President Joe Biden has weaponized the federal government to boost organized labor’s power since his first day on the job.
Biden’s campaign promise to be the “most pro-union president you’ve ever seen” includes tolerating the worst type of workplace conduct imaginable so long as it is in service of union goals. The Democratic Party’s embrace of such tactics only serves to embolden Big Labor’s corruption at the expense of American workers.
The data is clear – workers just are not buying what union bosses are selling. A recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that just 10 percent of workers were unionized in 2023, less than half of the 20.1 percent of workers that were unionized in 1983 when the statistic was first collected. In total, 21 states saw unionization rates drop.
Big Labor is a critical paymaster for the Democratic Party. In 2022 alone, labor unions spent $50 million on political activity, the vast majority of which went to Democratic candidates. Government unions send 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats on both the state and federal level.
The declining unionization rate presents a severe problem for Democrats. When a worker chooses to leave a union, they no longer have to pay dues to union bosses. That is less money that union bosses can spend on Democratic candidates in election cycles.
To keep the gravy train rolling, the Biden administration has led a government-wide crusade to force workers into unions. Soon after taking office, Biden announced a task force chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris that sought to increase the number of unionized workers. Biden’s Department of Labor recently issued a final rule designed to reclassify independent contractors – who cannot be unionized – into W-2 employees.
Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has served as a consistent enabler of organized labor’s ugliest tactics, even going so far as to tip the scales in at least one union election.
In April 2022, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) narrowly voted to unionize an Amazon facility in Staten Island. Just days before the election, the NLRB filed a petition in federal court to force Amazon to rehire an employee that was terminated for hurling sexually charged and profane obscenities at a female coworker. The NLRB claimed that Amazon fired the worker to thwart the ALU’s efforts to unionize the JFK-8 facility.
The JFK-8 election proved to be a high-water mark for the ALU, as it has failed to unionize any other Amazon facility since then. A Wall Street Journal report shows that the ALU is hanging on for dear life, with several prominent unions like the American Federation of Teachers dropping their financial support for the ALU in 2023.
Like clockwork, the NLRB has stepped in once again to bolster the ALU. On Monday, the NLRB’s in-house judge once again ruled that the fired Amazon employee’s vulgar insults constitutes protected workplace speech, blaming the female victim of this employee’s attacks in the process. To support his opinion, the judge cited several cases that found “strikers’ profane, vulgar, racist, and otherwise insulting language to be protected so long [as] the comments contain no threats of violence.” This ruling is a clear signal to union organizers across the country – as long as you stop short of directly threatening violence, the Biden administration will have your back no matter how vulgar your workplace behavior.
That is just one example – Democrats have long advocated for legalized union harassment of American workers. For years, Biden and Congressional Democrats have pushed the “Protecting the Right to Organize” (PRO) Act, legislation that would rewrite a century of labor law to benefit union bosses. One provision in the PRO Act would force employers to hand over sensitive employee contact information – including home addresses, cell and landline phone numbers, email addresses – to union bosses during organizing drives. If passed into law, this would make it even easier for organizers to intimidate workers into voting for unionization.
The Biden administration’s green-lighting of Big Labor’s thuggish tactics has only served to exacerbate union corruption. In 2023, the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS) conducted 155 criminal investigations into union activity, handing down 39 indictments and 57 convictions. Union crimes the OLMS prosecuted include petty theft, embezzlement, racketeering, and falsifying records.
Democrats claim to care about American workers, but the Biden administration’s actions show that there is virtually no limit to the tactics they will condone to force workers into a union.
Tom Hebert is Director of Competition and Regulatory Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of the Open Competition Center.