The Other Side Of The Coin

Remarks by Brian D. Griffin

Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Cincinnati AFL-CIO Central Labor Council

Brown County Democratic Party Fundraiser

 06-27-2026

The following is taken directly from the printed transcript I had with me in the room yesterday afternoon. Thank you for taking the time to read it.

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Reach into your pocket right now and take out a coin. Any coin. A quarter, a dime, it does not matter. Look at one side. Now flip it over.

That simple act is the one our politics has refused to perform for a generation.

We talk endlessly about affordability. Lower the cost of groceries. Lower the cost of rent. Lower the cost of prescription drugs. And I will tell you plainly: those are not wrong things to say. But they are dangerously incomplete. Because a coin has two sides, and we have been conducting a one-sided conversation for forty years.

On one side: the cost of things. On the other side: the value of work. On one side: what people spend. On the other side: what people earn. We have mastered the language of the consumer. And somewhere along the way, we forgot the language of the worker. That forgetting has cost us more than we know.

I have been a Democrat since before many of you reading this were born. I remember clearly the assassination and funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I worked on Hubert Horatio Humphrey’s campaign in 1967. My first vote for President was for James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr.  I was there when this party knew in its bones who it was fighting for. And I have watched, across the decades since, as that certainty slowly dissolved into something polished and careful and, for too many working people, unrecognizable.

Dustin Guastella, a Teamster officer and labor researcher, put his finger on something important recently. He said our politics treats people as consumers first and as human beings with a role in society second. Consumers first… Shoppers first… Customers first…

That shift did not happen by accident. It happened as the party’s donor base changed, as the professional class displaced the working class at the tables where strategy gets made, and as the language of markets replaced the language of dignity. We began speaking to people’s wallets and stopped speaking to their lives. And working people, who are nothing if not perceptive, noticed.

We began speaking to people’s wallets and stopped speaking to their lives. Working people noticed.

Here is what forty years of that bargain looks like in numbers.

The real purchasing power of the average American wage today is roughly what it was four decades ago. Not adjusted for lifestyle upgrades or changing tastes. Actual purchasing power. We have worked harder, produced more, built more, shipped more. And we have not gotten paid more. The productivity climbed steadily. The wages did not follow. Somebody captured what the workers did not get, and we all know who that was.

From April last year to April this year, wages grew by 3.6 percent. Inflation ran at 3.8 percent. Working people lost ground. Again. This is not an anomaly. It is the continuation of a pattern that has defined American economic life since the late 1970s.

Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research studied what happened to workers in markets where corporations concentrated their power and squeezed out competition. Wages stagnated. For almost everyone. With one exception.

The only workers who did not lose ground were the ones who belonged to a union.

Just let that sink in… Not a slogan. Not a bumper sticker. Forty years of evidence. And the answer has been there the whole time.

These numbers have addresses. They have zip codes, street names, and shuttered storefronts.

Ohio built the arsenal of democracy with its own hands. Rubber from Akron. Glass from Toledo. Jeeps from Toledo. Steel from the Mahoning Valley. Airplanes from Dayton. We did not ask whether we could afford to build. We asked what needed to be built, and we built it. Working people had a seat at that table, and the communities organized around that work were alive in a way that is not easy to describe to someone who did not see it.

What happened when that work left is not an abstraction. It is the Mahoning Valley. It is Middletown. It is Gallia County, where I am from, where my father’s generation built their lives around work that paid enough to mean something. The devastation that followed plant closures was never contained to the workers who lost jobs. It moved through the tax base, the schools, the small businesses on Main Street, the hospital, and eventually through the bodies of people who had nowhere left to put their despair. The geography of addiction in this state is not a mystery. It is a map of where the work used to be.

We cannot shop our way out of this. We cannot coupon our way out of this. We cannot discount our way out of this.

The answer to affordability is not only cheaper things. The answer is better wages, better jobs, and an economy built to serve the people who do the work. That means asking different questions than we have been asking. Not just: how do we lower the price of what we buy? But: who makes it, and where, and are they paid enough to live? Not just: how do we bring down the cost of building? But: who builds it, with what materials, sourced from where? Could it be built here, by American hands, from American materials, toward an American purpose?

The Greatest Generation did not build a marketplace. They built an economy. There is a difference, and we used to know what it was.

This is a self-inflicted wound. I say that as someone who has given his life to this party, not as someone standing outside throwing stones. We made choices. We drifted from the people we were built to serve. And only we have the power to find our way back.

Part of that finding our way back is being honest about who we ask to lead us there. It is worth sitting with a few quiet questions. Does this person know what it feels like when the check does not quite reach the end of the month? Have they ever sat across a table from someone with more power than them and had to fight for what was fair? Do they understand, not from a briefing book but from their bones, what these forty years have actually felt like?

You cannot lead people home to a place you have never been.

I am in the twilight of my working life. From this vantage point, I can tell you that I have been blessed to live, walk, and work alongside giants. But none so great as the quiet working person whose very life is the statement of purpose to which we owe everything that is this country.

Not the ones with titles, platforms, or names on buildings. The one who punches in before the sun is up. The one who comes home with their hands telling the story of what they built that day. The one who raises children, pays taxes, tends to neighbors, worships on Sunday, and never once asks for a monument. Their life is the argument… Their life is what we are supposed to be fighting for.

If the Democratic Party is not about them, what are we? What do we stand for? What do we fight for? What do we wake up in the morning and put our name on?

The answer is right there. It has always been right there.

On the other side of the coin.

It is time to flip it over.