Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
President Joe Biden reacts after signing an executive order on project labor agreements at the Ironworkers Local 5 in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, February 4, 2022.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration delivered a road map for advancing American workers’ rights in its Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment report. Headed by Vice President Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, and composed of officials from 20 federal agencies, the task force recommended dozens of actions the federal government should take to promote union organizing and collective-bargaining rights through executive action rather than legislation. The report signals how the administration intends to make good on its commitment to increase worker power to reduce inequality and grow the middle class.
Why executive action? After all, legislation is the way to cement gains for workers and their unions. And promoting collective bargaining is still a bedrock policy goal of the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law seen at the time as workers’ Magna Carta. But since then, anti-union amendments and court decisions have hobbled the rights guaranteed in the NLRA, often making the law a barrier, not an aid, to workers trying to exercise their right to freedom of association.
The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, passed by the House and pending in the Senate, would dramatically improve protections for workers who try to form unions. The task force report notes that support for unions runs high, both in the general public (68 percent) and especially among Black women (82 percent), Black men (80 percent) and Hispanics (75 percent). But now and for the foreseeable future, 41 U.S. senators who might represent less than 20 percent of the American population can block passage of the PRO Act—unless, as appears highly unlikely, there are 51 senators willing to scrap the filibuster.
Anti-union amendments and court decisions have hobbled the rights guaranteed in the NLRA, often making the law a barrier, not an aid to workers.
Facing this reality, the only way for the Biden administration to amplify workers’ bargaining power is through executive orders, with the hope that they can later be codified in filibuster-proof legislation. This is how President Kennedy’s 1962 executive order granting collective-bargaining rights to federal employees became law under President Carter in 1978.
The White House ordered the 20 executive branch agencies in the task force to dig into their governing legislation, rules, regulations, and practices to identify changes that would help workers organize and bargain. Their prospecting developed recommendations for actions spanning the many roles that federal agencies play—as employers, as contractors that hire private-sector providers, as grant-givers, and as models of healthy labor-management relations.
For starters, the report calls on agencies throughout the executive branch to let union representatives meet with newly hired federal employees at the worksite to explain what the union does, review the collective-bargaining agreement, and invite them to become union members.
Elsewhere, the report notes the endemic problem of high turnover of federally hired firefighters on public lands and urges a solution that relies on a shift to a more permanent workforce that can organize and bargain on a sustained basis, rather than seasonal workers. Why shouldn’t these essential workers get better wages and benefits through collective bargaining, like their highly organized counterparts at the municipal level nationwide?
Stressing communication and information, the report recommends that unions have greater access to employees of private contractors providing services on federal property such as military bases, national parks, and federal buildings, with particular attention to food service providers. Federal agencies can discourage anti-union campaigns by contractors when workers try to organize, in part by prohibiting them from charging the government for costs associated with anti-union lawyers and consultants, while agreeing to bear the costs related to collective bargaining, labor-management cooperation initiatives, and union stewards’ representational activities.
When contractors’ employees organize, a first-contract arbitration system would provide a backstop to collective bargaining if the employer and union can’t come to an agreement. The report also encourages project labor agreements providing for union representation, no work stoppages, and high-quality performance in federally funded construction projects overseen by almost every federal agency.
The report also speaks to private-sector employers generally, whether or not they are federal contractors. For example, it recommends that the Department of Labor reinvigorate reporting requirements relaxed under the Trump administration on “persuader” activity by anti-union lawyers and consultants like those engaged by Amazon and Starbucks in recent campaigns. Putting sunshine on the sums companies spend resisting their employees’ organizing efforts—money that could go toward better wages and working conditions—can help workers overcome consultants’ anti-union pressure tactics.
The report is not a “101 Ways to Build Unions” blueprint, but it’s close: In all, the new report identifies nearly 70 discrete actions that federal agencies can take to enhance workers’ organizing and bargaining power. And unlike many government reports that splash and sink, the task force requires a follow-up in six months from each federal agency, documenting exactly what it has done to implement the task force’s recommendations.
The anti-union industry has already launched a campaign to vilify the report, calling it a “union wish-list” and “payback to union bosses.” But after decades of having their own wishes granted, employers should not now be allowed to block workers and their unions from turning these policy proposals into an enduring framework for workers’ rights.
