Workers at the Momentive plant near Albany, New York, didn't get as much attention in the weeks surrounding Donald Trump's election as did those at Carrier in Indianapolis, but in many ways they are similar. While the Carrier plant was closing down, the workers there had faced repeated demands for givebacks in their contracts like the ones the Momentive workers fought against.
Like Carrier, in Indiana, the state from which Trump drew Vice-President Mike Pence, the Momentive plant had a Trump connection: Steve Schwarzman, billionaire hedge-fund titan and Trump economic adviser, had been part of the team of private equity investors who owned the plant once it was spun off from GE.
Yet when filmmaker Cecila Aldarondo began visiting the workers on the picket line they walked outside of Momentive for over 100 days, she found that many of them had voted for Trump. Her short film, Picket Line, is part of Our 100 Days, a film initiative from Firelight Media and Field of Vision examining America after Trump. We talked about stereotypes of Trump voters, the power of the union in resistance, and how to talk to people on the other side of the political line drawn by the 2016 election.
Here are some outtakes:
“Let me put it this way: I did not expect unionized workers to vote for Trump. That was something that sort of surprised me. Then, when I thought a little bit harder about it, it actually wasn’t that surprising.
“What I mean by that is just thinking about this area where I live—upstate New York, in general—is a place that for many, many years was the industrialized part of the state and there are many towns, many cities even, where you can see marks of wholesale industrial decline.
“It became clear to me over time by talking to these people who are my neighbors that this is basically one of the last working factories left that provides “good” jobs. What I mean by that is jobs with benefits, jobs where theoretically one person can work in a family and not be wealthy, but at least—a solid middle class job. . . . These are people who just felt totally disenchanted with party politics. They felt that Trump was honestly the only person who was speaking to them after Bernie dropped out.”
“We have this caricature of the Trump voter and, unfortunately, I think people on the left are just as guilty of simplistic thinking as people on the right sometimes and I don’t think that serves us. I think that we would get a lot further in trying to fight Trump if we actually tried to understand how people got to the thinking that they have.”
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes.