Joe Biden proves Democrats can deliver for labor 

President Joe Biden made history on Tuesday, becoming the first president in at least a century to walk a picket line with striking labor workers. Biden intended for his visit to erase any doubts about where he stands on the United Auto Workers’ historic strike of Detroit’s Big Three automakers, now entering its third grueling week. And he succeeded — but not for the reasons the White House might think. 

Biden spent plenty of time on the 2020 campaign trail talking up his deep family roots in the labor movement. He frequently invokes Franklin D. Roosevelt as a political mentor. But Biden’s most consequential efforts to put organized labor back on equal footing with corporate management remain largely ignored by a political media hypnotized by the horse race dynamic of a Trump-Biden electoral rematch. 

For decades, the labor movement settled for an uninspiring choice between Democrats who took unions for granted and Republicans who are openly hostile to labor’s right to organize. Barack Obama squandered eight years promising action on the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act while failing to even bring the measure to a floor vote. Bill Clinton alienated union workers with NAFTA. Donald Trump filled the federal bench with some of the most extreme anti-labor judges in American history. 

What Biden has achieved for the labor movement stretches well beyond this week’s powerful rallying cry to the UAW’s 146,000 members. His historic appointment of Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board may be the most significant pro-labor move by a Democratic president in many Americans’ lifetimes. Now Abruzzo and a newly proactive NLRB are set to supercharge what is already a nationwide resurgence of labor organizing.  

Will anyone notice? 

Last year, the NLRB waded into the thorny question of whether college athletes are actually employees of the teams to which they dedicate their labor. Players represented by the National College Players Association filed an unfair labor practices complaint against  the University of Southern California. Their hope was simple: to finally draw a ruling from an NLRB that had in the past strenuously dodged the question of student athletes’ right to organize.  

In a clean break with the NLRB’s past trepidation, Abruzzo issued a clear statement: athletics conference organizers, universities and the NCAA were knowingly and unlawfully denying student athletes the full right to organize as employees of their teams.  

That decision is complicated by the fact that the NLRB’s oversight only stretches to private universities — but still, Abruzzo’s ruling upsets 75 years of precedent that devalued student athletes at the expense of vastly wealthy schools (USC boasts a nearly $7.5 billion endowment as of last year). 

Earlier this month, Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball players officially filed a petition to unionize, citing the NLRB’s 2022 decision. Dartmouth expressed the “utmost respect for our students and for unions generally,” while hinting that they may not support this union specifically. Thanks to the Biden NLRB, the one thing Dartmouth can’t do is ignore students’ demands. One way or another, the university will need to act to either recognize the union outright or facilitate a free and fair vote to organize. Even that process has undergone a sea change thanks to Abruzzo and the NLRB. 

Abruzzo’s other landmark decision came this year in a complaint against Cemex Construction. In that ruling, the NLRB massively shifted the balance of power in union organizing efforts.  

Prior to Cemex, large companies like Amazon were largely free to meddle in union elections with only nominal punishments. For example: After harassing employees at the megaretailer’s Bessemer fulfillment center, the NLRB simply ordered Amazon to run the union election again, this time “free of interference.” The controversial second run of the union vote proved no less prone to Amazon meddling than the first. 

Under the new Cemex standard, that impunity vanishes. Abruzzo’s opinion grants the NLRB the power to impose a union on a company found to have repeatedly meddled in a free and fair union vote, compelling collective bargaining to begin immediately. Groups including the conservative Chamber of Commerce blasted the NLRB’s sweeping decision, in part because it marks the single greatest transfer of negotiating power back to unions in nearly a century. It also marks the most durable boost to union organizing delivered by a Democratic president since the New Deal era. 

Biden’s commitment to strengthening American unions extends far beyond marching a picket line and cheering on the UAW. In the NLRB, Biden has created a powerful vehicle for enshrining progressive labor-organizing values into durable decisions like Cemex.  

Biden’s muscular NLRB will have a monumental impact on the labor movement long after Biden leaves office, likely driving a sharp growth in labor union recognition after decades of unchecked decline. That alone should etch Biden’s pro-labor bona fides in stone while silencing any critics who view the president as too soft on big business. Now the White House must tackle the trickier task of selling those historic victories to American voters. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.