A popular knock on voters who support Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders because they have been “left behind” by free trade, globalization and technological progress is that they want a handout from Uncle Sam.

But the truth is the opposite: These voters want to work. They want jobs. And that’s the key to understanding their support for Trump or Sanders.

I know these people personally. In the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up in a vibrant working-class community in upstate New York. But by the early 1990s, thousands of people in their 50s in my community, including my parents, had lost their jobs as a result of a massive IBM downsizing. They “accepted” buyouts, but they were cast aside and not retrained for anything else.

In this political season, I’ve been asking some of them and their friends, and their now-adult kids, which presidential candidates they find appealing. Only two find support: Sanders, the Vermont socialist, and Trump, the New York billionaire. Both candidates appeal to a working class that is frustrated, fed up and downright angry.

Neither can be bought.

To understand the simmering discontent of working-class folks who are attracted to one (or both) of these candidates, you need to imagine you’ve either lost a job or cannot break into the work force. Viewed from these perspectives, an academic debate about whether free trade results in net job losses or gains is mostly meaningless. These people want a good job, or at least a job no worse than the job they lost. Their economic futures seem to be on life support.

We can’t ignore the centrality of work in people’s lives. Most people want to work. Most people want to contribute to society and take care of their families. When the government adopts free-trade policies that pick winners (the better educated who gain new jobs) and losers (manufacturing workers), the government also needs to cushion the blow for the losers.

Since this hasn’t happened for the last couple of decades, anger has been building and is now finding a political outlet. Many Americans start to wonder: Our government helps rich Wall Street bankers but not Main Street homeowners? Supports elite universities but not vocational schools? Lowers taxes on the wealthiest Americans?

Our government has an obligation to help people adjust to seismic policy changes, like free trade. In the last couple of decades, trade agreements have resulted in, for example, the technology industry gaining ground, and the steel industry losing ground. Besides picking winners and losers, free-trade policies introduce major economic anxiety into many previously stable families.

Obvious policy tools have long existed to cushion the life-altering blows inflicted when government policies shift: job retraining, wage insurance, free community college and infrastructure investment. But these tools have been only sparingly deployed.

We need to address the needs of displaced older workers, as well as undereducated younger workers. And no, raising the minimum wage won’t do it.

For many working-class families, access to credit is limited. They can’t keep refinancing their homes as a result of the mortgage meltdown. Both parents already work (if they’re fortunate enough to have jobs), so there isn’t another parent to send into the work force. There are kids to raise and support.

People need to feel that their lives are on an upward trajectory, or at least that there is a realistic chance they can advance. And far too many people don’t feel that way.

Sanders and Trump tap into this disillusionment. They’re paying attention to the working class. They appear to actually understand, on a visceral level, the challenges faced by these Americans — and at least they seem to understand these voters aren’t moochers.

In different ways, they’re offering seething working-class Americans pathways to reclaiming what they’ve lost.

Until we admit that we have come precariously close to ending true social mobility in America, we’ll continue to see angry working-class voters approaching their boiling point.

Most of these people aren’t “takers.” Rather, what they had, or what they hoped to have, has been “taken” away from them.

Jim McDermott is the author of “Bitter Is the Wind,” a novel of working-class aspirations set in the Hudson Valley, and the chairman of a Portland, Ore., law firm.