No place epitomizes the profound changes that have taken place in the American economy more than Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The city lost a huge steel mill but was reborn with the help of casinos, hotels, and several Wal-Mart distribution centers. Thanks to the rise of online shopping and proximity to much of the United States, warehouses have become a major source of blue-collar employment in Bethlehem and beyond. More than 19,000 employees work in package preparation warehouses in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Thousands more drive delivery trucks. The total number of employees in the industry has nearly replaced the number of employees Bethlehem Steel employed in the city during its heyday.
But the political power once wielded by blue-collar workers has not yet been supplanted.
Warehouse workers, like steelworkers, form an influential voting bloc despite their large numbers, importance to the economy, and presence in the key battleground state of Northampton. I haven’t. How elected officials engage with voters during an election year, when voters in this county and across the Lehigh Valley have a good chance of deciding who will sit in the White House. I’m having trouble deciding what to do.
“It’s really hard to reach these people,” said Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure.
It turns out that creating something and distributing it are not the same thing. Working in a steel mill, unlike working in a warehouse, is a communal act suited to the pursuit of political power. Steelworkers worked side by side with each other, forming lifelong bonds, bowling leagues and unions, and creating a reliable voting bloc. When thousands of workers poured through Bethlehem Steel’s gates at the end of the day, “politicians would come out and shake our hands,” said the former president of United Steelworkers Local 2599. Jerry Green told me.
In fact, factories were so good at political mobilization that some believe they brought about democracy itself. A recent study by Sam Van Noort, a lecturer at Princeton University, found that women and working-class men lost their jobs in the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia after about a quarter of the population was employed in factories. gained the right to vote in some areas.
Warehouses, by contrast, have no such mystique. No one is campaigning outside of the Walmart distribution center here. Workers tend to be hired by staffing agencies, and many stay for only a few months. They work alone and rarely socialize. They are notoriously difficult to organize. Alec McGillis, author of “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon,” says the biggest challenge for Amazon warehouse labor organizers is keeping workers on the job long enough to feel a sense of community. He said it was true.
Maleny Tapia, who moved to Bethlehem from Queens, New York five years ago and took a job as a “picker” at a Zara warehouse, explained why. She worked eight hours a day picking items from numbered shelves and delivering them to packers who packed them into boxes. She said she was not allowed to talk to colleagues, except during short lunch breaks. “Sometimes I would go to the back section, where people don’t get a lot of attention, and sneak a little conversation,” she said.
Her three bosses, all Latinos who spoke Spanish like her, wrote down on a whiteboard how fast she was working. They told her that if she worked fast enough, she might one day become a “leader” like them. But she didn’t want that. Older people, those in the country illegally and those with uneven employment histories, are clinging to those jobs, she said. However, young people considered this work to be temporary and not a foundation for their lives.
She quit her job at a warehouse and eventually landed her dream job teaching English as a Second Language at Northampton Community College. About half of her students work in warehouses. Her mother, too, is a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border on foot at age 15 and now works in a warehouse during the day and runs her own small restaurant at night. Tapia told me that despite constant ads on the restaurant’s radio, no one from the Donald Trump or Kamala Harris campaigns has contacted her to ask her to vote. She is still undecided.
“The most obvious choice would be Kamala in terms of being a woman,” she said. “But in terms of how I feel politically, a lot of my friends and people my age feel like they can’t trust anyone.” She continued, “Young people are giving their votes. They don’t even want to vote because they feel it doesn’t matter.”
That’s ironic. Northampton County is one of the few places in America where every vote absolutely counts.
But no one seems to have cracked the code of how to talk to warehouse workers as workers. Republicans are trying to engage them as Christians. Guillermo López Jr., a former Bethlehem Steel millwright and civic leader, said conservative pastors who support Mr. Trump have begun preaching in Latino-majority evangelical churches. A lifelong resident whose father was recruited from Puerto Rico to work in a steel mill in the 1950s, Lopez said many of today’s Latino workers get their political cues from God rather than from union halls. He said he is doing so. “There’s an evangelical pastor and church for almost every 100 Latinos,” he says. Although he is a Democrat who supports Harris, he believes the Republican Party is gaining support among Pennsylvania’s Latinos through churches.
Democrats, on the other hand, rely on these voters as Latinos. About one-third of warehouse workers in the region are Hispanic. Harris’ campaign opened an office in Allentown, a predominantly Latino city near Bethlehem, and hired a Spanish-speaking state spokeswoman. Harris campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said the party is running a bilingual advertising campaign and is “investing more in paid Hispanic media in the state than any previous campaign.” .
Is it working?
At the Santiago Cigar Lounge near downtown Bethlehem, Dominican-born truck driver Jose Vargas, who has been stacking boxes at Ryder’s warehouse for years, said in 2020 that he opposed the Trump campaign because it seemed racist. I cast my vote,” he said. Since then, the high cost of living has changed his mind. “We used to have barbecues a lot,” he lamented. “I can’t even see a steak now,” he said, deciding that Trump was not criticizing legal immigrants like himself, but illegal immigrants. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows that others feel the same way. Mr. Vargas supports Mr. Trump.
So did Mr. Vargas’ friend Marty Hosey, who smoked cigars with him. Hosey, a fourth-generation ironworker who immigrated from Long Island, spends the summer building high-rise buildings and the winter loading Amazon warehouses. He identifies himself as a libertarian, saying, “Left and right, it’s the same bird.”
They complained about high housing costs and new immigrants who seemed to want free things more than jobs. Most of all, they were worried about being replaced by machines. They spoke with horror about fully automated McDonald’s and robots unloading cargo from container ships. They did not seem to think of themselves as members of the working class who could unite and demand protection for their jobs.
The hot political issue surrounding warehouses is not the workers themselves. It’s the loss of traffic and green space that comes with it. Both Democratic and Republican candidates vying for Northampton’s state House seat have vowed to stop the proliferation of warehouses that some civic groups say destroy the rural way of life. If warehouse workers had a political voice, they might push back. But they don’t because they aren’t. Warehouses have been an economic boon. But politically it is a loss for workers.
