Big Labor thinks they put Joe Biden in the White House and now want their payoff.
Last year, labor groups spent $70.7 million on direct contributions to Democratic candidates and party committees, but that’s a fraction of the $244.8 million labor organizations contributed in total during the election cycle. That doesn’t include the $166 million labor gave to outside groups or the contributions labor unions made in staffing campaigns, manning phone banks, and canvassing.
So how will Biden pay back his union friends?
The Biden administration is planning a radical revolution, hoping to tip the balance between management and labor from a roughly equal playing field to a decided tilt toward organized labor.
Biden has embraced a new plan “that would make Big Labor a key player in virtually every federal agency in a bid to revive fading labor unions,” according to the Washington Examiner.
In sharing the keys to the federal government with the AFL-CIO and other labor groups, a new report from [Vice President Kamala] Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that boosting union membership to about 70 million, or more than half of the nation’s total, full-time, adult workforce, is the goal.
Across dozens of pages and some 70 recommendations, Harris’s task force vowed to open the door fully to union organizing in every corner of life and block efforts by private companies to remain union-free.
This isn’t a stealth takeover of the government by unions. It’s making unions a senior partner in the radicalization of America.
“We had the ability for people to come in and give testimony on what they want to see in strengthening workers’ rights,” Walsh said. “This is a very strong, worker-centered document.”
The report argues that a decades-long drop in union membership has coincided with a rising share of income going to the top 10% of earners. It further says that most Americans have a favorable impression of unions and would join one if given the option in a vote. Yet the Labor Department reported last month that only 10.3% of workers belonged to a union in 2021, down from 20.1% in 1983.
They’re not even trying to hide the fact that this “report” was written by top AFL-CIO lobbyists. The plan is simple—make union membership compulsory and blackball any worker or company that refuses to play ball. We’re already seeing that with the new executive order mandating project labor agreements, or PLAs, for all federal contracts in excess of $35 million.
PLAs control the terms and conditions of employment of workers on specific construction projects, including wages, hours, working conditions, dispute resolution methods, and by banning work stoppages and strikes. PLAs are known as “umbrella” or “uber” collective bargaining agreements, because PLA contracts generally exist on top of any specific union trade agreements.
This is far worse than the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws that most federal contractors must adhere to. Some regions may have less worker-friendly collective bargaining agreements but would be forced to abide by the PLA, making the bidding process far less competitive.
In a time of higher inflation, the Biden administration’s plans would dramatically increase the costs for contractors, which would then be passed down to the consumer. But Biden owed Big Labor big time and the payoff will hurt everyone.
