Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Joe Biden speaks during an event in honor of labor unions, September 8, 2021, in the East Room of the White House.
’Tis the season of the worker, sort of. In a growing number of Starbucks shops and university campuses, certainly. And also, just yesterday, at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
Yesterday, the House voted by 335 to 97—which means not just all the Democrats, but a majority of the Republicans, too—to ban forced arbitration in cases of sexual assault and harassment. Tens of millions of workers are compelled by their employment contracts to forgo the right to sue their employer for abuses, discrimination, and the like, and submit their claims to private arbitration, which in the overwhelming majority of cases results in a pro-employer ruling. That forced arbitration even exists is itself a form of worker abuse, but at least it now appears doomed (the bill has overwhelming support in the Senate and, of course, the Oval Office) in matters of sexual harassment.
Also yesterday, the White House released a long and detailed set of rules and policies to bolster workers and unions, which was developed by its Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. The new rules will help foster worker organizing among those federal employees who are not now union members, and at companies that are recipients of federal grants. The report comes in the wake of President Biden’s proclamations that employees of federal contractors must be paid an hourly wage of at least $15, and that workers on every project funded to the tune of at least $35 million by the recently passed infrastructure bill must receive the prevailing construction wage on public projects in that region—which invariably is a relatively high unionized construction-worker wage.
Such legislation and administration policies are all to the good, but they don’t address what the White House task force identified as a primary cause of the shrinkage of the American middle class—the evisceration of the labor movement from a third of the workforce in the mid-20th century to a bare 6 percent in the private sector today. That, in turn, is largely due to the erosion of the National Labor Relations Act, which once protected workers seeking to form a union from management abuse and discharge. Returning that act to its original purpose of helping workers would require enacting the considerable rewrite of the NLRA contained in the PRO Act, which has majority support in the House but can’t pass the Senate so long as M&S (or is it S&M?) refuse to dump the filibuster. In the face of congressional inaction, the newly Bidenized National Labor Relations Board appears determined to at least enforce what remains of the act in the pro-worker spirit that its authors intended.
It’s not that popular support for unions is lacking—on the contrary, according to Gallup, it’s at a 50-year high, with the labor movement now claiming a 68 percent approval rating. Seeking to divert that support, and to expand the Republicans’ hold on many working-class voters beyond the calumnies of cultural politics, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has recently proposed resurrecting the TEAM Act, a mid-1990s brainstorm of Noted Workers’ Friend Newt Gingrich. Rubio’s bill would allow employers to establish company “unions” of their own in which employers and employees would jointly develop policies, so long as the employer really liked them. If employers didn’t like them, they could, of course, just abolish the “union,” as Jamelle Bouie notes in his Times column today. Bill Clinton rightly vetoed the 1990s bill as the “worker empowerment” scam that it was, but now Rubio has sought to bring it back. It’s a useful reminder that the Republicans’ Trumpification doesn’t mean that the party has abandoned all of its dubious heritage. It’s still the place where a lot of bad ideas live on.
