Grading all the 2020 candidates on their labor plans, based not only on the positions they've espoused during the campaign, but on their track records
Photo: Callaghan O’Hare/Bloomberg via Getty Images Never before have I seen Democratic candidates do so much to woo workers and win over union leaders. Elizabeth Warren kicked off her campaign at the site of the famous 1912 Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
I confess to one bias in grading the candidates. In my new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, I write that union power and worker power in the U.S. have fallen to their weakest point since World War II, and that this has fueled wage stagnation, out-of-control income inequality and a warped political system in which corporations and billionaire donors have far too much sway and workers far too little.
The labor platform that Sanders has announced this year envisions doubling union membership in four years. It is a dream list for the nation’s unions. Sanders wants to strengthen workers’ clout through legislation that promotes industry-wide bargaining .
A Elizabeth Warren Warren doesn’t have a pro-labor record stretching back decades, but she has been a remarkable fount of innovative, pro-worker ideas. Some union officials told me that her proposal on trade was by far the best and most sophisticated they’ve ever seen from a lawmaker. Criticizing the U.S.
Last Monday, at her rally in Washington Square that attracted 20,000 New Yorkers, Warren spoke movingly and at length about the 1911 Triangle Fire, about the 146 Triangle workers who died, and about the brilliant efforts, led by Frances Perkins, who later served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, to prevent more such factory disasters — and to improve conditions overall for America’s workers.
“He’s been fantastic,” Jim Gardner, an official with the Operating Engineers union told In These Times. Buttigieg’s unsuccessful campaign for state treasurer in 2010 was run out of the offices of South Bend’s building trades unions. As a senator, Biden supported organized labor’s No. 1 priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier to unionize by, among other things, giving unions a right to use card check. At a forum sponsored by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees in August, Biden spoke robustly for labor, decrying “an all-out war on suppressing wages to increase profits.
Teachers’ unions have long been uneasy with Booker because he championed vouchers and charter schools as Newark’s mayor. Labor leaders complain that these moves siphon money from traditional public schools and undermine teachers’ unions. The Newark Teachers Union opposed Booker’s 2010 reelection as mayor. But Booker argues that that teachers’ union often obstructed moves to improve educational quality in Newark’s struggling schools.
B Beto O’Rourke O’Rourke’s labor platform, A 21st Century Labor Contract, is an impressive, thoughtful document. He calls for lifting workers collectively by expanding unions and their bargaining clout, while also calling for lifting workers individually, legislating new worker rights, by, for instance, guaranteeing seven paid sick days.
B- Amy Klobuchar Klobuchar has “one of the vaguest labor platforms” of the Democratic candidates, Vox wrote recently. She often tells audiences that she is the daughter of a unionized teacher and newspaperman and granddaughter of a unionized iron ore miner. She says that “as President she’ll stand up against attempts to weaken unions,” adding, without offering details, that she wants to reform labor laws, protect collective bargaining rights and roll back right-to-work laws.
In a Labor Day blog post last year, Yang seemed to have only just discovered the importance of labor unions and collective worker action — he was marveling at the historic achievements of Walter Reuther, the UAW, and other unions, and how they played a pivotal role in building the world’s largest and richest middle class. In Yang’s platform, there is little acknowledgement of what collective action or unions have achieved and can achieve for American workers.
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