Opposition to the TPP proves that politics makes strange bedfellows. Allied with pro-union, pro-middle class progressives are Libertarians and other conservatives. We should look more closely at these folks.
Even though I am a liberal Democrat, I routinely monitor several conservative sites, mostly ones pertaining to economics. My intention is to keep contact so I know what these people are up to, and there are a number of conservatives who seem to do the same thing with Daily Kos. The two main sites I follow are Agora Financial and Jim Rickards' Strategic Intelligence, both of which seem to be heavily Libertarian. I have already written a highly qualified recommendation of Mr. Rickards' recent book.
Libertarianism is an economic and social philosophy with roots from the late 1800's. Like many intellectual efforts from that age, it is a logical structure based on reasoning from first principles, from assumptions assumed to be true without proof. This is a procedure with well known defects since these initial assumptions must be flawless; they must be absolutely true under all conditions or the deductions derived from them will also be flawed. Unfortunately, at least one third of the first principles accepted by Libertarians are totally wack and have no basis in real life. Since these principles affect all "truths" derived from them, the faults are multiplied up the chain of deduction. As a result, fifty or sixty percent of what Libertarians passionately believe is sophistry and needs to be ignored. But what about the rest?
Strangely enough, buried under the obvious falsehoods are a few gems of reason which we should acknowledge. These people, as stated above, are largely opposed to the TPP, and their opposition is passionate. They may have some rather different reasons for this than we do, but we are all pointing in the same direction.
Another strong interest for this group is opposition to GMO products and other sources of food contamination. One site has a significant fraction of their output devoted to what we would call health issues, and much of their information is well founded and useful. They are definitely not on the corporate side on this issue.
The thing to remember about Libertarians and other right wingers is they are absolutely sure that they are right in all things, and their definition of "wrong" is "they disagree with me." This pig headedness makes it impossible to have a meaningful discussion on maters where we disagree with them. However the same intensity is applied in issues where we do agree, and potentially this would make them powerful allies in some cases.
Dealing with such folks might require application of the esteemed SAWA methodology. I have noticed that whenever they depart from analysis and start to list solutions, these usually contain phrases like "repeal Obamacare," "build keystone pipeline," "eliminate capital gains taxes," yadda yadda. Here you implement SAWA.
Whenever they are making sense, work with them. When they are not, Smile And Walk Away.