The Democrats have always been a party of the rich, just as the Republicans have always been a party of the rich. The fact that the former also win the support of non-rich Americans by promising to throw them a bone every once in awhile does not fundamentally alter the class character of the party, which is and always has been bourgeois. The Democrats are a shaky alliance between bankers, tech companies, and higher education facilities, which treat labor unions like an expense account, using their funds to undermine their position with things like NAFTA, privatization, and the like, while also singing praises to the 'middle class' and occasionally raising the minimum wage (whenever they can't avoid doing so, that is)
Sounds better than the party that wants to impose nationwide right-to-work laws, abolish the minimum wage, abolish child labor laws, etc. etc.
With the possible exception of the first one, there's no likelihood of those actually happening in the near future. Child labor restrictions may be loosened, as we have seen in states like Maine, but there will never be a full on return to child labor without mass and likely violent resistance that will probably force the person dumb enough to attempt it to back off from it. Even a nationwide right-to-work law probably wouldn't muster a constitutional challenge, given that it violates the sacred right of contract that conservatives go on and on and on about.
As for the minimum wage, what's the point of abolishing it on paper when it has already been abolished in fact? No one with a real understanding of the situation we're in today honestly thinks that the minimum wage as it exists is enough to live on, and no one who knows much about the issue seriously thinks that $10.10 would be a raise to a livable wage, because it wouldn't. The minimum wage has been abolished by way of it's value not keeping up with that of the real cost of living, if not by law then by the conditions of the labor market, which continue to throw workers under the bus at the behest of corporate capital.
Child labor was rejected in Maine in March!
