AHC: pro-student Hard Hat Riot reversal

For those unfamiliar, here's the lowdown on the OTL Hard Hat Riot: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot

The challenge: instead of OTL's divide between the working class "Hard Hats" and the bourgeois student hippies, have some solidarity between the two a la Paris in '68, leading not to the Hard Hats attacking the students but rather rioting in support.

Same rough time frame - 1970, but an open post-1900 POD. Only restriction is to keep the war in Vietnam as a focus of the student protests from being completely butterlied (ie other loci are OK).
 
Offhand, an earlier, sharper (more severe 1969 gold crisis?) inflationary shock might make the scenario plausible.
 
Um, I hate to say ASB but it's damned close.

The mutual contempt with which hippies and hard hats viewed each other would take more than a few bong hits to see the point of brotherhood.

Hard hats had so much invested in playing with the status quo that trying to overthrow it as the hippies were was unthinkable. You married early, had a mess of kids and worked your ass off, went to church, etc.
If your draft number was called up, you went to induction and served your tour. No excuses.
As Nam wound down, Watergate and other things wore down the absolute certainty American society invested in the post-WWII status quo.

Hippies OTOH tended to either romanticize workers' toil w/o taking into account workers' limited choices or had such contempt for the illiterate troglodyte conformist crew-cuts doing their bosses' dirty work for free, it's tough to see where common ground could've sprung up.

Many Nam vets from working class backgrounds came home, went to college, and adopted a lot of hippie aspects.
Many hippies ended up working in hardhat trades and it became something of a cross-pollination as hard hats ended up absorbing some hippie aspects, tolerating unmarried shacking up, smoking dope, and so forth after the seventies as the Zeitgeist shifted.
You wonder where biker culture came from- well, look no further.

However, IDK if biker culture was ready to absorb the counterculture in 1968.
Altamont was for many where things went haywire and it got too ugly for many. YMMV of course
 
One thought I had was a POD leading to a more radical labor movement, which might be more sympathetic.

Maybe if the Taft-Hartley act is worse than OTL. Say, THA makes right-to-work federal law rather than a state option and allows yellow dog contracts. The mob gets their hooks deeper into the AFL, and ends up cutting deals with corporations making it basically a yellow dog union. The CIO doesn't merge and instead reaffirms it's more radical roots.

Fast forward to Vietnam, and you might find CIO members oppose the war and sympathise with the students.
 
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