Frankly, Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Washington Post column on strengthening the labor movement puzzles me. Here’s her thesis:
This is a moment of immense promise: By elevating pro-labor legislation and policies, we have the opportunity to revive union power and launch a new labor movement for the 21st century.
Strengthening unions would play a critical part in tackling our country’s staggering inequality. As proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 face an uncertain future, expanding the ranks of organized labor would give more people a living wage. The Labor Department reports unionized workers’ median earnings are about 19 percent higher than those of nonunion workers. Unions also shrink wage gaps for women and for workers of color.
What’s unclear to me is how she intends to strengthen unions. I think that unions are strongest in a tight labor market. AFAICT the Biden Administration is doing everything in its power to loosen the labor market.
To the loose domestic labor market add offshoring and importing goods we used to manufacture here. If you want the lots of working people to improve, you’ll want a tighter labor market, less offshoring, and fewer imports. I just don’t see how you can accomplish it via legislation without dealing with those fundamentals.
It would also help if she distinguished between public sector unions and workers and private sector unions and workers which she does not do.
Card Check is an organizing tactic unions have been after for a long time . Biden supports it.
https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers/
Basically it makes the workers private organizing vote public so that various pressures can be brought to bear. Companies have a great deal of power that they can use to defeat unions organizing. From threatening job loss to closing plants and stores.
Unions see card check as a needed equalizer.
Exactly. I don’t know whether its just wrongheadedness, or more sinister, but the Biden Admin, and Democrats more broadly often advocate and implement policies at odds with stated intentions.
See: labor welfare in general, African American prosperity, prosperity of the poor, income equality, “the children”……………..rinse, lather, repeat