Tyranny Triumphs in the Great Lakes State
Ignoring ample evidence of forced unionism’s unfairness and its damaging impact on jobs and incomes, Big Labor Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Right to Work destruction in 2023.
‘Whole of Government’ Now Boosting Big Labor
To most Americans, the fact that the federal annual budget deficit is rising to nearly two trillion dollars in FY 2024, even though our nation’s economic output and employment have already fully recovered from the COVID-19-related economic shock of 2020, is a scandal.
But to union-label President Joe Biden and the small legion of Big Labor bosses upon whom he is relying to power his emerging re-election bid, that two trillion dollars in annual deficit spending represents a wonderful opportunity and a huge financial windfall.
‘Full Authority’ of Federal Government Utilized to ‘Encourage’ Unionization
It is furnishing federal agency after federal agency with vast sums of new money to carry out the President’s mandate to browbeat and/or bribe businesses into submission to monopolistic unionism and to ensure that millions of additional workers are forced to pay dues to Big Labor as a job condition.
Four years ago this spring, Joe Biden launched his third campaign for chief executive in Pittsburgh with a promise to Big Labor bosses and their militant followers that he would be “the most pro-union President you’ve ever seen.”
And soon after moving into the Oval Office, Mr. Biden formed, by executive order, his so-called “Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment,” which is charged with utilizing the federal government’s “full authority” to “encourage” the corralling of workers into unions.
Specifically, the President called upon this task force to adopt a “whole-of-government” approach to increasing dramatically the number of workers who are subject to “exclusive” union representation and forced to pay union dues or fees.
In practice, what this means is that, under the Biden presidency, it is not only traditional redoubts of forced-unionism activism in Democrat and many GOP Administrations, such as the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board, that are assigned to do Big Labor’s bidding. Rather, every executive department and agency, from the Treasury to the EPA to Commerce to the VA, is expected to deploy its power and money to advance union special interests.
The Biden EPA and Department of Energy (DOE), which are now in the process of doling out hundreds of billions of dollars in “green” energy grants authorized by a union-label Congress in 2021 and 2022, are key cases in point. Biden EPA grants, for example, now require would-be recipient companies not to exercise their legal right to oppose efforts to unionize their employees and, in many cases, also to grant recognition to a union as employees’ monopoly bargaining agent without first allowing a secret-ballot vote.
‘Federal Money Rolling in,’ ‘Friendly Administration’ Empower Union Organizers
Top union bosses openly acknowledge having the Biden Administration’s thumb on the scale is a boon for their organizing campaigns.
In a May 2023 interview with Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, AFL-CIO national spokesman Steven Smith gushed: “[W]e have federal money rolling in, a friendly administration and a chance to make inroads like we never have before.”
Betony Jones, the director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Jobs, similarly acknowledged that union officials “in particular” have “a lot riding” on the DOE’s $7 billion “Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs” scheme. Team Biden is offering them an “opportunity,” she explained, to ensure a “whole new industry” is built by workers under their control.
No Legitimate Environmental Or Consumer Interests Are Served by Biden Handouts
National Right to Work Committee Vice President Greg Mourad commented:
“No legitimate environmental or consumer interests are being advanced by the innumerable provisions in Biden ‘green’ energy grants that are plainly intended to facilitate the forced unionization of employees.
“Moreover, conditioning government grants to a company on its willingness to pledge not to communicate with its employees about the potential downsides of unionization seems to be a clear violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. Brown. According to Justice John Paul Stevens’ majority opinion in this case, workers have an ‘underlying right’ in federal labor law to ‘receive information’ opposing unionization.
“The National Right to Work Committee and its members are strongly supportive of all credible congressional efforts to stop Biden appointees from abusing their authority in order to expand union bosses’ coercive power over workers.”
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