After repeatedly promising on the campaign trail to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” Biden has broken with all recent Democratic predecessors by actually governing like he means it.
On his first day in office, the 46th president fired National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Peter Robb, replacing him with former Communications Workers of America attorney Jennifer Abruzzo. On the same day, he rescinded some of Donald Trump’s federal civil service reforms, declaring, “It is also the policy of the United States to encourage union organizing and collective bargaining.”
Three days later, Biden announced the creation of a new Made in America Office inside the White House. The day after that, he signed an order saying federal agencies “shall…apply and enforce the [1931] Davis-Bacon Act and prevailing wage and benefit requirements,” thus making government workers and contractors richer at the expense of taxpayers. He appointed Laborers’ International Union of North America member Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, as secretary of labor and created a Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, headed by Vice President Kamala Harris.
In February 2021, Biden took the step—“basically unprecedented in American history,” University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis later told Vox—of endorsing a specific workplace unionization effort, at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. (The final tally in Bessemer was 1,798 votes against unionization, 738 in favor.)
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