You’ve spent 25 years working for a company. You’re proud of your work. Your wages and benefits are good, and you’ve put together a decent life. Then your CEO says the company is heading for some tough times, and that everyone from the executive suite to the shop floor will need to make some sacrifices. You are willing to join with others to help the company survive. You feel part of it. It’s your identity. You will sacrifice if that’s what you and your company need to survive.

But when the sacrifice comes, the price paid is far from equal. You, along with hundreds of other workers, are laid off and are replaced with low-wage sub-contractors.

I found out when a similar scenario was foisted on 114 food service and maintenance workers at Oberlin College in 2020. Many of them had been there longer than any of the administrators and most of the faculty. Their work for the college was their life, their identity. They cared for the students. They were proud to be associated with this elite liberal institution, wokeness and all. It was by far the best employer in northeastern Ohio, which has had its industrial base decimated over the last four decades.

In 2018, Oberlin’s administration had come up with a PR program called “One Oberlin” to secure the school’s finances, upgrade facilities, and prepare for the college’s third century. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Oberlin community was asked to pull together to make ends meet. But while the financial stress was real, it turned out “One Oberlin” was not: It failed to include the college’s unionized blue-collar workers. They were summarily dismissed, dispatched with a little severance and little else. They were devastated.

We know how they felt because a group of Oberlin student interns interviewed many of the laid off workers. These workers were hurt and they were angry. They saw this very liberal institution as hypocritical, as betraying its values, and as uncaring and cruel.

As an Oberlin alumnus, this was a wake-up call. Although a group of us did all we could to call out the college’s hypocrisy and compel it to save these jobs, we couldn’t get them to consider the workers as part of “One Oberlin.” (We were able to raise about $180,000 from alumni for these workers to cushion the blow.)

That led me to conduct a larger study of the impact of mass layoffs on politics. It didn’t take much of a leap to see that Oberlin’s liberal establishment was very similar to that of the Democratic Party. A declared ethos of caring and positive social values seemed always to stop when budgetary restraints forced a choice between the interests of workers and those of the party’s elites and their wealthy allies.

That turned out to be the case throughout the Midwest, where the Democratic Party’s fortunes have flagged over the past few decades as their “Blue Wall” crumbled. We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party.

Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio who is trying to reclaim his job this year, found that the Democrats are still being blamed for the job destruction caused by NAFTA. After his loss in the 2024 campaign, he said:

The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House [was] when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, and 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign, about........

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