There's an argument -- maybe best made by John Judis -- that despite the optimism I chronicled here, labor is a low priority for the incoming Obama administration. Though it is true that labor's number one priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, is unlikely to be passed early in the new term, that's somewhat out of Obama's hands: It is hard to make the case that sixty votes can be found in the Senate to stop a Republican filibuster against the bill. But the fact that the transition didn't introduce the labor secretary with the rest of the economic team shouldn't be used to argue that the administration won't work on those issues; the delay really reflects the difficulty in picking someone for the position who would satisfy the various interested constituentcies while still being a strong manager who is familiar with labor issues.
Obama's pick for Labor Secretary is Representative Hilda Solis, and our resident Solis-expert, Harold Meyerson, say she's great. Various sources in the labor movement are also enthusiastic about the appointment and Solis' long history of advocating for workers. She'll have an opportunity to do a lot of work inside the department on less-glamorous but critically important tasks like ensuring that safety regulations are actually enforced. But critics question whether she'll have the clout to win economic battles with, say, Tim Geithner at Treasury or the anti-labor coalition in Congress. As Judis puts it, "If you think these are important jobs, what you want is someone of national standing who can sell your and their program to the public and to Congress--and particularly to the Senate, where the Democrats are going to need 60 votes on some key issues."
Which is why today's announcement from the transition team is so interesting (full release after the jump):
Today the Obama Transition team announced the President-elect's intention to form a ‘White House Task Force on Working Families,' to be chaired by Vice President-elect Joe Biden, effective January 20, 2009. The Task Force will be a major initiative targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America. The task force will be comprised of top-level administration policy makers, and in addition to regular meetings, it will conduct outreach sessions with representatives of labor, business, and the advocacy communities.
Did the VP just become labor czar? And if you were going to pick someone to find 60 votes for EFCA in the Senate, wouldn't you want that person to be Joe Biden? On the other hand, throwing a task force at an intractable problem is certainly a play we've seen before here in Washington -- at least it's not a blue ribbon commission. But Biden has been vehement since the campaign that he expects to be doing substantive work for the new administration, and his hiring of Jared Bernstein as his Chief Economic Adviser certainly presaged this move; given the crowded field of foreign policymakers in the Obama administration, Biden is putting himself in the position to exert a lot of pressure on policies that are good for labor.
In the release, Biden says that “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.” That statement echoes something Anna Burger, Chair of the Change to Win Coalition, told me the other week: the Bush administration looked at policymaking through a screen that emphasized business interests, and that to rebuild the middle class, the next administration needs to look through a screen that emphasizes the needs of workers.
-- Tim Fernholz
