Live at Truthdig: How Can We Fix the Disconnect Between Our Workers and Our Political System?

Bill Boyarsky (second from right) with Truthdig staff members Sarah Wesley (left), Eric Ortiz and Emma Niles.

Throughout this unprecedented election season, there has been increased attention on a critical problem facing the United States: income inequality. Initially emphasized by Bernie Sanders during his bid for president, it’s now an issue garnering responses from presidential campaigns and down-ticket candidates on both sides of the aisle.

Earlier this week, a Washington Post exposé revealed that Bill Clinton may have “leveraged” his wife’s position as secretary of state to increase his own personal wealth. His arrangement with a for-profit college, which garnered him almost $18 million, “illustrates the extent to which the Clintons mixed their charitable work with their private and political lives,” argue the authors of the exposé.

Meanwhile, Truthdig’s own Bill Boyarsky relayed a look into a completely different component of American society in a new report in which he interviews blue-collar truck drivers and warehouse workers in Southern California. “Here, far from the noise of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton brawl, are painful examples of what this presidential campaign should be about—$10-an-hour working people struggling to raise their families out of poverty, straining to send their kids to school, falling through holes in the safety net,” Boyarsky states. He continues:

Generations ago, there were strong unions—the autoworkers, steelworkers, machinists, longshoremen and others. But an unfriendly judicial and regulatory system has made it almost impossible for unions to organize drivers classified as independent contractors or warehouse workers in scattered facilities, each with a different owner. That should be part of the presidential campaign.

Why has media coverage of America’s working-class citizens, so far from the political elite, been in decline? In an election year when so much discussion has focused on income inequality, can Americans expect any real change? Where do the presidential nominees really stand on income inequality and worker rights?

The Truthdig team sat down with special guest Boyarsky to discuss these questions and others raised by his new report. Watch the session below:

You can find other editions of “Live at Truthdig” on our YouTube channel.