This article originally appeared in In These Times.

Ever since the earth-shaking election of Donald Trump, there have been innumerable articles arguing that Democrats brought this upon themselves by losing white, working-class voters in the Midwest. These articles have been met with a torrent of essays urging Democrats to focus on becoming the party of diversity. And, coming back from the dead like a bloated zombie corpse is Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s New York Times piece calling for a return to Clintonian centrism.

All of these discussions imply that progressives can either fight for voters from the working class or communities of color — but not both at once. This line of thinking demonstrates a profound lack of faith in democracy and the electorate’s ability to smell bullshit.

As a seasoned union organizer, I often ask myself whether the pundits offering the aforementioned opinions have ever actually spent time talking to working-class people. By this, I mean all working-class people. Contrary to the narrative put forth in the mainstream — and even some left—media, some of the most significant work confronting homophobia, sexism and racism has been done by working-class people of all ethnicities through collective struggle in the labor movement.

My first substantive labor movement work was as a union organizer with California’s SEIU Local 250 — a healthcare workers’ industrial union, theoretically representing all non-management personnel in hospitals and nursing homes. In practice, the union mostly represented those classifications except registered nurses, who were generally represented by the widely-respected California Nurses Association. Local 250’s membership was racially diverse, with strong representation from African-American, Latino, Filipino and white workers. Standards were generally good for a union workplace: free healthcare, pensions, time off and competitive wages.

My first instructions at Local 250 were pretty simple: Go recruit 10 percent of the membership at the hospital to serve on the negotiating team, and get them ready to lead the entire hospital out on strike in two months. These were strong directives delivered with about as much subtlety. At the time, the union was engaged in a massive, coordinated contract campaign to achieve minimum staffing standards. This meant that as many as 30 hospitals would be bargaining and perhaps striking in coordination.

As a union staffer, one of my myriad job duties was to have meetings with members and member leaders, guided by a small pamphlet titled, “What is a Union?” This pamphlet emphasized that a union is “an organization of workers who all work for the same employer and act collectively to keep the boss from doing things that the workers do not want and to get the boss to do things that the workers do want.”

My job was to explicitly talk about racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia and religious intolerance as specific barriers to a strong union. A good union member can’t complain about Mexicans ‘taking jobs’ while also asking Latino colleagues to make common cause with him.