose as racial hierarchies do in society at large: they divide and conquer. White workers will have to choose between their own self-interest (which would lead them to team up with their Black coworkers) and their loyalty to their white managers. And this situation is even better for management than simply having full time workers, because they do not have to pay living wages or benefits to nearly 40 percent of their workforce. Indeed, the factory’s structure offers clear evidence of how conditions have gotten far worse for American workers over the last 50 years.
Themes
Employers have always tried to stop collective bargaining by dividing workers along demographic lines in a zero-sum way. For instance, they long hired Black men, immigrants, and women to undercut white men’s wages. But around 1880, the Knights of Labor federation started countering this tactic by organizing white and Black workers into the same unions. In a “cross-racial win-win,” white workers no longer had to worry about being undercut, while Black workers could get better wages and benefits than they would have otherwise. The union was controversial but highly successful for about a decade, until it was overtaken by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose affiliates often rejected Black workers. The 1930s saw the rise of the progressive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which was dedicated to cross-racial organizing.
Again, unions offer a miniature version of the choice between zero-sum thinking and interracial solidarity. Racism simply makes the divide-and-conquer strategy more effective, because it lets workers quickly identify and demonize their enemies. But this also explains why some of the most successful unions specifically focused on organizing across racial lines: overcoming racism was the main obstacle to unionization. Moreover, despite this reality, many Americans assume that most unions throughout history have been racist and exclusionary—a story frequently pushed by elites to turn people of color against them.
Themes
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In the mid-1900s, unions were large and powerful enough to transform entire industries. They won higher wages, a 40-hour week, and overtime, health, retirement, and worker compensation benefits. But while one in three workers had a union in the 1950s, today it’s barely one in 16. It’s little coincidence that the middle class has shrunk significantly during the same period, while the wealthy are earning more and more. Unions increase wages by 13 percent, on average, and they also push up wages for non-union members in the same industries. While unions are sometimes inefficient and corrupt, they are still ordinary people’s best tool for improving their working conditions.
If homeownership explains why so many white Americans managed to build wealth in the mid-20th century, then unions explain why American workers’ wages reached such high levels in the same period. The evidence shows that this effect is quite straightforward: unions give workers more power, and when workers have more power, they win higher wages. So if the main problem with the current “Inequality Era” is that elites have far more power than ordinary people, then unions are a key tool to correcting that imbalance—and improving life for the vast majority of Americans.
Themes
Why have unions declined, and why do so many workers oppose them? In the 1970s, corporations invested millions in anti-union lobbying efforts, and in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers, which showed private-sector companies that the government would support union busting. In fact, companies had long since been using illegal anti-union tactics and simply paying the paltry fines whenever they got caught. This practice continues today—including in the Mississippi Nissan plant that McGhee visited. The decline of U.S. manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s also left many workers desperate to keep their factory jobs and less willing to fight for a union.
Unions lost their power around the same time as colleges, mortgages, and healthcare started becoming unaffordable: in the 1970s, at the beginning of the current “Inequality Era.” As McGhee pointed out in earlier chapters, this period saw a major white backlash against the government, largely in response to the civil rights movement. The result has been a system similar to the one that created the Great Recession: lax government regulation gave corporations permission to exploit people however they wanted.
Themes
However, most of the U.S.’s peer countries are still highly unionized, even though their manufacturing sectors have also declined. This is primarily because white Americans turned sharply against unions in the 1960s, largely because the United Auto Workers openly supported the civil rights movement. Later, white men began shifting from unionized manufacturing jobs to white-collar professions, and in the 1970s, the economy faced a serious recession. Notably, right after the Obama administration bailed out the auto industry in 2010, unions’ approval rating hit their all-time low—especially among white voters. Right-wing media pushed the classic zero-sum story, claiming that the bailout was Obama’s way of transferring wealth to Black autoworkers.
Conservatives have changed what unions stand for in the public eye: rather than associating them with democracy and the middle class, white Americans now associate them primarily with people of color. (This is all the more ironic because many people of color associate unions with racism.) By associating unions with people of color, many white voters turned the auto industry bailout into another racial grievance against the Obama administration. Of course, this had nothing to do with the bailout’s true purpose—which was to prevent the economy from collapsing further.
Themes
Similarly, in the Mississippi Nissan plant, the management convinced white workers to oppose the union by associating it with Black people. A Black pro-union worker named Melvin tells McGhee that, to white Mississippians, “unions […] are for lazy Black people.” A white pro-union worker named Johnny admits that the other white workers think, “If the Blacks are for it, I’m against it.”
Zero-sum thinking again rears its ugly head. White workers are so concerned with their racial interests—staying unified against (and, they think, above) Black people—that they forget about their own economic interests. Of course, this is exactly what management wants. But the pro-union workers can see through such tactics.
Themes
These comments helped McGhee understand why the South has the worst working conditions and wages in the U.S. In fact, unions have always struggled to organize in the South. For instance, even after strategically deciding to completely avoid talking about race, unions only managed to capture four percent of the mostly white southern textile industry. Similarly, many shuttered Midwestern factories relocated not overseas, but to Alabama and Mississippi. So did foreign automakers like Nissan. And since 2001, these factories’ workers have seen their wages fall every year. Meanwhile, over the same period, southern companies like Walmart have spread the low-wage business model that has ratcheted up inequality in the U.S. as a whole.
American politicians and media commentators tend to focus on the jobs and factories that got transported overseas—and not the ones that got relocated to the South. But these internal relocations still left ordinary people worse off, on balance, by replacing middle-class, union jobs with low-paying, precarious ones. Indeed, McGhee sees a direct link between the South’s weak labor laws and its history of racial hatred and discrimination. And since she also argues that the South has provided the template for contemporary labor practices throughout the U.S., this means that Southern racism is a core reason for the nation’s growing inequality overall.
Themes
After learning about the advantages that the Nissan plant managers gave white workers, such as priority for promotions, McGhee starts to wonder whether those white workers might have been acting rationally when they rejected unionization. They assume that they would lose status and power if they join a union because they primarily feel allegiance to their white bosses, and not to their Black coworkers.
When white workers consider unionization—like when white voters consider different candidates—they weigh their economic interests in better working conditions against their emotional interests in remaining racially dominant. And because this is a question of values, there is no perfect way to make this comparison: status, belonging, and racial competitiveness simply don’t mean the same thing to everybody.
Themes
McGhee remembers a famous idea from W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction: instead of earning a fair wage for their work, white workers instead get a “psychological wage” from receiving superior status to Black people in every aspect of daily life. Perhaps, McGhee thinks, the white Nissan workers simply care more about status and identity than money. Similarly, most immigrant groups chose to gradually assimilate into whiteness, rather than fighting for equality. For instance, Irish immigrants initially worked alongside Black people in the worst jobs, but instead of fighting together with them for better economic conditions, they chose to ally with the white ruling class in exchange for the advantages of whiteness.
DuBois’s troubling insight is that many white people simply find the feeling of racial superiority more attractive than the prospect of a more secure, comfortable, affluent life in a more racially equitable society. In short, status trumps economic self-interest. And political and economic elites are happy to indulge this preference, which lets them keep more of the profits. The example of Irish immigrants shows how this dynamic can shape society as a whole—and reinforce racial hierarchies over time.
Themes
White antiracism scholar Robin DiAngelo tells McGhee how her mother used to say things like, “Don’t sit there. You don’t know who sat there, it could have been a colored person.” This language shows how poor white people feel pride about their superior status relative to Black people. Psychologist Michael Norton calls this “last place aversion”—people care less about their standard of living than about simply not being at the bottom of the hierarchy. For instance, people who make slightly more than the minimum wage oppose raising the minimum wage because they don’t want to fall down to “last place.”
DiAngelo’s anecdotes show how zero-sum thinking can give poor white people a sense of pride and identity, even when their lives lack all the ordinary trappings of success. And Norton’s research demonstrates how this kind of identity translates into political attitudes: people near the bottom of a hierarchy end up reinforcing that hierarchy because they take pride in being better than the people at the absolute bottom of it. (Of course, they misunderstand how social policies actually work—for instance, raising the minimum wage generally improves wages for everyone else, too.) This clearly applies to the Nissan plant—many low-level white workers rejected the union because they cared about remaining superior to the Black workers in the labor hierarchy.
Themes
In Mississippi, all the workers were financially precarious, white and Black alike, and there were few good alternatives to working at the Nissan factory. Worse still, management constantly bombarded workers with the message that the factory would shut down if the union drive succeeded. They even threatened to take away workers’ company cars. McGhee meets Chip, a white worker who outspokenly supported the union until his coworkers started harassing and threatening him. So he switched sides. He explains that his white colleagues opposed the union because of their zero-sum mentality: they thought that “if you uplift Black people, you’re downin’ white people.”
The Nissan factory management was clearly aware of the dynamics that DiAngelo and Norton describe, so they did everything they could to spread the zero-sum mindset among white workers. Namely, they made these workers anxious about their finances and insecure about their identities. As a result, the white workers voted to retain the few privileges they had, rather than to try and expand those privileges through solidarity. And Chip’s experience shows how they enforced this narrative of events by pressuring one another to repeat it.
Themes
But the few pro-union white workers, like Johnny, have a solidarity mindset: they know that if they’re willing to join forces with their Black coworkers, they can achieve victories that help everyone. Melvin tells McGhee that he managed to get through to some white colleagues by emphasizing common ground, but others are too racist to ever take him seriously—even though the union would still fight for their rights, too. An older Black organizer named Earl hoped that the union could earn political power in the state and fight the governor’s budget cuts to education and disability insurance. (Meanwhile, the state gave Nissan tax breaks worth several hundred million dollars.) Clearly, zero-sum thinking has destroyed these workers’ dream of a more just Mississippi.
Johnny, Melvin, and Earl resisted zero-sum thinking by understanding Nissan’s tactics and clearly identifying what everyone stood to gain from solidarity-based politics. Whereas the white workers’ anti-union message focused on status anxiety—they were afraid of losing the little they had—the pro-union members’ messaging focused on optimism, win-win thinking, and the specific political goals they sought to accomplish. Of course, the workers’ final vote—against unionization—shows that appeals based on fear often simply hold people’s attention better than those based on hope.
Themes
Nevertheless, underpaid workers still can achieve “the Solidarity Dividend of better jobs” through unions. In 2012, fast-food workers across New York City went on strike to demand a union and a $15-an-hour wage. (Policy advocates, including Demos, were pushing for $10.10 at best.) The “Fight for $15” movement spread fast around the U.S., across a wide variety of industries, and in 2014, Seattle became the first city to actually institute a $15 minimum wage.
The Fight for $15 movement shows how, even though union membership is extremely low in the 21st century, the solidarity logic of union organizing can still spread fast and shape the economy. Notably, the Fight for $15 spread so fast because activists started building unions at hundreds of workplaces in dozens of cities simultaneously, across an entire industry, instead of waiting to unionize one company at a time. Indeed, the movement’s successes even exceeded Demos's expectations, which shows that workers are more powerful than they tend to realize.
Themes
By his forties, Kansas City resident Terrence Wise had been working in fast food for two decades, struggling to keep up with stagnant wages. He joined the Fight for $15 campaign in 2012 by cofounding the local group Stand Up KC. He immediately won safety improvements and a dollar-an-hour raise by organizing with his co-workers. Kansas City is highly segregated, which has long divided workers, but Terrence’s union emphasized cross-racial solidarity from the start. This is how it attracted people like Bridget Hughes, a white Wendy’s worker who was initially skeptical about unions and prejudiced against her Latinx immigrant coworkers. But at her first meeting, Bridget heard a Latinx woman tell her life story and realized that they had much in common.
Terrence Wise and Bridget Hughes’s stories show how union organizing also transforms its participants: it connects them to others who share their struggles, empowers them politically, and even gives them a broader sense of purpose in their day-to-day lives. Specifically, Bridget’s story demonstrates that union organizing can fight racism by putting people from different backgrounds in close contact with one another and helping them bond around shared political interests. At its best, then, unionization transforms ordinary workers from powerless cogs in a machine into a well-organized coalition with meaningful control over their collective fate.
Themes
Stand Up KC eventually won a $13 minimum wage for the city (although the state legislature reversed the decision). And crucially, the organization’s messaging both highlighted racial inequities in pay and focused on the importance of overcoming racism. After all, the states with the lowest wages are also the states with the largest Black populations. In fact, the majority of Black and Latinx Americans earn poverty wages of under $15 an hour. One in three white workers do, too, but they are actually the majority of low-wage workers. Thus, as with so many other inequities in the U.S., then, people of color suffer disproportionately from low wages, but most of the people who suffer from them are still white.
Stand Up KC’s success shows that focusing on race and racism can actually unite people, rather than dividing them. This helps disprove the common assumption that the best way to win political power and enact progressive policies is by trying to be “color-blind.” Rather, campaigns must emphasize a crucial but slightly complex truth: bad policy hurts people of color disproportionately, but most of the people it hurts are white. By building their campaigns around this message, activists can make clear their intention to include and help white people, while also showing that they are taking people of color’s specific struggles and interests into account.
Themes
The fast-food workers succeeded where the Nissan plant workers failed because they brought their white colleagues into a multi-racial coalition. They did this by focusing on how management’s racist, zero-sum story was dividing them all. The Fight for $15 campaign has substantially improved wages for the lowest-paid Americans for the first time in two generations. However, it has struggled to unionize fast-food workers due to high turnover and a ruling by the Trump administration.
McGhee hopes that the Fight for $15 can be a source of hope and inspiration for workers around the U.S. It shows that the zero-sum story, while strong, is not invincible. Meanwhile, McGhee is not blaming the pro-union Nissan workers for their unionization effort’s failure—after all, they actively tried to spread an inclusive message and present their political goals in terms that appealed to white workers, too. The Nissan factory was extremely hierarchical and racially divided, so it’s no surprise that unionizing it was more difficult.
Themes
On her last visit to the Nissan plant union organizing office, McGhee notices how pictures and posters of the workers have transformed the space. She remembers Chip—who did vote yes on the union—telling her about the “sense of belonging, of love, of togetherness, friendship” that he felt during the union drive. He called it “utopia without havin’ utopia.”
Even though the Nissan workers’ unionization effort failed, these posters demonstrate that the attempt to unionize still transformed the workers’ relationship to their work, their colleagues, and their town. Put differently, in the U.S.’s isolated, divided contemporary culture, solidarity is a huge reward in and of itself.
Themes
