Politics & Power Quote by John J. Sweeney

Globalization is the kind of word that sounds like weather: huge, impersonal, inevitable. Sweeney’s move is to drag it back down to street level and insist it’s a policy choice with a human report card. “For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people” isn’t a folksy add-on; it’s a veto threat. If the gains concentrate at the top while wages stall, he’s saying the project has failed on its own terms.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a late-20th-century consensus that treated trade liberalization as an automatic national win, with displaced workers offered retraining rhetoric and a pat on the head. Sweeney reframes the unit of measurement: not GDP, not stock indices, not corporate competitiveness, but the “breadth” of the middle class. That word choice matters. Breadth implies resilience and shared footing, not a narrow ladder reserved for the already stable.

He pairs that with a second metric: the “scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child.” It’s a strategic moral escalation. Middle-class strength becomes inseparable from mobility, and mobility is anchored not in abstract meritocracy but in what society actually offers: schools, healthcare, wages, labor standards. The child functions as an emotional truth test, but also a political one: if you can’t plausibly promise upward movement from the bottom, you’re not running a dynamic economy, you’re managing inequality.

Contextually, Sweeney’s labor-leader worldview (despite the “businessman” tag) tracks the NAFTA/WTO-era backlash and the growing sense that globalization’s winners wrote the rules. His line aims to rewrite them.