The Socialist Plan to Create 20 Million Blue-collar Jobs
The Democrats and Republicans are lying to the US working class about manufacturing. Both parties and their media mouthpieces claim that “industrial policy is back!”, implying that the two capitalist parties are both pushing to drive a “manufacturing renaissance.” The reality is far different. The 2021 infrastructure law, The Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act — bipartisan cornerstones of the “renaissance” — would in the best case scenario increase manufacturing employment by 3.9% by 2030, still representing barely 10% of the workforce.
In this best case scenario, the various bills designed to reboot American manufacturing promise to create roughly two million manufacturing jobs by 2030. Our Vote Socialist 2024 campaign has an industrialization strategy, focusing on a few key areas, that will catalyze the creation of tens of millions of jobs.
Executing such decisions would require a radical restructuring integrating education, investment, production and distribution. Which, to start, would begin with the seizure of the top 100 corporations in the United States in order to institute an emergency plan for the transformation of America by 2030, anchored in a renewed industrial base.
Our plan will create 20 million new jobs, including millions of manufacturing jobs, taking manufacturing employment to the highest level since the 1979 peak. Here’s how:
A massive home building and retrofit program that will provide an affordable, safe home for every person that meets the highest environmental standards.
A large-scale effort to repair and build out public transit of all types on the municipal, regional and national level — including building subways in the 15 largest US cities without one and high speed rail from San Diego to Seattle as well as Atlanta to Boston.
A crash emergency program to triple the reduction in carbon emissions from 2023 levels every year for the next six years — including projects to supercharge the production of clean energy technologies.
We Have The Resources
No industrial boom can take off without a rapid shift in societal priorities. The leadership of both parties is clamoring to spend $95 billion for a genocide in Gaza, a failed proxy-war in Ukraine and sabre rattling with China. That same “leadership” could only muster $4 billion to keep our dams bursting from disrepair, which is not even enough “to address even the most dangerous of dams.” The US government is spending $1.7 trillion on one plane, the F-35, that “doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” This is equal to 20 years worth of current federal government spending on all housing programs combined. Between 2024-2030 the U.S. is set to spend $10,500,000,000,000 in war spending, while spending $6,419,000,000,000 on all other programs.
Any sound “industrial policy” must rest on reorienting the use of gigantic resources for wars and the military-industrial complex towards socially useful investments. Taking over the largest 100 companies is an initial emergency measure to perform a rapid course correction. It is a way for the working class to take the offensive by seizing key chokepoints in investment, production and distribution in order to introduce democratic control of the economy.
It would mean being able to deploy the loan capital and profits of the biggest banks (JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America). Add to that the productive capacity of the largest U.S. brick and masonry products firm and largest home builder (Acme, Clayton Homes), leading construction equipment and agricultural machinery companies (Caterpillar, John Deere), aerospace technologies leaders (Boeing, Lockheed), Ford and GM, and other industrial conglomerates like United Technologies, GE, Honeywell, Dupont, 3M, and Intel.
We want to bring together the key elements to put a massive emergency program to rebuild the country that can drive a manufacturing renaissance, particularly in key areas like housing, infrastructure, climate mitigation. The combination of reorienting resources from the military industrial complex; the profits, dividends, interest and share buybacks of the largest 100 companies; and higher taxes on the remaining wealth of the rich can provide us with the resources and the instruments to make the transformative change we need to rebuild the industrial base and lay the foundation for a socialist future.
How It Will Happen
Housing
Having access to quality housing that is easily affordable is a human right, and well within our reach. 21.6 million households pay over one-third of their income in rent, 11.6 million more than 50%. The problem has gotten so bad, our exact housing need isn’t quite clear. The U.S. has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes for “low-income” renters alone. One study suggests the country further needs 4.3 million affordable homes. Because of the substandard quality of so much existing affordable housing, especially public housing, there is also an acute need to renovate and retrofit millions of existing units. This would also heavily impact other relevant areas like water and sewage management, in particular the replacement of all poison lead pipes.
Our proposal is to build and renovate enough home and rental units so that no one pays more than one-third of their income on rents and that everyone lives in a safe quality dwelling maximizing the materials produced thanks to the socialist manufacturing renaissance. This would constitute a historic shot in the arm to industries like building materials, construction machinery, appliances, heating and cooling infrastructure, piping, and more. And there would be so many synergies that can be created in the new, publicly-owned sector of the economy. For instance the newly worker-controlled Home Depot and Lowes could primarily sell tools and materials manufactured under this industrial policy to fuel the construction boom.
Transit/Rail
Safe, reliable, frequent and fast public transit should be available everywhere. 45% of people have no access to any public transit at all and most of those who do rarely find the right mix of reliability, safety, speed and location. Public transit tends to be starved of funds, with most “improvements” being a mix of patchwork upgrades that have led to spiraling capital repair backlogs. The “Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill” actually underfunds Amtrak by $9 billion, and public transit repair backlogs by $14 billion.
Hundreds of municipalities have ambitious expansion plans that are currently seen as beyond reach. Our emergency program to rebuild the country would seek to fulfill them. Our benchmark, by 2030, is active projects that will lead to 100% of people having access to one or more municipal, regional, or national public transit options that meet the reliable, frequent, safe, fast and accessible standard. This would involve establishing a subway system in each of the 15 largest American cities without one and high speed rail from San Diego-Seattle and Atlanta to Boston.
There are 750 companies in 39 states manufacturing components for passenger and transit rail. Even with the paltry transit funding currently in place, the sector is expected to grow nearly 5% by 2026. Adding thousands of miles of long-distance, regional, commuter and subway rail, with the appropriate sourcing requirements, could supercharge the sector. In addition to the subsidiary manufacturing boosts from the railways themselves, building and maintaining the infrastructure to support them will support a huge number of jobs.
Climate Mitigation
Humanity as a species is at major risk from climate change. Failure to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees by the end of the century will set in motion irreversible changes that threaten all life on earth. On the way to destroying life on the planet, climate change, left unchecked, will also cost us huge sums of money. Extreme heat is costing the United States alone $100 billion a year from lost work days. While President Biden touts “record funding” for addressing climate issues, his plan won’t even meet his own target of reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. In fact, the United States has to triple its reduction to greenhouse gas emissions every year for the next six years to reach the goals set by Biden, which many argued were already too modest.
The rapid expansion in public transit and push to retrofit homes with energy efficiency in mind would go a long way towards addressing the climate crisis. However, significantly more must be done. We need to rapidly scale up the production of clean energy technologies from windmills, to battery storage and solar panels. Decarbonizing industrial processes themselves, like steel and cement making, will not only have a major impact on carbon emissions, but also facilitate the build out of new emerging manufacturing technologies.
Trade and Investment: Who Makes the Decisions?
The above policies have a broad impact on other key areas regarding building a pro-working class society. First and foremost is how to address foreign investment and trade. The hollowing out of U.S. industry was not something countries in the Global South created. Instead, U.S. corporations and banks decided that they preferred to move production to areas they could exploit more heavily, regardless of the impact on U.S. workers. Politicians who want us to blame workers in other countries for “taking jobs” are just trying to cover up the ruthless logic of capitalism. Workers around the world want the same basic things as workers here — to live with dignity and security. U.S. workers should support every effort by workers abroad to win better wages and conditions to reduce the differential that is exploited by capitalists.
The only real barrier to increasing manufacturing in the United States is the desire to privilege profit above all else. Socialists are not concerned with capitalist profit margins. We would never send a job anywhere, or refuse to bring it back because of the difference in a few percentage points of profit that only flows to a tiny handful of people anyways.
However, since the beginning of humanity, people have engaged in trade, where both sides take advantage of the other's level of expertise (or availability of appropriate resources) to engage in mutually beneficial exchange. This should be the basis for all decisions regarding “foreign investment” by others or ourselves. Insofar as it meets the goals of our class and follows our core principle (union representation and appropriate pay and benefits) it is a good thing that companies from abroad want to come set up in the United States. It can plug holes in domestic capacity that can’t easily be fixed, making it easier to reach our goals and catalyze an economic takeoff.
A similar logic should apply to international supply chains. There may, for instance, be a component made abroad that, in the abstract, one might like to be made “at home.” However doing so would be unnecessarily cost prohibitive, or the actions required to make the shift take so long it would set back the goals designed to empower the US working class. Rather than a blanket approach to these issues, it should be considered a part of the whole, in relation to the goal of providing food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare and access to information to every person as quickly as possible.
Overall, the bottom-line is this: the real reason the country was deindustrialized, and the main impediment to reindustrialising is that a tiny handful of capitalist control all the decision-making. Our plan is to take the power back, start building more things, and make all our lives better, easier, safer and more efficient.