Happy Labor Day! Labor has been in the White House in a big way under the Biden-Harris administration, with President Biden creating the kinds of policies you’d expect from the first sitting President to walk a picket line.
For almost four years, the media has acted as if Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t doing anything, when in fact she’s been put in charge of numerous White House initiatives. One of them is relevant today, as the VP is the Chair of the first ever White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.
This task force isn’t just talk.
They’ve taken over 70 actions to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining for federal employees and worker employed by public and private-sector employees.
If you’re wondering why they haven’t done more over the private sector, well, in their historic infrastructure pushes, the Biden-Harris administration implemented a new rule to require Project Labor Agreements on nearly all major federal construction projects of over $35 million.
This rule and the administration’s policies strongly encourage private sector contractors to hire union workers and to provide things like child care to workers, as you might expect from a president who repeatedly says, “unions built the middle class.”
President Biden’s Department of Treasury also implemented prevailing wage and apprenticeship bonus credits for Inflation Reduction Act clean energy projects. They restored and extended overtime pay protections to millions of workers, protected workers from extreme heat through the Department of Labor, provided through the CHIPS Act $200 million to train workers and insist that companies receiving grants over $150 million have a child care plan…
There’s a lot more where that came from. An important takeaway from the different departments I’ve mentioned is that the Republican playbook Project 2025 seeks to gut federal employees and instead staff these various departments with radical “conservatives” whose ideology is closer to nihilism than conservatism. It’s safe to say they will not be continuing worker protections under these various departments.
So while President Biden has been rebuilding America’s infrastructure, the Biden-Harris administration has also been pushing to have it rebuilt by empowered labor, so as to rebuild the middle class. The positive impact this will have on communities around the country is hardly felt yet; but will be one of President Biden’s lasting legacies.
It’s also important to understand the relationship between good-paying jobs and American democracy. When people feel satisfied, when they can pay their bills, when they can find decent work, they are less easy to radicalize against democracy. So this pro-worker push serves on multiple levels to rebuild our country, to strengthen democracy and to reconstruct the middle class.
But, the White House is limited in its scope. It can’t order private sector companies to take actions and it can’t make laws. Senior Administration Officials have explained in calls in which PoliticusUSA has participated that they hope the practices of the federal government will impact the private sector, to serve as a role model.
It seems like that is working to an extent, although in an era of what Hillary Clinton called “quarterly capitalism,” the struggle for anyone who isn’t an elite is real and ongoing.
By March of 2023 after the President approved all of the VP’s recommendations, the Task Force announced that agencies had advanced the recommendations and indeed, these recommendations had results – both in the federal government and in the private sector. One of the clearest consequences has been a nearly 20% increase in the number of federal government employees in a union.
So when President Biden and Vice President Harris talk about Labor Day, it’s more than rhetoric. They’ve put muscle, concerted effort, resources, and the weight of the entire federal government behind their belief that empowered labor is good for the country.
There’s so much work still to be done to renovate the labor movement, so on this Labor Day, make sure you and three of your friends or loved ones are registered to vote. As former First Lady Michelle Obama said, we can’t wait for Goldilocks candidates. We have to: “Do something.”
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