Joe Biden Admits He’s ‘Owned’ by Union Bosses

Joe Biden’s record proves he’s bought and paid for by union bosses. But persistent Right to Work opposition can stop him from fulfilling his paymasters’ most destructive dreams.
Joe Biden’s record proves he’s bought and paid for by union bosses. He doesn’t even try to hide it. But persistent Right to Work opposition can stop him from fulfilling his paymasters’ most destructive dreams. (Credit: A.F. Branco)

But His White House Record Never Left Any Doubt About That

Recently, while addressing a small crowd of roughly 100 powerful union bosses and rank-and-file militants at an event in West Mifflin, Pa., President Biden committed what’s commonly referred to in politics as a “Kinsley gaffe.”

The term comes from veteran Beltway pundit Michael Kinsley, who once quipped: 

“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” 

Joe Biden’s imprudent honesty came as he reminisced about the forced union dues-funded support that helped him win his first race for U.S. senator in 1970. The president bluntly told the assembled union bosses, “[T]he fact is: You guys own me.”

Joe Biden Relentlessly Aims to Keep Serving His Big Labor ‘Owners’

Mr. Biden’s admission elicited hearty applause, not shock or laughter, because it was true. 

As a consequence of Big Labor’s unyielding support for Joe Biden over the years, it now completely owns the principal occupant of the White House.

The effects of this ownership are visible throughout the President’s first two years in the Oval Office.

In 2020, he made the eye-popping campaign promise to “change the federal law [so] that there is no Right to Work allowed anywhere in the country.” 

He thus bluntly attacked legal protections against forced union dues that eight in 10 Americans support, but which Mr. Biden’s union-boss owners want to abolish.

In 2021 and 2022, Mr. Biden and his allies pushed the so-called “PRO Act,” which would not only destroy the 27  Right to Work laws nationwide, but 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 last Congress. 

Legislation Already Signed By Joe Biden Will Boost Big Labor For Years to Come

Its passage is unlikely in the current one, thanks in part to the National Right to Work Committee survey program’s success in expanding Capitol Hill opposition to compulsory unionism during the recent mid-term elections.

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

The President stuck hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of pork-barrel spending and numerous anti-consumer regulations benefiting his Big Labor owners into bills that did become law in 2021 and 2022, and he plans to do much more in the coming years. 

The so-called “American Rescue Plan” he signed in March 2021 sent more than $530 billion in bailouts to state and local governments, allowing 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 egregiously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” Mr. Biden signed last summer was also stuffed with Big Labor giveaways. 

For example, this sweeping Tax-and-Spend bill (which many economists warned would actually increase inflation) sets a new “base tax credit” for solar and wind production of $5.20 per megawatt hour (MWh).

But if contractors for renewable energy projects acquiesce to labor regulations that effectively ensure their employees will be unionized, they are able to claim a tax credit of $26 per MWh. That is, five times as high.

Biden Bureaucrats Also Catering to Powerful Union Bosses

And the “Inflation Reduction Act” provides special tax exemptions for union boss-controlled multiemployer pension plans (MEPPs), creating a brand-new incentive for employers to steer their employees into these chronically mismanaged schemes. 

(See page seven of this Newsletter edition for additional information about Joe Biden’s bailout of union-label MEPPs.)

Biden bureaucrats have also established a track record of catering to the President’s Big Labor backers. 

His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have been churning out pro-union boss decisions that undercut workers’ statutory rights, and taking aim at agency precedents that protect workers.

Several New Encroachments On Workers’ Rights Likely To Go Into Force Soon

The Biden NLRB has endeavored to make it extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming for workers even to get a chance to vote on decertifying a union and removing its officials from the workplace. 

For example, they are openly seeking to reverse the Election Protection Rules, a set of common-sense, if modest, reforms previously adopted by the NLRB, with Right to Work attorneys’ input, that removed multiple Board-invented barriers to worker-backed decertification. 

Another reform that the Biden Board plans to reverse allows many workers to challenge through a private, secret-ballot vote a union’s installation through an unreliable, public “card check.”

Several of the ongoing Biden Administration attacks on individual workers’ freedom could be put into effect within the next few months.

Among them are NLRB plans to repeal Trump-era “blocking charge” reforms and once again allow unions to stymie worker decertification efforts by filing spurious unfair labor practice charges. 

Even in instances where there is incontrovertible evidence that most employees want to oust union bosses from a workplace, pending NLRB charges could keep a union in power for years on end. 

The Board is also poised to reinstitute its “voluntary recognition” bar, once again denying workers’ right to seek a secret-ballot vote to oust a union their employer has “voluntarily” recognized until at least six months have gone by. 

This is part of a broader Biden NLRB scheme to routinize unionization via “card check,” a process in which union organizers go worker-by-worker collecting union cards that are counted as “votes” for unionization.

Union partisans like Joe Biden’s NLRB appointees prefer card-check organizing because it is far easier for union bosses to gain control of a workplace when they can coerce hesitant workers to publicly declare their stance on unionization.

With union thugs staring them down, workers in a card-check drive must choose between acquiescing and signing a union card, or making themselves a target for harassment by union militants inside and outside the workplace.

Powerful union bosses and fiscally reckless state Big Labor politicians like Illinois Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker have benefited enormously from the Biden presidency. But ordinary tax-paying citizens have been left out in the cold. (Credit: J. B. Pritzker/Wikimedia Commons)

Right to Work Committee Ready to Fight Back

“The U.S. President’s admission that he is owned by special interests prompted no controversy, nor any frantic ‘clarification’ from the White House press office, because it is a truth already understood by everyone,” said Committee President Mark Mix.

“This year, Joe Biden and his appointees will try every way they can to reward the union bosses who got him elected.

“But Right to Work members and supporters from across the country will be fighting back. 

“Throughout 2023, the Committee will be working, through mobilization of its members, to encourage the avowed opponents of new special privileges for union bosses who now hold operational control over the U.S. House to wield their appropriations power to block Joe Biden’s bureaucrats from enforcing their anti-employee regulations.”  


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

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