Biden Is the Most Pro-Labor President Since F.D.R. Will It Matter in November?

[Uncle Joe]

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.”

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.”


https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/biden-is-the-most-pro-labor-president-since-fdr-will-it-matter-in-november

[mopinko]

1. us older brothers and sisters need to explain to the younguns about davis-bacon.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Davis-Bacon Explained - LCPtracker

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