Workers and Industry

It is in our national interest for working people to be fairly treated and paid, and for our economy to thrive. It is especially important that our country is not dependent on foreign, potentially hostile countries for basic and strategic needs, such as food, raw materials, and technologies such as semiconductors, renewable energy, software, and technical materials. And our workers must be trained and incentivized to work in these strategic industries.

Industrial Policy

  • Identify and preserve strategic industries and job skills. 
  • Invest in strategic Research into socially beneficial technologies.
  • Impose tariffs on foreign goods that threaten strategic industries and agriculture, and do not use tariffs as a retaliatory tool against countries that protect their industries
  • Retain governmental (i.e. pubic) co-ownership of enterprises in which the government is invested. This includes bail-outs, strategic industrial investments, and other subsidies.
  • Retain government co-ownership of patents created using government funding

Worker Rights

  • Establish a minimum wage, applicable to all industries, that ensures that full-time employees (40 hour work week) are able to meet their basic needs – shelter, food, water, clothing, energy, and transportation.
  • Index the minimum wage to inflation
  • Eliminate “right to work” laws. Fully support the right to organize and unionize. Institute rules for corporations and employee organizers.  
  • Mandate full disclosure and transparency of salaries and benefits of all public workers at all levels of government

Support for Workers

  • Mandatory maternity and paternity (infant care) leave totaling 1 year
  • Mandatory paid family leave
  • Paid childcare

Discussion

Government funding of private research imparts an unfair advantage to the funded company, unless (and even when) the government (i.e. the People) retain some degree of ownership of the results of that research. This is no different from any other form of venture capital… the VC takes an equity stake in the company in exchange for its funding.

In most cases, government research funding is designed to address an issue of public concern, such as vaccine development, the creation of the Internet, military technology (for which the Internet was in part created), and other technologies that are considered of strategic importance to the physical or economic health and safety of the country. For that technology to then become the exclusive property of a private company invites a degree of monopolistic power that is contrary to the public interest.

Unfortunately, this is a pattern that goes back to the 1800s with the railroads, the allocation of native land, and many other giveaways to private interests, usually in exchange for corrupting contributions and considerations. This has to stop!