Bold Ideas, Emerging Leaders: Roosevelt Network Emerging Fellows Journal 2023

As new laws like the Inflation Reduction Act revive interest in public investment, labor advocacy, and green manufacturing (Sullivan 2023), Colorado is poised to enjoy another decade of rapid growth. But growth alone is not enough to secure shared prosperity for Coloradans—not when corporate greed captured so much of the state’s economic growth over the past 10 years (Abidh and Danninger 2017). The suite of progressive policies enacted by the Biden administration offers an opportunity to rebalance economic power in states like Colorado, where for far too long, workers have not reaped the benefits of the growth they helped to create. As the American economy enters an era of rapid transformation, worker ownership offers a model of governance that empowers workers. As the US continues to find its way beyond neoliberalism, Colorado can take the lead in building a cooperative economy that puts workers first. 

The United States faces persistent crises of economic instability, poverty, climbing costs, and inequality that state and federal governments have yet to adequately address (Piketty 2020). With this leadership vacuum, city and municipal governments have stepped up to legislate solutions for working families, but many state legislatures are intervening to limit local control (Phillips 2017). Pennsylvania’s 2006 minimum wage law raised the state minimum wage to $7.15 per hour while preempting and prohibiting local wage hike ordinances in cities and municipalities from Philadelphia to Erie (43 Pa. Stat. Ann. § 333.114a). Initially derived from the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, preemption is a legal doctrine that empowers state governments to limit the legislative jurisdiction of lower levels of government (Cornel LII). Preemption rules also act as policy tools that are interpreted by courts and implemented in a wide array of policy matters (NLC 2018). The most common preemption policy tool is a ceiling preemption: a prohibition on enacting local laws that exceed higher-level government standards (ChangeLab Solutions 2019).

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the importance of our frontline care workforce. This includes doctors and nurses as well as other home care workers who are often overlooked and unseen. These workers are critical to our national care infrastructure and will be even more so going forward. The United States faces a demographic transition where there will be more demand for long-term home care support services. By 2040, there will be nearly 81 million adults 65 and older, a 44 percent increase from 2020 (Vespa, Medina, and Armstrong 2020). Seventy percent of those in that age bracket will need long-term care services (Johnson 2019). Therefore, home care will be one of the fastest-growing occupations, with more than a 25.4 percent increase in employment over the next decade (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022).

In the United States, the working class—those employed in manual labor, the service industry, or clerical jobs—represent over half of the labor force, but make up only 10 percent of elected city council representatives, 3 percent of elected members of state legislatures, and a mere 2 percent of Congress (Carnes 2018a). More than 50 percent of legislators in the 116th Congress were millionaires (Evers-Hillstrom 2022), a group that makes up just 8.8 percent of the US population (McCain 2023). Research shows that overwhelmingly, working-class people are disproportionately underrepresented at all levels of government. This is because most working-class people lack the personal finances, time, and political capital to enter races. Flexibility in time, finances, and political capital give wealthy candidates access to party leaders who recruit candidates and support campaigns, and these candidates have the excess savings to afford income lost due to campaigning. Furthermore, working-class candidates’ ability to succeed in elections at both the federal and state levels is often viewed with skepticism stemming from bias by party leaders.

At the end of June 2023, the United States Supreme Court issued two decisions that undermine the survival of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their student bodies. First, the Supreme Court effectively overturned race-conscious college admissions policies in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina (Liptak 2023a). Then, the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s first student debt cancellation program in Biden v. Nebraska, which would have eliminated $400 billion in student debt (Liptak 2023b). The ruling in both Students for Fair Admissions cases will likely increase the demand on HBCUs to fill educational opportunity gaps for prospective Black students (Perry et al. 2023; C. Adams 2022). HBCUs are generally oversubscribed relative to their financial capacities, so they will likely be unable to handle an influx of students without additional state funding.⁷ The ruling in Biden v. Nebraska will disproportionately impact HBCU graduates, who carry a greater debt burden than those who attend predominantly white institutions (PWIs) (Koch and Swinton 2023).

⁷Swinton, Omari H. (Economics Department Chair at Howard University), video interview with author, July 5, 2023.

Seemingly benign, local zoning codes are the focal point in a lively debate concerning persistent structural barriers to working-class needs, such as economic opportunity and affordable housing. This is because the American regional planning model creates ample opportunities for wealthy residents to dominate local zoning meetings and thwart housing production efforts that seek to serve the common interest. This is especially true in urban settings, where the arcane dynamics of zoning hearings can make it easier to organize a small group of people who espouse NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) ideology than to pursue common good projects. This paper draws attention to the need for zoning reform in rural America, an oft-overlooked dimension of the zoning reform debate, which tends to focus on urban settings. In the wake of COVID-19, small-town communities began facing rampant property speculation from outside forces looking to commodify the newly rediscovered benefits of rural living; the result has been a sharp decline in affordable housing opportunities for working-class rural families.

Recently, Kansas City has experienced rapid health-care consolidation. There has been a wave of mergers and acquisitions among local medical providers, especially due to the financial losses many of them faced during the pandemic. As these health systems expand by acquiring or integrating with their competitors, they gain the ability to dictate prices for administering care in the area because of minimal competition. Consequently, their rising dominance in the market can lead to higher costs for patients with no evident improvement in the quality of care provided.

This policy brief explores the impacts of private prisons and corporate power on mass incarceration in the United States and examines the unique case of Alabama, where one plan to build private prisons was halted in 2021. After a 2020 Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation exposed systemic violence in the state’s prison system, the crux of the state government’s solution was to construct two private prisons. Lawmakers and individuals who stood to profit from the building of private prisons ultimately failed to take control of the state’s jail system due to organized grassroots opposition. However, Alabama’s prison system is still notorious for violent facilities, with over 270 deaths in custody and 19 homicides in 2022 alone (Equal Justice Initiative 2023).

In New York’s sports entertainment industry, corporate welfare regarding stadium infrastructure has become the byproduct of corporate power’s consolidation and exertion. In 2022, Terry Pegula, owner of the Buffalo Bills, benefited from a record $850 million direct government infrastructure subsidy tied to New Highmark Stadium from New York State (NYS) (Ferré-Sadurní 2022). In New York City, Madison Square Entertainment continues to benefit from a property tax exemption clause on its Madison Square Garden (MSG) property. These corporate giveaways follow a cycle. Massive wealth affords corporate sport entities the luxury to hire prestigious lobbying firms, shape public messaging, and play an influential role in local campaigns in order to consolidate their corporate power. When sports executives contemplate relocating their team, they assert that government subsidies and tax breaks are essential for the sustained operation of their business. Without these incentives, corporate owners threaten NYS with the potential relocation of their teams—and the consequential loss of economic activity and benefits (Breech 2021).

When natural disaster strikes, political posturing and infighting often make it difficult to fully understand the extent of what happened and who is responsible for the response or lack thereof. This is especially true for complex infrastructure and regulatory failures like the Texas freeze of 2021. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri exposed the severe outcomes of neoliberal policies that for decades have favored market-driven privatization of the Texas power grid over its resilience and reliability for consumers and communities across the state. Covering approximately 90 percent of the state’s electrical load, many were surprised when the grid failed to meet the needs of millions of freezing Texans during a snowstorm that paralyzed the state (Krauss et al. 2021). The Texas power grid’s inadequate infrastructure left more than 4.5 million households (roughly 10 million Texans) without electricity at its peak, some for several days (Busby et al. 2021), and it exposed the vulnerabilities and shortcomings in the state’s energy systems. Texans dealt with widespread food and water shortages, burst pipes, and the dire consequences of seeking warmth—including house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning, and hypothermia (Jeanty 2022). The state Department of Health and Human Services released a final report placing the number of dead at 246 (Svitek 2022). AccuWeather estimated economic losses from lost output and damage to be $130 billion in Texas alone, and $155 billion for the country as a whole (Busby et al. 2021).