Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Joe Biden speaking at the Plumbers Union Local 27 training center during his presidential campaign, October 10, 2020, in Erie, Pennsylvania
Joe Biden said what? That unions “give you a stronger voice for your health, your safety, higher wages, protections from racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Unions lift up workers, both union and non-union, and especially Black and brown workers.”
And he said this in a video he addressed to the largely Black workers who are now voting whether to unionize the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse of Amazon—by various metrics, America’s most powerful corporation, and one that’s been relentlessly hostile to its employees’ efforts to unionize.
The president went after that kind of employer hostility, too. “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda,” he said, in full knowledge that these are practices that Amazon has engaged in while fighting its Bessemer workers, as a Prospect article by Luis Feliz Leon and a Prospect interview by Steven Greenhouse have documented.
I have three takeaways from Biden’s intervention in this potentially epochal battle. First, Biden’s video goes well beyond any pro-union statement that any other president has uttered. Industrial unionism thrived during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, but the height of FDR’s pro-labor activity was his decision to say and do nothing during the defining labor battles of the ’30s—refusing, for instance, to send in the troops to end the San Francisco general strike of 1934 or the autoworkers’ occupation of General Motors’ Flint, Michigan, factories in 1937. Compared to his presidential predecessors’ willingness to use the Army to break strikes, Roosevelt’s silence signaled a new direction in public policy, but he didn’t want his fingerprints on or even near that new direction. Nor was union revitalization a priority of the FDR White House; the historic legislation of 1933 and 1935 that ensured workers’ collective-bargaining rights was more a product of street heat and congressional initiative than presidential demands. As to FDR’s rhetoric, there is no documentation that he ever said, “If I were a factory worker, the first thing I would do would be to join a union”—though the CIO emblazoned that quote on countless signs and banners during its organizing drives. As to FDR’s Democratic successors, none ever intervened in organizing campaigns, and, quoting Yale’s Jennifer Klein, Jamelle Bouie notes in today’s New York Times that both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton viewed unions as increasingly superfluous dinosaurs from an earlier age.
My second takeaway is that Biden’s video makes clear he understands that today’s working class is heavily Black, brown, and female. I had believed he understood that, but some of his extemporaneous remarks while campaigning last year—reeling off the unions that came to his mind, he came up with the unions of his youth (boilermakers?)—suggested he had the proletariat of 1940 lodged firmly in his brain. Clearly, he also has a pretty good sense of the proletariat of 2021.
And third, many of the anti-union tactics that he condemned in his video are both routine and legal, thanks in part to decades of court rulings that allowed management to roll over labor. Proscribing them requires congressional enactment of the PRO Act, which in turn requires having the Senate ax the filibuster. That’s the legislative means Biden will have to embrace to realize the ends of enhanced worker power and a more equal economy to which he is pledged.
