Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, delivers this great speech on globalization and what it means for our workforce. It’s a heartening and well-reasoned speech and an especially effective response to the fatalistic “globalization is happening, so there’s nothing we can do about it” school of thought. The first clause of that claim may be true, but underlying the second is the misleading idea that globalization is binary- either it happens or it doesn’t. In reality, though, we can tailor macroeconomic policy to reap the benefits of globalization while at least partially mitigating job loss and trade deficits. An excerpt:

We have to begin the conversation by talking about jobs—the 11 million missing jobs behind our unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

Now, you may think to yourself, that is so retro. Jobs are so twentieth century. Sweat is for gyms, not workplaces.

For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does. Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes.

And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization—everything got cheaper and easier.

But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different.

Ezra Klein on the speech:

To think about this slightly differently, consider the way elites have treated the decline of journalism jobs and the decline of manufacturing jobs. Both sectors are fundamentally suffering from the same thing: A technological revolution that has made the large, well-paid workforces of yesteryear into a competitive disadvantage in the modern economy. But where the decline of manufacturing was greeted with sanguine talk about “retraining,” the decline of journalism has been greeted with something akin to grief.

People notice that. Now, this isn’t to accuse anyone of heartlessness. But “creative destruction” isn’t easy to explain, and it’s not very comforting to the destroyed. The problem, however, is that it’s a very comforting concept to the people watching the destruction. It’s a license not to worry about the death of aging industries. And the massive bubbles of the past decade or two made it easier to ignore the country’s economic problems, because the massive expansion of credit made people who weren’t getting ahead feel more like they were, which blunted the sort of polling evidence and popular anger that could have gotten more elites worried about all this.

Meanwhile, when creative destruction came at a white-collar industry like journalism, people in the field justified their terror because journalism plays a more important function than simply giving people jobs. But a lot of that terror has been about jobs, and understandably so. And when it comes at other “knowledge” industries, you hear a lot of concern about America losing its edge in, say, green energy, or microchips. So that also gets a special exemption from being written off as “creative destruction.” You don’t want America to lose the future, do you?

Elites are much better at being afraid of job losses in their world, but that hasn’t contributed to a broader sympathy or — dare I say it? — sense of solidarity. Meanwhile, the game in Washington proved itself rigged in favor of powerful interests when Wall Street cracked and the banks got bailed out. So the economy can batter the working class and it’s all part of the natural order of things, but the rich seem to get saved when things don’t go their way. Why shouldn’t people be angry?