Forced-Unionism Agenda Fuels Biden Unpopularity

Working-Class Voters Reject Most Pro-Big Labor President Ever

Four years ago this November, Democrat career politician Joe Biden won the presidency despite his extraordinarily unpopular stance on the Right to Work issue.

Many of the voters who supported him in 2020 undoubtedly hoped his radical advocacy of forced unionism was just a campaign tactic.

But that was, without a doubt, a vain hope.

Ever since he entered the Oval Office in January 2021, Mr. Biden has made it clear that he really is determined to bring about a vast expansion of union officials’ coercive special privileges.

Throughout his first two years in office, Mr. Biden demonstrated again and again he was indeed committed to fulfilling his frightful campaign promise to “change the federal law [so] that there is no Right to Work anywhere in the country.”

As long as his Big Labor Democrat allies remained in control of both chambers of Congress, Mr. Biden pushed relentlessly for passage of the so-called “PRO Act.”

Legislation Signed by Joe Biden Has Boosted Big Labor at Taxpayers’ Expense

This scheme would destroy the 26 state Right to Work laws nationwide, and also implement a host of other union boss-backed legal and regulatory changes that would sharply curtail employees’ ability to say “No” to Big Labor.

The PRO Act, facing intense opposition from Right to Work advocates, stalled in the 2021-22 Congress. 

And this legislation (now H.R.20/S.567) has not moved forward in 2023 or 2024, largely thanks to the National Right to Work Committee Survey 2022 program’s success in expanding Capitol Hill opposition to compulsory unionism during the current Congress. 

But a PRO Act impasse was never going to stop Mr. Biden from catering to union bosses in every other feasible way.

For example, the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” (ARP) he signed in March 2021 sent an extra $500 billion, roughly, in federal taxpayers’ money to state and local governments. 

This pile of bailout money enabled Big Labor-dominated states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California to paper over huge shortfalls in their grossly mismanaged government union pension funds.

The ARP simultaneously authorized a $91 billion giveaway to Big Labor-dominated private-sector retirement funds, commonly referred to as “multi-employer pension plans.” And the union bosses and firms who colluded with them for years to underfund notoriously mismanaged plans like the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund won’t ever be required to pay back a dime.

Multi-Trillion-Dollar Biden Spending Hike and Fed Accommodation Fuel Inflation

In the summer of 2022, Mr. Biden rubber-stamped the $800 billion, cynically mislabeled “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA).

This scheme is stuffed with Big Labor giveaways that effectively bribe employers to acquiesce to the coercive unionization of their employees.

That’s why top bosses of the United Autoworkers (UAW) union strongly supported the IRA, even though in practice it is now accelerating the long-term decline of unionized auto-assembly jobs by spurring the Detroit-based auto firms to overinvest in EVs, for which consumer demand remains relatively low.

A wide range of economists agree that the multi-trillion-dollar spending hikes rubber-stamped by Mr. Biden and the apparently politically intimidated Federal Reserve’s decision to accommodate, rather than offset, this fiscal madness for far too long are the principal reason for the recent surge in inflation.

During the first three years of the Biden Administration, consumer price index (CPI) inflation soared by 18.0%. By comparison, over the entire four years of the Trump Administration, inflation grew by just 7.8%.

And accelerating inflation is the key reason why real hourly pay for private-sector production employees has actually fallen since January 2021, after growing steadily during the Trump years.

Recent New York Times Poll Shows Joe Biden Is Losing Blue-Collar Vote, Big Time

National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix commented: 

“By doing everything within his power to make Big Labor bosses happy, union-label President Joe Biden has without a doubt hurt ‘blue collar,’ less-than-college educated employees economically, along with vast numbers of other Americans.

“Moreover, because less-than-college-educated Americans are evidently more likely to base their votes for or against a political candidate on economic issues, Mr. Biden’s inflationary, real income-cutting policies are hurting him more with them than with the college-educated.

“In fact, a New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters nationwide conducted late this February revealed lopsided, 36%-54% blue-collar opposition to Mr. Biden in a contest against former GOP President Donald Trump.

“Even among union members only, a group that tends to be much more pro-Democrat Party than the working class as a whole, in part because they are much more likely to work for the government than the typical employee, Mr. Biden is tied with Mr. Trump, 47% to 47%, in 2024’s six key battleground states.”

A March 13 Washington Post news analysis addresses how union bigwigs inside the D.C. Beltway, such as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Mary Kay Henry, are sounding the alarm about the current polling for the 2024 elections.

Union Bosses Are Spending Coerced Dues to ‘Reeducate’ Workers About Politics

Specifically, Ms. Henry is terrified at the prospect that majorities or near majorities of rank-and-file unionists and other historically Democrat-leaning constituencies could “vote with their pocketbooks” this year and thereby help bring about the defeat of Joe Biden. 

According to the Post’s Sabrina Rodriguez, the SEIU chiefs are vowing to spend “$200 million” in union treasury money, consisting largely of workers’ coerced dues and fees, to “boost President Biden” and other Big Labor Democrat politicians in “electoral battlegrounds” across the country.

Vast sums of this money will be spent, as Ms. Rodriguez effectively acknowledged, to “reeducate” workers, who understandably believe they are faring worse now than a few years ago, about the merits of the Biden presidency. 

“$200 million sounds like a lot of money,” said Mr. Mix, “but it is actually only the tip of the iceberg.”

He cited a 2023 analysis by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, a think tank affiliated with the Right to Work Committee. The Institute found that union bosses, according to their own admissions on LM-2 disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Labor Department, spent more than $1.6 billion on politics and lobbying in 2021 and 2022.

And even this enormous figure vastly understates Big Labor’s political and ideological spending, primarily because it leaves out the billions of dollars Big Labor spends every year exercising its monopoly-bargaining privileges to influence how millions of public servants are compensated and managed.

“This year, Big Labor will once again be using its enormous campaign war chest to pay thousands and thousands of union organizers to do politics full-time for weeks, or even months, up to Election Day,” said Mr. Mix.

“Much of this operation will be financed with dues money that millions of private-sector workers are forced to pay as a condition of employment, even if those workers totally disagree with Big Labor’s political agenda.

“This is by far the most pervasive and the worst form of political corruption in 21st Century America. And the only way to stop it in the foreseeable future is for Congress to repeal all the current provisions in federal labor law that authorize compelling workers to bankroll a union, or be fired.”

---

This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.

To support our cause and help end forced unionism, go here to donate.

---