President Obama’s unveiling today of his administration’s Task Force on Middle Class Working Families is the most unambiguous statement yet from the president of his support for unions. Surrounded by union leaders from both the AFL-CIO and Change To Win (which generated the idea for the task force some months ago) and by Vice-President Biden, who will chair the task force, Obama delivered comments were even more emphatic than his official actions.
“I don't see organized labor as part of the problem,” the president said. “To me, it's part of the solution.”
Lest anyone miss the point, he added, “You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor union.”
But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an American president has ever made.
The task force, whose executive director will be Biden's economic adviser, Jared Bernstein (formerly of the Economic Policy Institute and the most liberal of the new administration’s major economists), will be comprised of the Secretaries of Labor, Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services, as well the directors of the Economic Council (Larry Summers), the Domestic Policy Council (Melody Barnes), the OMB (Peter Orszag) and the Council of Economic Advisers (Christinea Romer). Its first full meeting will come late next month in Philadelphia, on the topic of green jobs. The task force’s goals, according to its website, include “restoring labor standards, including workplace safety,” “helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes” and “protecting retirement security.”
