President Joe Biden vowed his administration would be the most pro-union in U.S. history. But in a labor stronghold that has become a symbol for blue-collar defections from the Democratic Party, workers say they don’t feel the wind at their backs from the White House.
Macomb County, Michigan, is home to an old guard of auto manufacturing tradesmen and a new generation of young organizers in the service and cannabis industries. Located just north of Detroit, it’s a place like many others where soaring inflation has eaten up wage gains and the pandemic forced some employees to shoulder novel on-the-job health risks without the safety net of paid sick days.
Biden’s failure to deliver on campaign promises such as a federal minimum wage hike makes his union cheerleading ring hollow for people like Alyssa Coakley, a 25-year-old Starbucks Corp. employee who led a successful effort to unionize her café in Macomb’s Clinton Township. “When it comes to labor, it’s been a little bit performative. Like, what more are you doing for us?” she said.
The lack of enthusiasm from workers like Coakley holds gloomy implications for Biden and the Democrats in the November midterm elections. Macomb is part of a newly redrawn congressional district likely to flip to Republicans, potentially helping the GOP take control of the House.
Biden has long touted organized labor as a force for good and has repeatedly credited unions for building the nation’s middle class. But the lack of policy actions targeted at unions mean the president and his party are not likely to get credit for a nascent resurgence in the nation’s labor movement — nor reap much political advantage from it.
The jolt of organizing energy that Biden has failed to harness has come from baristas, warehouse workers and others in the service sector, whose low-wage jobs are replacing reliable, higher-paid ones on assembly lines in Macomb and elsewhere.
“There's a lot of righteous anger on the part of Democratic voters, in particular union voters who tend to vote Democrat," said Celine McNicholas, director of policy and government affairs at Washington think tank EPI, who views the president's labor policies as helpful to workers.
That sentiment underscores how hard it will be for Democrats to rebuild their deep historic ties with union voters, in the midterms and beyond.
Union bastion
Macomb County, which encompasses parts of Detroit’s suburbs and a swath of farm country, has a long history as a bastion of union power. In the 1930s, successful strikes at General Motors Co. plants in the region helped ignite a nationwide organizing revolution.
Well-paid jobs at auto factories built an economic foundation that allowed the area to grow to about 880,000 people. As globalization and automation transformed car production, though, many of those union jobs vanished.
Macomb was thrust into the political spotlight in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan stunned Democrats with the inroads he made with union voters that upended allegiances dating to the New Deal. The county became a symbol of that shift when a pollster’s analysis found that Reagan got about two-thirds of the local vote in 1984, almost a mirror image of Democrat John Kennedy's 1960 win. The pollster, Stan Greenberg, concluded that these Democrats no longer saw the party as representing the working class.
Today, in a Macomb County less dependent on the auto industry, much of the organizing fight falls to workers like Coakley.
Her effort is part of a national movement of more than 200 Starbucks stores that have voted to unionize this year. She and her colleagues are asking for more stable hours, better safety conditions and higher wages. She makes $16 an hour after working at Starbucks for 6 years, and wants more than $20 an hour.
While Coakley says that Biden's pro-labor stance is better than the prior administration, she and her co-workers say they’ve faced numerous hurdles from Starbucks to organizing and hammering out a labor agreement — the same kinds of obstacles they would have dealt with under any president. A Starbucks spokesman declined to comment beyond the company's public statements that it's “committed to meeting in-person with union representatives for the purpose of good faith bargaining."
Coakley’s experience shapes her priorities as a voter.
“Having people in power that actually care about workers’ issues — that's really important to me,” Coakley said. “Because we're the backbone of this country.”
‘Bare minimum’
Biden has attempted to make a more favorable playing field for workers like Coakley. He has revoked several Trump-era policies seen as antagonistic to labor and has made symbolic overtures such as meeting with an Amazon.com Inc. union organizer at the White House.
He's also implemented some suggestions from his worker task force that said "urgent action" is needed to make it easier to form a union.
White House spokesman Chris Meagher said in a statement that Biden “consistently demonstrates that worker power is at the core of his administration’s economic vision to rebuild the economy from the bottom up and middle out.”
Some of the president’s legislative wins — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief measure and a large health, tax and climate law — benefit working people.
But those sprawling packages weren’t primarily aimed at addressing the concerns of unions and their members. And on those types of initiatives, Biden has been less successful.
A proposal to raise the minimum wage was thwarted in the Senate and hasn't been revived. The PRO Act, the biggest pro-labor legislation in half a century — is stalled in Congress.
And though the National Labor Relations Board — Biden's labor enforcement arm — has gotten extra funding and labor-friendly appointees under Biden, it still doesn't have enough staff. Adjusting for inflation, the organization's budget is down 25% in the past decade.
That makes it harder for the agency to protect workers who are trying to organize, including service sector employees who sometimes don’t see much of a future in their low-wage jobs.
“This is not a career trajectory job for me," said Dylan Skinner, a colleague of Coakley's at Starbucks who's part of the unionization effort. “People move on and go to college, go to different jobs."
Instead, he’s looking for the "bare minimum" when it comes to scheduling stability, input with management and wages.
Grassroots power
Service sector unionization efforts like those at Starbucks are fueled by anger over risks taken during the pandemic and newfound leverage in a tight labor market.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler says this latest burst of organizing differs from earlier eras.
“This time, the power is actually at the grassroots more than ever before,” Shuler said.
Shuler and her organization support Biden and are campaigning across swing states, including Michigan, ahead of the midterms. But she acknowledged that many workers just don’t see the benefits of what Biden has done for them.
“That’s one of the challenges we have, just connecting all these powerful investments that have been made” to “how that’s impacting peoples’ lives,” she said.
That is no easy task, given the difficulties organizers face that are outside of Biden's control. About an hour and a half drive south from Macomb County, Mike Davisson and Kyle Sell unionized their Lume Cannabis store last month after the company cut benefits and closed several stores unexpectedly. While it signals the potential for an organizing boom in an industry worth billions in Michigan that's been rapidly unionizing in other parts of the country, the vote at their store was closer than they expected at 10-9.
Michigan is a right-to-work state, making it tougher for unions to take hold. Lume executives told workers that their vacation days and tips were on the table if they unionized, according to what colleagues told Davisson, weakening support on election day, he said.
“At Lume we value our employees and recognize our team members are a critical aspect to our success," Lume Cannabis President Doug Hellyar said in an emailed statement, calling the allegations "completely false and without merit.”
“We're really just asking to be treated like people with lives, and who have bills to pay," said Davisson, 40.
‘Sign of respect’
After former President Barack Obama won Macomb County twice, former President Donald Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in the county by 12 percentage points, helping him eke out a narrow win in the state. Biden performed better in Macomb than Clinton, but still lost it to Trump.
Voters from traditional manufacturing unions may be more willing to cut Biden and his allies slack, given that he's been visiting plants touting trade rules and onshore jobs.
“As long as the economy and auto sector stays fairly strong, I don't think they're going to be looking" to vote outside of the Democratic party, said Bill Peterson, the recently retired coordinator for the skilled trades department at United Auto Workers.
And yet Trump's pledges to renegotiate trade deals, revive manufacturing towns and curb immigration resonated with the area’s white, non-college educated voters — messages that have been adopted by many of the Trump acolytes on the ballot in November.
Ed Bruley, chairman of the Macomb County Democratic Party, noted that Biden campaigned in the area in 2020, but has yet to visit as president despite making other appearances in Michigan. Bruley said cabinet officials including Labor Secretary Marty Walsh have not stopped by, either. Trump, however, staged a rally in April. That may matter in a county that in the past has been lavished with attention by national politicians.
"All I know is they don't show up here, and they need to show up here. It's a sign of respect and it's a sign that you want to make friends," Bruley said.
Meanwhile, as campaign season heats up, Coakley is speaking with Starbucks employees at five other stores that could be next to unionize.
"It really just starts with the workers," she said. “It doesn't really matter at the end of the day who's in power.”
