President Joe Biden likes to say, \u201cI\u2019m a union guy.\u201d Unfortunately, as Vice President from 2009 to 2017, his boss, Barack Obama wouldn\u2019t let him be a \u201cunion guy.\u201d Even with large Democratic majorities in Congress and control of the White House, worker needs went unmet.<\/p>\n
Setting records for raising Wall Street campaign cash, Obama reneged on his 2008 promise to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour by 2011. He reneged on a promise to the AFL-CIO to push for \u201ccard check\u201d to facilitate workers wanting to form a union. He did nothing to preserve traditional earned worker pensions provided by corporations while bailing out Wall Street crooks whom he refused to prosecute.<\/p>\n
Obama stubbornly blocked an eager Biden from going to speak at a massive workers\u2019 rally in Madison, Wisconsin at the critical time when Democrats were challenging corporatist Governor Scott Walker\u2019s anti-union \u201cbudget repair bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
One would think after eight years of biding his time, a liberated Joe Biden would be the most pro-union labor president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He probably is by default, due to the cowardliness of his predecessors who would have lost some of their own elections without union support.<\/p>\n
The question now is: Given the entrenched deprivations of workers and abandonment of labor to serf-labor countries abroad, is President Biden pro-union-labor enough, apart from the temporary Covid-19 relief? The answer has to be a qualified, NO.<\/p>\n
He has dropped into limbo the long-overdue $15 federal minimum wage from his legislative priorities. He did give strong verbal support to the Amazon workers union-organizing drive at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. However, when the workers lost, Biden did not assail the extreme union busting tactics by Amazon that exploited weak labor protection laws. He has finally nominated the new head of OSHA \u2013 the under-funded, Trump-wrecked job safety agency that is in shambles.<\/p>\n
What he has done is come out strongly for the Congressional Democrat\u2019s latest version of labor law reform \u2013 the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) that passed the House on March 9, 2021, with a 225-206 vote.<\/p>\n
The problem with the PRO Act, like its legislative predecessors over the past 60 years, is its faint-hearted attempt to chip away at the unmentioned, gigantic, anti-union TAFT-HARTLEY ACT OF 1947 \u2013 a devastating anti-organizing and union representation law.<\/p>\n
The Taft-Hartley law was so extreme that its principal author, Senator Robert Taft (R-OH), offered to amend some of its sharpest claws in the late 1940s. His offer was rejected by outraged unions who wanted a more significant repeal. That, astonishingly, was the last major bellow by the large unions and the AFL-CIO against this stifling chokehold over the union movement. Union membership in the corporate sector is at 6.3 percent. Overall union membership regularly hits new lows.<\/p>\n
Even mentioning the repeal of Taft-Hartley by unions and Democratic candidates has become taboo. When campaigning for president in Detroit at a labor hall in 2004, a retired UAW worker came up to me with tears in his eyes. He said, \u201cI never thought I would hear getting rid of Taft-Hartley from a presidential candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the 50th and 60th anniversaries of Taft-Hartley\u2019s passage by a Republican Congress \u2013 that is 1997 and 2007 \u2013 I strenuously urged the AFL-CIO and the largest unions to hold public demonstrations of protest. (Does anybody think big business would have allowed such handcuffs without battling year after year for repeal?)<\/p>\n
The union leaders wouldn\u2019t inform the public of this pernicious law with a national event against this tragic curtailing of worker\u2019s freedoms to band together and bargain together in major workplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald\u2019s. No other western country allows such draconian anti-labor restrictions.<\/p>\n
Unions are waiting on the Democratic Party to lead while the Democrats are waiting upon big business. Biden should make ending the anti-worker, anti-union, and pro-employer union-busting, Taft-Hartley Act the battle cry for the Republic. The PRO Act doesn\u2019t come close to this objective.<\/p>\n
Taft-Hartley is a wide-ranging, intricate paradise for union-busting law firms, corporatist legislators, and atavistic judges. It authorized states to enact so-called \u201cright to work\u201d laws or more properly named \u201cright to shirk\u201d laws, allowing workers to keep benefits of union contracts but not pay union dues. This provision vastly decreases union membership and increases employer leverage to resist union organizing.<\/p>\n
Taft-Hartley gives employers all kinds of ways to block union certification elections, harass workers with demands for obstructionist hearings on what is an \u201cappropriate bargaining unit,\u201d permits aggressive anti-union organizing, and outlaws the \u201cclosed shop\u201d for union solidarity.<\/p>\n
One of the most damaging provisions defines \u201cemployees\u201d so as to exclude supervisors and independent contractors. This greatly diminished the pool of workers eligible to be unionized. For example, years ago AT&T widely expanded the number of \u201csupervisors\u201d to both deplete the union membership numbers and use their \u201csupervisors\u201d as management control tools.<\/p>\n
Taft-Hartley has other pro-management provisions, including controls over pensions, disclosure of information, and workplace time for union purposes.<\/p>\n
Once Taft-Hartley was on the books, its restrictions were strengthened by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board (whose last pro-corporate general counsel was just fired by Biden). With the expansion of the \u201cgig economy,\u201d by Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and other companies whose business model is built on having no employees, the challenge for American workers is nothing less than displacing anti-labor dictates with a comprehensive worker\u2019s human rights law.<\/p>\n
The PRO Act is decidedly not anywhere near Biden\u2019s recent recognition that \u201cNearly 60 million Americans would join a union if they get a chance \u2026. They know that without unions, they can run the table on workers \u2013 union and non-union alike\u201d (Statement by President Joe Biden on the House Taking Up the PRO Act, March 9, 2021).<\/p>\n