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LABOR LOVIN' PRESIDENT.
President Obama’s unveiling today of his administration’s Task Force on Middle Class Working Families is the most unambiguous statement yet from the president of his support for unions. Surrounded by union leaders from both the AFL-CIO and Change To Win (which generated the idea for the task force some months ago) and by Vice-President Biden, who will chair the task force, Obama delivered comments were even more emphatic than his official actions.
“I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem,” the president said. “To me, it’s part of the solution.”
Lest anyone miss the point, he added, “You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor union.”
But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an American president has ever made.
The task force, whose executive director will be Biden’s economic adviser, Jared Bernstein (formerly of the Economic Policy Institute and the most liberal of the new administration’s major economists), will be comprised of the Secretaries of Labor, Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services, as well the directors of the Economic Council (Larry Summers), the Domestic Policy Council (Melody Barnes), the OMB (Peter Orszag) and the Council of Economic Advisers (Christinea Romer). Its first full meeting will come late next month in Philadelphia, on the topic of green jobs. The task force’s goals, according to its website, include “restoring labor standards, including workplace safety,” “helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes” and “protecting retirement security.”
In conjunction with announcing the task force, Obama also issued three executive orders on labor issues: one requiring federal contractors to offer jobs to their current workers when receiving new contracts; the second preventing payment to federal contractors for any funds they spend opposing their workers’ attempts to organize; and the third repealing a Bush administration order requiring federal contractors to post notices telling workers how they can withhold dues payments from the union representing them if they don’t like the union’s politics.
The first order comports closely to some municipal “worker retention” ordinances that various living-wage advocacy groups have persuaded city and county governments to adopt over the past decade. In weeks to come, labor leaders expect Obama to sign more labor-backed executive orders, including one to require project labor agreements between contractors and construction unions on federally-funded infrastructure projects.
Probably the most significant part of today’s proceedings is Obama’s observation that a strong labor movement is essential to building a strong middle class. It’s certainly a historically grounded assertion: The only time in American history that median household income increased at the identical level that productivity increased was the period from 1947 to 1973, when both rates increased by 104 percent. Not coincidentally, this was the only time in American history when union labor constituted more than a quarter of the work force. Over the past decade, with the unionized percentage of the private-sector workforce reduced to single digits, productivity increases have enriched only the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, according to the work of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.
But it’s not just the historical accuracy of Obama’s remarks that is notable, however much they represent a departure from the practice of his predecessor. What’s really notable here is that Obama is publicly, as president, laying the basis for his case for the Employee Free Choice Act, though his public push for the bill is still to come. A number of union leaders have recently told me that they expect the bill to begin to move through congress this spring, and they sound relatively optimistic that they can get to the magic number of 60 in the Senate. With his comments today, Obama certainly has given them a basis for their optimism.
--Harold Meyerson
COMMENTS (11)
Mickey Kaus just had a stroke.
Posted by: CaptBackslap | January 30, 2009 11:00 PM
He's not the first labor-lovin' President. Abe Lincoln had a couple of nice things to say on the subject:
*Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
* If a man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar!
And then there's these:
If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The American labor movement has consistently demonstrated its devotion to the public interest. It is, and has been, good for all America.
John F. Kennedy
Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of the right to join the union of their choice.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every advance in this half-century: Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education... one after another- came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
Jimmy Carter
Anyone got any to add to this?
Posted by: PHJ | January 31, 2009 6:36 PM
Didn't Woodrow Wilson also invite class-collaborationist labor union officials like Samuel Gompers to sit on federal government committees next to Big Business folks--at the same time Woodrow Wilson was imprisoning anti-war IWW union activists and anti-war Socialist Party Leader Eugene V. Debs?
Large numbers of working-class people in the USA are still being laid-off at the same time the Obama administration continues to spend U.S. tax money to wage war in the Middle East-- instead of immediately setting up some kind of emergency public works job program under the control of U.S. labor movement activists.
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