As Joe Biden gets ready to leave the White House Jan. 20, one verdict is clear: He kept his often-repeated pledge to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history. For four years, at every level of his administration, he and his appointees went out of their way to support unions and union labor.
Biden’s labor record started with appointees. On Day One, he fired the previous general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board and nominated union attorney Jennifer Abruzzo for the job. She proved to be the most aggressive protector of workers’ rights the agency had seen in living memory, and reached deep into case law to justify more pro-worker interpretations of the National Labor Relations Act. For labor secretary, he appointed former Boston Laborers union leader Marty Walsh, followed by former California labor commissioner Julie Su. To lead OSHA, he appointed James Frederick, a longtime worker safety advocate at the United Steelworkers. To enforce the labor provisions of U.S. trade agreements, he named AFL-CIO trade policy expert Thea Lee, and made the former AFL-CIO policy director Celeste Drake the first-ever “Made in America” director at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Biden also signed legislation to bail out struggling union pensions, which will have a lasting impact on 2 million union members.
When Biden said he wanted to “build back better,” that translated to “build it union.” An early Biden executive order required the use of all-union project labor agreements on federal construction projects over $35 million. And when his signature infrastructure bill passed — $1.2 trillion over five years to upgrade bridges, highways, rail, transit, ports and airports, water systems, broadband, and more — its federal grants were set up to favor project proposals that would be union-built. The same goes with the CHIPS Act legislation that subsidizes renewal of American semiconductor manufacturing.
Biden couldn’t make Congress pass the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to unionize. But he used executive orders to expand workers rights, including an order that all federal contractors pay at least $15 an hour. He also reversed Trump executive orders that stripped federal workers of certain union rights.
Biden’s labor record wasn’t entirely unblemished. Laborers union members faulted him for revoking a key permit for the Keystone Pipeline that was supposed to bring crude oil from Alberta. And in 2022, he got Congress to pass a bill imposing a contract settlement on 115,000 railroad workers that members of rail unions had voted to reject; it raises wages 24% over five years, but left unfulfilled their demand for paid sick days.
But throughout Biden’s four years in office, he relished opportunities to meet union members, visit union halls, and promote unionization. In pro-union videos and statements, he encouraged Volkswagen workers in Tennessee and Amazon workers in Alabama to unionize. He talked up unions at all four of his State of the Union addresses.
“The middle class built the country,” he said in 2021. “And unions built the middle class.”
Wow.
I guess I imagined he personally blocked that railway strike then, for instance. He may not have been “fully fund the genocide of all workers”-atrocious for labor, but can we stop with the fairy tales?
As a wise anthropologist (Jason Hickel) recently said:
The problem with liberalism is that it rests on a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved. It will always fail, it will always collapse, and this explains everything about our current moment. Liberals try to hold two commitments at once: on the one hand, they are firmly committed to capitalism; on the other, they express support for principles like human rights, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, environment and the rule of law.
This duality is the core of liberalism. But there’s a problem. Capital accumulation requires cheapening labour and nature. This eventually comes into direct conflict with principles like rights and equality. And whenever this conflict appears, the liberal ruling class sides with capital, abandons their lofty principles, and throws workers and nature under the bus. Every. Single. Time. This results in flagrant displays of hypocrisy.
They run on nice-sounding platforms but end up either betraying their promises or actively working against their stated values. They’ll slash public services, bail out banks, imprison journalists, beat up students, expand fracking, coup democratically elected leaders in the global South, bomb liberation movements, fund a genocide – they’ll even trash international law itself – anything that’s needed to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation.
At most, they may try to negotiate mediocre compromises, a few social policies here and there – some abortion rights, a tiny increase in the minimum wage – but nothing that might pose any serious threat to capital accumulation. Thus the soul-crushing slowness of liberal incrementalism. Ultimately they are unwilling to take any of the obvious steps that would actually resolve our urgent social and ecological crises.
This is why nobody trusts liberal politicians. This is why they come across as so fantastically insincere, and even sneering. This is why they feel so spineless and *empty*. The center cannot hold. Liberalism will always collapse, inevitably handing power to fascists, and this is not acceptable. There is only one way to overcome this deadly impasse, and that is to mobilize a socialist alternative. A political movement that can unite the working-classes, overcome capitalism, deliver real economic democracy, and enable us to achieve rapid progress toward social and ecological goals.
As long as we, in labor, keep insisting on believing in the performance art and marketing and stop looking at the problem that the center cannot hold, we will remain imprisoned by the duopoly.