At a splashy event in Philadelphia last weekend, the AFL-CIO, America’s largest union coalition, announced its endorsement of Joe Biden for president in 2024. You may notice that the election is still 17 months away. This was the earliest endorsement in the AFL-CIO’s history, amounting to an all-in bet by organized labor that the interests of the Democratic president are identical to its own. The problem with this is not so much that labor might have decided to endorse a Republican – whoever that party’s candidate is, they are sure to despise the concept of working-class empowerment – but rather the fact that the endorsement is an implicit acceptance of the status quo.
These union leaders believe that the Biden White House as currently constituted is the best they can hope to get. Indeed, they are overjoyed by what they have gotten already. It is this lack of ambition that is the labor movement’s biggest flaw. They have been beaten down for so long that they have lost their ability to believe that the world they deserve will ever be real. This is a sort of trauma, induced by a decades-long decline in union power. By settling for what they have, unfortunately, they have forsaken their leverage to ask for more.
At his speech accepting the endorsement, Biden declared himself “the most pro-union president in American history”. That may be a bit much – a few generations ago, even Republican presidents supported unions, so the standards were much higher – but it is certainly true that Biden is the most pro-union president of the past half century.
He signed a $36bn bill to save union pensions; his Covid relief and infrastructure bills were boons to union workers; his nominee for NLRB general counsel has been tirelessly pushing invaluable labor law reforms; and he has, to a degree not seen before in my lifetime, used his bully pulpit to speak out in favor of union drives, in ways that Clinton or Obama never would have. The AFL-CIO feels that its voice is being listened to in the White House more than they can ever recall.
On the other hand, the single biggest labor issue of Biden’s first term was the potential national rail strike, which he dealt with by crushing the workers’ right to strike and imposing a contract on them that they didn’t want. But hey, what’s the occasional knife in the back between friends?
Seventy-one percent of Americans say they approve of labor unions. Only 40% of Americans say they approve of Joe Biden. Unions are more popular than the president, by a long mile. In fact, the popularity of organized labor is at a 60-year high. This is due not to the AFL-CIO, nor to the White House, but to a realization that swept working people across the nation as the Covid pandemic paralyzed society: your job does not care if you live or die. Your boss will not save you from disaster. There is no safety net, except for unions. That’s it.
The wave of interest in labor organizing that has swept through coffee shops, warehouses and college campuses is fueled by a widening, bone-deep understanding that solidarity is the only shield against capitalism’s scorching rays. I can attest, from years spent traveling America as a labor reporter, that this grassroots enthusiasm is real. It is the job of the labor movement’s institutions to turn that enthusiasm into the maximum possible gain. That’s where the malfunction is. We have an army ready to fight the class war led by generals who have been trained to assume that it is unwinnable.
Unions do not have to endorse the Biden agenda. Unions can set the agenda. Now is not the time to settle. Now is the time to demand. The labor market is strong, the appetite for unions is high and the discontent with inequality is everywhere. This is a time to push the president, not bow and scrape and thank him for what he has done. Working people are begging to become a part of a strong labor movement.
If the AFL-CIO and its unions could find within themselves the ambition to take advantage of current conditions to organize 10 or 20 million new union members, they could quite literally reverse the post-Reagan inequality crisis. Labor’s early endorsement of Biden is meant to enable unions to start mobilizing their political operation now – but that mobilization is also their leverage. They could demand that Biden commit to federal funding for union organizing and to abolishing the filibuster so that the labor law reforms of the PRO Act might actually have a chance to pass, rather than just serving as a campaign slogan. In short, they could make the building of the labor movement itself their central political demand.
Biden will be out of power in a few years, but a labor movement with 10 million new union members would transform the entire American political landscape for decades to come.
Instead of taking this tack, the AFL-CIO has committed to organize only a paltry 100,000 new union members a year (which would ensure the continuing decline of union density) and handed its support to Biden in exchange for the gifts he has already given. It is not a strategy that will ever be mistaken for a master class in boldly seizing the initiative.
History’s greatest labor leaders have not been conservative pragmatists in search of marginal gain. They have been people whose outrage over the injustices of the present fueled them to accomplish things that others dismissed as unrealistic. Too much time spent inside of existing institutions seems to extinguish this spirit. The next generation of working-class heroes is out in the world right now – working. It will be up to them to force the labor movement to thrive in spite of itself, long after the “most pro-union president in history” is gone.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor journalist based in New York
