Hard Work Is Getting Us Nowhere Fast

For decades, American workers have been breaking their backs as corporate profits soar to record highs. They’ve watched Wall Street rake in hundreds of billions of dollars while wages stagnate. Meanwhile, both Republicans and Democrats serve up little more than lip service, sleight of hand, and Band-Aid fixes.

Former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown says enough is enough. This week, the Ohioan launched the Dignity of Work Institute to do what politicians are failing to do: put workers front and center in the fight for economic justice and security.

“American workers built this country and are working harder than ever, but have less and less to show for it,” Brown said. “They’re producing more than ever, but their wages have barely budged, and the cost of living keeps getting worse.”

A lifelong champion of the working class who served 18 years in the Senate, Brown isn’t just talking — he’s backing up his words with cold, hard data that challenges traditional economic narratives. The institute’s first national survey lays out the ugly truth of how desperate the American working class has gotten:

Al Quinlan, a partner at the polling firm GQR, conducted the survey.* Quinlan described it to Ohio Capital Journal as “one of the more startling projects” he’s ever worked on.

“Americans (are) fighting to stay afloat in an economy that’s much more brittle than the standard narrative suggests.”

Where’s the plan to fix this?

“Workers keep telling us the status quo isn’t working for them and their families. But neither party — neither party — has an agenda to create the dramatic change that workers want and the dramatic change that workers are demanding,” Brown said.

As the new Trump-Vance Regime and a subservient Congress do the bidding of corporations and the ultrawealthy, it’s clear the GOP is deep in the pocket of the billionaire class. Democrats, meanwhile, have become the “compensate-the-betrayed” party, as Brown puts it, offering handouts instead of meaningful economic reform.

Workers don’t want pity checks. They want good jobs and reliable paychecks.

Three out of five Americans have relied on some form of government assistance — unemployment, Medicaid, SNAP food benefits, or school-lunch programs — to get by. Now, these very same programs, as well as student aid and funds for food banks, are being undercut and defunded by the Trump-Vance Regime.

Quinlan said the institute’s polling shows 86% of Americans believe the economy needs significant changes, while 50% of Americans say they cannot get ahead without a major economic shift.

Yet the only major economic shifts happening right now are Trump’s global tariff war of retribution, which is raising consumer prices here and abroad, $4.5 trillion in proposed tax cuts for corporations and the mega-wealthy, and efforts to gut the federal laws and agencies that protect workers’ rights.

In response, Brown’s Dignity of Work Institute aims to act as a policy war room, an engine for reforms that put workers back at the table where big political and economic decisions are made.

“I think people believe both parties have betrayed them,” Brown said on the day he unveiled the institute. “I think that they think that Democrats are the party of betrayal, and Republicans are the party of rewarding the rich.”

If neither Democrats nor Republicans are heeding the workers, the news media aren’t doing any better.

The chattering class that dominates the TV pundit shows will fixate on talk that Brown is plotting another run at the Senate or perhaps the Ohio governorship, and cast the institute as a vanity project or a short-lived political stunt. As U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bring their “Fighting Oligarchy” movement to city after city, drawing tens of thousands as they present the case against massive class exploitation, the same pundits fixate not on working-class needs but on the parlor game of whether AOC has designs on higher office.

We can’t let the news media distract us from the real message and mission.

When we see the economic evidence the institute uncovers and the policies it proposes and fights for, we’ll know if it’s really in the fight.

Beyond research, will Brown’s new think tank name and shame corporations that drive wage stagnation, outsource jobs, and crush unions? Will it pressure CEOs to pay fair wages?

Will it push for:

And, finally, will the institute and its allies challenge the forces of economic disinformation and pierce the malevolent propaganda bubble of faux populism and culture grievance that move so many millions of people to vote against their own economic interests?

Many working- and middle-class Americans feel politicians and think tanks talk about them, not to them. They aren’t looking for another politician to talk about their pain. They want a bare-knuckled brawler who will fight for them — and with them.

“This is going to be a big deal, if done right,” Brown said.

Let’s hope so, because the good and decent working people of this country cannot afford to be shafted by another “art-of-the-deal” con job.

*GQR contacted 1,000 registered voters by phone in February and supplemented with sampling of Black, Hispanic, and 18-to-29-year-old voters. Margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points.

This essay first appeared in The Land, a Cleveland, Ohio-based news site. Dennis Robaugh is the host and author of Worker Bees Club, a community dedicated to the idea that we “work to live, don’t live to work.”