Sometime next year, the Ford Motor Company will begin to produce electric trucks at BlueOval City, a sprawling manufacturing complex in an impoverished rural area of western Tennessee. The multibillion-dollar project, which received a federal loan through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden signed in 2021, has already created thousands of construction jobs that pay substantially more than locals are accustomed to earning. Landing a job at BlueOval City “changed my life,” one worker recently said. Another was able to begin the process of buying her first home, a plan she’d delayed for years.
As a report published by the Center for American Progress noted, these workers were hired under a project-labor agreement, a collective-bargaining contract that requires construction projects to pay employees union-level wages and benefits. Inserting prevailing wage standards and other worker-friendly rules into domestic-spending programs is one of the reasons that many scholars and union officials have come to view Joe Biden as the most pro-labor President since Franklin Roosevelt, a designation he has proudly embraced. And yet awareness of these policies hasn’t always filtered down to the rank and file. Employees at BlueOval City interviewed in the CAP report praised Ford for investing in their region, but none thanked President Biden, whose role seemed to escape their notice. According to the report, “Workers are inclined to support everyone associated with the project yet likely to need additional education to understand the role that politicians who supported it played.”
Failing to receive credit for implementing policies that benefit workers is unlikely to have any significant political fallout for Biden in Tennessee, a state whose eleven Electoral College votes are all but certain to go to Donald Trump in November. But it could have enormous consequences in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—to the point of deciding the election. In 2016, the defection of many blue-collar voters and union members in those states was arguably the decisive factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Biden clearly understands this. When he travelled to Michigan last fall to support the United Auto Workers strike, he was clearly seeking to set himself apart not only from Trump but also from Democratic leaders who took the support of organized labor for granted while promoting trade deals that cost many blue-collar jobs.
“You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now,” Biden proclaimed through a bullhorn on the picket line, the first time any President has engaged in such an act. That gesture helped him win the early endorsement of many union leaders, including Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, who was in the audience at Biden’s State of the Union address last month. But, as Jeff Stein, of the Washington Post, recently reported, from Lansing, it remains unclear whether rank-and-file workers will follow suit, because some disagree with Biden’s policies on other issues, and because the apprenticeship funds, federal loans, and clean-energy subsidies that his Administration has steered to Michigan, such as those for two new electric-battery plants funded, in part, through the Inflation Reduction Act, aren’t always recognized as a reason that unions in the state are thriving. A worker who had just joined the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters, after completing an apprenticeship, and was making almost double his previous salary, told Stein, “I don’t see really how politics affects my life or this job.” As Stein noted, although Biden won union households in Michigan by twenty-five points in 2020, a recent Fox News poll showed his lead among such voters had shrunk to twelve per cent, an alarming development in a state where many Arab Americans who’d supported him four years ago may not do so this year, because of his backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Another factor that may explain why Biden isn’t getting more credit is the scarce attention that the media pays to labor issues and, particularly, to the records of the officials he has placed in charge of government agencies whose mission is to protect workers’ rights. Among these officials is Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency, formed in 1935, that is charged with remedying unfair labor practices. (The general counsel is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and serves a four-year term. There is also a five-member adjudicative body, whose members are appointed and confirmed, and serve five-year terms, with one member’s term expiring each year.) Biden appointed Abruzzo in 2021, after firing Peter Robb, a Trump official who earned the wrath of many unions for seeming to favor employers over workers. Robb insisted, for example, that Uber drivers should be classified as independent contractors, rather than employees, and therefore be excluded from federal labor-law protections.
During the past few years, Abruzzo has issued a stream of memos to the agency’s field offices and to regional directors designed to hold companies that engage in unfair labor practices accountable. In one, she took aim at “captive audience meetings,” mandatory gatherings that companies routinely organize to dissuade employees from joining unions. In another, she affirmed that employees who are unlawfully dismissed for exercising their collective-bargaining rights—another routine practice—should be compensated not only for back pay but also for other costs, such as medical bills they might have accrued after losing their work-issued health insurance. As critics of the system point out, the N.L.R.B.’s ability to stop unfair practices is limited by its small budget and staff and by the fact that it lacks the authority to impose financial penalties on employers who violate the law. (A bill introduced in 2021 called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which President Biden endorsed, would have changed this, but it failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.) To become legally binding, Abruzzo’s memos must also be approved by the N.L.R.B.’s board, which can take time. But her tenure, along with Biden’s appointment of three union lawyers to the board, has had clear effects. Last year, in a case involving Cemex, a building-supply company, the agency ruled that if a majority of workers sign union cards the company must either recognize the union or petition the N.L.R.B. for an election within two weeks. (In the past, companies have often stalled such elections while threatening and punishing workers to thwart organizing drives.) The decision has spurred a thirty-five-per-cent rise in union-election petitions since last October. The agency’s interventions on behalf of workers have also risen sharply; according to one analysis, the N.L.R.B. ordered companies to reinstate more workers who had been illegally fired during Biden’s first year in office than during Trump’s entire Presidency.
The N.L.R.B. did make headlines earlier this year, after Elon Musk’s company SpaceX sued it in a federal court in Texas, claiming that the agency’s structure is unconstitutional and that it should not have the power to impose certain penalties on a company without a jury trial. (The suit has been transferred to a federal court in California.) The lawsuit was filed shortly after the N.L.R.B. issued a complaint against SpaceX for allegedly illegally dismissing eight employees who had aired concerns about workplace conditions. Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s—companies that the N.L.R.B. has cited dozens of times for allegedly engaging in unlawful union-busting—have since made similar arguments during hearings. The dispute could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, where SpaceX might receive a sympathetic hearing from the conservative super-majority. When I met with Abruzzo, she dismissed the suit as a “distraction” aimed at diverting attention from the records of the companies. “These are violators of the law that are trying to stop us from enforcing the law,” she said.
Biden’s pro-labor achievements may also be underrecognized simply because most American workers, even though they benefit from them, don’t belong to unions. In 2023, the proportion of the U.S. workforce that is unionized fell to ten per cent, the lowest level since 1983. (The figure was 6.9 per cent for private-sector employees.) Paradoxically, however, unions have seldom been more popular. In a Gallup poll taken last August, two-thirds of Americans said that they approved of them. A more recent Pew survey found that fifty-nine per cent of the public believes that the decline of unions has been bad for working people; a majority also believes that it has been bad for the country. Biden’s tenure has coincided with a wave of organizing activity at companies such as Amazon and Starbucks, which has demonstrated how frustrated and undervalued many employees feel. The ferment suggests that, like defending reproductive rights, running on an agenda of empowering workers to exercise their collective-bargaining rights would be a winning strategy. Several labor advocates I spoke to said that they wished the issue would feature more prominently in Biden’s messaging.
The President might also benefit from reminding voters that, the last time he ran against Trump, a lot of workers in warehouses and meatpacking plants were getting sick and dying while the government did nothing for them. When the pandemic began, the Secretary of Labor was Eugene Scalia, a corporate lawyer who had spent years trying to dismantle government regulations. Before Trump appointed him to run the department, Scalia had been a particularly strenuous critic of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a Department of Labor agency. Forty-two per cent of the leadership positions at OSHA, including that of the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, were left vacant during his tenure. In the first six months of the pandemic, OSHA received more than ten thousand complaints from workers alleging unsafe conditions; it issued just two citations.
Under Biden—who appointed Douglas Parker, a former staff attorney with the United Mine Workers of America, to head OSHA—it has been a different story. “The Biden Administration has expanded workers’ safety rights and stepped up enforcement of federal job-safety laws more than any Administration since President Carter,” Eric Frumin, the health-and-safety director at the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of unions, told me. Frumin has been struck by the agency’s willingness to take on billion-dollar corporations such as Dollar General, which OSHA recently classified as a severe violator, and Amazon, which the agency served with six citations for exposing workers to ergonomic hazards at an array of fulfillment centers. (The company appealed the citations.) The pattern led the agency to take the unusual step of requesting “enterprise-wide relief” from Amazon. Frumin recently created a spreadsheet, drawn from an online database of enforcement cases on OSHA’s Web site, which lists all the major citations that the agency had issued to companies for violating health-and-safety standards in recent years. In 2023, the data showed, there were a hundred and forty-four “significant” citations, which carry fines of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars or more. That’s more than the total number of such penalties issued during Trump’s first three years in office.
None of this may be enough to win over voters on the left who are angry about Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, especially younger voters who supported him decisively in 2020 but now appear to be wavering. According to a Times/Siena College poll, nearly three-fourths of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine disapprove of Biden’s policy on the Gaza conflict. Yet polls also show that members of Gen Z are overwhelmingly pro-union, a fact apparent in the organizing drives spearheaded by young baristas at Starbucks stores in recent years. When faced with a choice between Biden and Trump, will these voters come around? Among those hoping that they will is Nikhil Goyal, a former senior policy adviser for Senator Bernie Sanders and the author of “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.” Goyal has been taken aback by how little even highly educated young people outside of government seem to know about the Administration’s efforts to advance the interests of working people. In 2021, he participated directly in the efforts to pass the Administration’s Build Back Better agenda. The White House worked “virtually in lockstep” with Sanders and other Democrats to include strong pro-labor language in the legislation, Goyal told me. Some of it had to be watered down, to satisfy the Senate parliamentarian, who restricted provisions that did not have clear budgetary effects. Even so, a lot of language slipped in that has made a real difference to workers who perform an array of essential (and grossly undercompensated) jobs, both in sweeping legislation, such as Build Back Better, and in other directives, such as a provision in the American Families Plan that raised the minimum wage of early-childhood educators to fifteen dollars an hour.
Goyal told me that he hopes young voters who care about social justice “can hold several positions at the same time: celebrating President Biden for being the most pro-labor President in modern history and being critical of the Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East.” He added, “If we don’t do that, we will be condemned to a Trump Presidency that will obliterate the progress we have achieved on the domestic front for workers.” ♦
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