President Biden Walks the Walk as Strongest Pro-Union Administration in Decades

July 1, 2024

IM  -  

In September 2021 remarks honoring labor unions, President Joe Biden declared, “I intend to be the most pro-union president, leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Since then, the Biden administration has been using its legislative, regulatory, and administrative powers to support unions and working people. No previous administration has taken such a comprehensive approach to determining how the executive branch can advance worker rights. Biden’s Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment is a profound statement about the importance Biden places on collective bargaining and workers who organize.

A guiding principle of the White House Task Force is the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to worker rights, including the right to a free and fair choice to join a union and to dignity in the workplace. As the president says, “Unions built the middle class, and as we now rebuild America, they can help rebuild the middle class in the process.” Never before has an administration taken a whole-of-government approach. But Joe Biden raised the question: What if the whole government was organized around the principle of union organizing?

It began in spring 2021. Biden issued an executive order establishing the White House Task Force, a move that aims to help unions expand their ranks. In the announcement, the White House said, “the shrinking of America’s middle class [is] associated with the declining percentage of workers in unions.”

The Task Force, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, submitted over 70 recommendations to the president for tools executive branch agencies could use, with existing powers, procedures, and practices, to reduce barriers to worker organizing and position the federal government as a model employer. As a result of this work, the Task Force announced in 2023 that the number of federal government employees in a union has increased by nearly 20%.

Labor Agreements for All Federal Projects

The Biden administration announced a final rule implementing the president’s executive order requiring project labor agreements (PLAs) for most large-scale federal construction projects. The administration updated Davis-Bacon and related acts to prevent federal construction contractors from paying below-market wages; support stability for service workers when contracts are rebid; and raise the contractor minimum wage to $15/hour and indexed it to inflation. In contrast, Republicans in Congress are blocking legislation to raise the federal minimum wage and introduced legislation to overturn the updated Davis-Bacon standards.

An Economic Strategy that Works

The Biden administration’s signature economic investments—enacted through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act—promise to create millions of good jobs across American communities through investments to support physical, digital, water, and clean energy infrastructure. At the heart of this economic strategy is a commitment to create high-quality jobs and support workplace equity, with standards and incentives written into competitive grants and spending programs across the federal government.

The Biden administration picked up the pace in 2024. In April, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote economic competition by banning noncompete agreements, an exploitative practice of imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business. An estimated 30 million workers—nearly one in five Americans—are subject to such agreements.

Making History on the Picket Line

Biden encouraged workers at an Amazon facility in Alabama in 2021 to vote in favor of joining a union. In a video message, he stated that there should be “no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” from employers toward workers in their effort to unionize. Workers chose not to unionize, but his address marked a milestone. No president had ever issued such a declaration on behalf of a union during an organizing campaign.

In 2023, Biden became the first president to walk a picket line in a show of loyalty for Belleville, Michigan, autoworkers who were striking for higher wages. It happened during the most effective United Auto Workers (UAW) strike in decades. The record shows that no prior president had ever even considered taking such an action. Simply by showing up, he set a precedent for American presidents about how to respond to future strikes.

Promoting Labor Is Good Policy

Biden has called on pension funds to adopt stronger labor standards and to only invest in companies that adhere to high labor standards. The White House convened the nation’s largest pension funds to promote robust labor policies in private equity. He met with leaders from five major pension funds that have committed more than $1 trillion in capital requiring strong labor standards in private-equity investments—all to push more funds to follow suit. States, which are strongly influenced by pension policy set by the federal government, are beginning to adopt pro-labor policies with support from Washington.

In the same month, Biden expanded eligibility for overtime pay to people making up to $58,656 a year, up from the current cap of $35,568.

Giving Workers a Voice

Biden has vigorously supported the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), the most pro-union legislation to advance in Congress since the 1930s. Among other things, the PRO Act would take away some of corporate America’s most effective tactics in fighting unionization and give state and local employees in all 50 states the right to unionize.

Biden’s pro-union stance is in tune with public sentiment: Approval ratings for unions are higher than they’ve been in several decades. About seven in 10 Americans say they support unions, according to polls commissioned by Gallup and the AFL-CIO.

Across the country, autoworkers, delivery drivers, health care workers, baristas, and musicians are taking up their right to form and join unions. Support for unions among the American public in recent years is the highest it’s been in decades. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want union influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy.

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