Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Biden speaks during an event at Henry Maier Festival Park in Milwaukee on Labor Day, Monday, September 5, 2022.
Every Labor Day weekend for the past 85 years or so has featured Democratic pols praising unions. This year, however, it featured a good deal more than that: in particular, a tussle between the nation’s two ranking Democrats as to which was the more genuinely pro-labor.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom took the occasion of Labor Day to sign into law what is the single most pro-labor piece of legislation the nation has seen in a very long time: a bill establishing sectoral bargaining in the fast-food industry. The new act creates a ten-member commission consisting of worker and management representatives and state officials that will set standards for wages and working conditions for the state’s roughly 550,000 fast-food workers. The statute also raises those workers’ minimum wage to $22 an hour. It further allows fast-food companies and franchises to skirt some of the commission’s rulings if they agree to let their workers unionize.
At the same time, Newsom has made clear he’s not enamored of another bill that the legislature has sent to his desk, this one permitting mail balloting for farmworkers seeking to unionize. As the legislature’s vote makes clear, a large number of California Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, support this change. The reasons for Newsom’s reluctance are much the same as those laid out in Miriam Pawel’s New York Times Labor Day op-ed: that the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, enacted in the 1970s during the first go-round of Jerry Brown’s tenure as governor, affords farmworkers an opportunity to unionize, and that in recent decades, their union—the United Farm Workers—hasn’t even tried to organize workers. Pawel, who is a distinctly pro-union progressive, has chronicled the transition of the UFW from a union to a movement to a foundation in her books on the UFW and its founder, Cesar Chavez, as well as in her book on the Brown family’s dominance of California Democrats.
But the one Democrat who plainly outranks Newsom—President Biden—took the occasion of Labor Day weekend to make clear that no other Democratic pol, and most especially no Democratic pol whose name has been bandied about as a possible 2024 presidential candidate (see, above: Newsom), can steal his thunder as the most pro-labor Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt. Biden had already appointed the most pro-union officials the nation may ever have seen to the Labor Department, the NLRB, and the Trade Representative’s Office; he had already endorsed unionization campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks. But just to drive home that this Newsom guy still had some distance to go before his union bona fides came up to the Biden standard, on the eve of Labor Day the president endorsed California’s mail-ballots-for-farmworkers bill as it languished in Newsom’s in-box.
There are a number of ways to gauge the extent of labor’s comeback, at least in the court of public opinion. Gallup’s Labor Day poll showed unions with a 71 percent approval rating, the highest it’s been since the mid-1960s. But the fact that the president of the United States and the governor of its largest state were duking it out for the title of labor’s BFF is one more indication of the reputational resurrection of liberalism’s most important institution.
Now, if we could only fix the goddam federal labor law …
