EDITORIAL: Biden is President. The labor movement must demand more than a return to "normal."

by The Editors

Source: Politico

It has been a grim four years for the labor movement.

As of today, a cruel and narcissistic autocrat with delusions of grandeur is no longer President of the United States. Donald Trump’s term in the Presidency was devastating for unions. He began his presidency with a rhetorical crusade against United Steelworkers Local 1999’s president Chuck Jones for daring to criticize Trump’s deal with Carrier to preserve jobs at the plant in Indianapolis. He fought to exterminate labor rights in the federal government and shut down the government for no good reason, forcing millions to work without pay for over a month. His National Labor Relations Board has waged an all out war on workers’ rights and has given the bosses every possible advantage. His pogrom against immigrant workers has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people and allowed bosses to terrify undocumented workers into silence.

The catastrophe that was the Trump presidency was decades in the making, and it is certain that labor isn’t out of the woods yet.

While Joe Biden has a much longer track record of supporting labor unions than Trump -- a low bar to clear -- his support has often been superficial at best. Biden never met a trade deal that he didn’t love, even when they would gut working class communities by offshoring jobs to countries where employers are allowed to inflict harm on their employees however they wish. His support for trade is deeply connected to an American foreign policy consensus that cannot abide countries governing in the interests of the poor and dispossessed. Countries like Honduras or Brasil, whose left-leaning presidents Manuel Zelaya and Dilma Rousseff were removed from office in nominally legal coups with the assistance of the US government in 2009 and 2016 respectively, saw surges of US capital investment flow into them after those coups. Eventually, both countries fell into the thrall of corrupt authoritarians like Juan Orlando Hernández and Jair Bolsonaro, and working people have suffered terribly for it.

This support for right-wing autocrats abroad always entails dubious views on domestic democracy. Biden is no exception to this: his long-standing support for criminal justice policies -- like the notorious 1994 Crime Bill -- that harshly mistreat and oppress Black people in this country -- is well-known. And make no mistake, these are labor issues. Policies that criminalize and terrorize working-class Black communities, and policies creating a carceral state exploiting prison labor, are assaults on working people -- and Biden had a hand in crafting the laws that led to an explosive protest wave in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis.

With his support of brutal tyrants in political office abroad and support of brutal tyrants in police uniforms at home, it isn’t hard to imagine how a Biden presidency would respond to any kind of large-scale disruptive labor insurrection like the ones that birthed the labor movement in its current form, such as the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike or the West Coast Waterfront Strike. Even Biden’s selection of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh as his Secretary of Labor speaks volumes. Although Walsh is an improvement over recent labor secretaries, he is unequivocally a representative of the parts of the labor movement that still hold to the “pure and simple unionism” of Samuel Gompers, rather than the transformative industrial organizing pioneered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s. Slight improvements over the status quo aren’t enough, and we require so much more. 

We are presented with a choice between a return to “normalcy,” or demanding more.  For some, the years prior to Trump’s election were fine: they didn’t feel the devastation felt by many working Americans who were left behind in the recovery from the 2008-2009 financial crisis. For others, “normalcy,” while inadequate, may still be tempting. Millions of working people are suffering as COVID-19 rages through our country, whether from lost wages, unsafe working conditions, lack of sufficient medical care, or some combination of the three. Unionists could be forgiven for falling back into old habits, settling for functioning federal agencies and the hope of judicial appointments as the limit of our ambitions.

The problem is that politics as usual set the stage for the harms done by Donald Trump’s administration. A restoration to the way things were before Trump will do nothing to prevent another autocrat willing to cater to the whims of an ever-hateful right, exterminating whatever tattered shreds of democracy we have left. The other path, the one we must choose if the union movement is to survive, is to fight. Our true enemies may be the bosses seeking to crush our movement, but our opponents must also be those -- including Democrats -- who want us to trim our ambitions to fit their political needs. 

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act represents the largest pro-union overhaul of labor law since the New Deal. But fighting for the PRO Act must only be the beginning. We have to fight for a public sector right to organize, strike, and collectively bargain, for all government workers, from federal employees to the smallest municipality in the country. We have to end “at-will” employment and require bosses to have just cause to fire someone. We have to fight to expand workplace democracy so that all workers are paid enough to lead lives of dignity and safety. Building the right of workers to organize and extending workplace democracy makes more possible: things like universal healthcare, a just transition to a green economy, dismantling a bloated defense budget and war economy, making higher education free for students, and ensuring every child in the US attends a school with small class sizes and a rich curriculum.

It is entirely too easy to say that we need these things. Accomplishing them requires struggle, it requires deliberate investments of resources in popular education, and it requires hard and contentious conversations and debates about what our priorities and values are as a movement. More than anything, we must expand democracy into all spheres of American life, and not just at the ballot box every couple of years. Autocracy in America was not created by Donald Trump’s election. His reign in the White House was a continuation of an authoritarian current that has existed in American life from the very beginning, and only by confronting it do we prevent another catastrophe like the Trump administration.

None of this will come without challenge. But it starts with demanding more: demanding it of our unions, demanding it of the powerful, and demanding it of ourselves. We can’t wait for power through Executive Order or legislative fiat. We have to seize it. Anything less, and we will be speaking about the current labor movement in the past tense entirely too soon.

This editorial represents the viewpoint of the majority of Strikewave’s editors.