[It is not too late for Biden to use the full powers of his
presidency to confront employers who force workers to choose between
protecting their health or retaining their jobs — and to challenge
them in other matters as well. ]
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WHY BIDEN MUST CONFRONT CORPORATE EMPLOYERS MORE DIRECTLY  
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Jon Hiatt
December 12, 2022
onlabor
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_ It is not too late for Biden to use the full powers of his
presidency to confront employers who force workers to choose between
protecting their health or retaining their jobs — and to challenge
them in other matters as well. _

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In June, the International Labor Organization (ILO) amended the
Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work to include
safety and health, elevating it to one of a small number of worker
rights deemed so significant that they are binding on all member
countries of the ILO. The United States strongly advocated for this
change, and upon final passage the Biden Administration issued a
congratulatory statement noting: “no worker should ever risk their
safety and health for a paycheck.”

Shortly thereafter, President Biden had a highly publicized
opportunity to put these words to the test when he chose to engage
directly in the labor dispute pitting the country’s four largest
commercial railroad companies against their 115,000 workers. Declining
to challenge these employers even on an issue whose importance he had
so recently championed on the global stage, the President
regrettably came up short [[link removed]].

The right of the rail workers to take sick leave without loss of a
paycheck or fear of termination was a central issue in this three-year
long dispute, as was the companies’ Wall Street-driven business
model, which included enormous job cuts, elimination of reserve pools
of workers, and the infamous “precision scheduled railroading
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work rules that effectively required workers to be at work or on call
regardless of health status. 

After a tentative mediated settlement was rejected by several of the
railroad unions’ memberships, a nationwide strike became imminent.
Accepting the companies’ insistence that they would only countenance
a resolution that retained their existing business model, President
Biden called on Congress to avert the strike by legislating a contract
on terms that omitted any paid sick leave. 

In seeking to justify his call for governmental intervention in the
face of economic disruption, Biden described himself as a “proud
pro-union president” reluctant to override the views of the
workers. 

Yet avoiding an opportunity to side with workers in the face of the
inhumane treatment they receive from their employers was hardly an
ideal occasion for the President to cite his pro-union bona fides.
Indeed, the reluctance to confront employers directly when worker
rights are at issue has too often been missing from the Biden
playbook.

No one can reasonably dispute that the Biden Administration has in
many ways been the most pro-union Administration in our history.
President Biden has used the bully pulpit to speak to the value of
worker representation, has appointed highly qualified union-friendly
officials throughout his Administration, and has sponsored important
labor-supportive policies. 

However, where he has fallen short is in his reluctance to directly
take on the corporate employers who are responsible for the cruelty
and hostility that workers suffer on the job, particularly when
seeking to assert their lawful right to union representation and
collective bargaining.

Consider, for example, the waves of self-organizing workers who have
been attempting to unionize in numbers not seen in decades. Looking to
give them a boost, President Biden invited
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delegation of Amazon and Starbucks workers to the White House last
May. On other occasions he has given shout-outs to workers who risk
their jobs organizing or striking for a fair contract.

What has been noticeably missing, however, is the Administration’s
willingness to hold the employers accountable. Starbucks CEO Howard
Schultz
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long active in Democratic politics and even expected
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many to be Hillary Clinton’s Labor Secretary. Consider the potential
impact if President Biden were to summon Schultz to the White House
and insist that his unlawful union-busting must cease immediately. 

Or consider the Warrior Met Coal Company in Alabama, where nine
hundred miners have spent 20 months
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strike, simply seeking to restore pay cuts they had accepted in 2016
to keep the mine from closing at that time. Now, the Company is making
record profits. With all the publicity this particular strike has
generated, surely this would be a righteous opportunity for the
President not merely to express support for the Warrior Met miners,
but to publicly shame a corporate owner that symbolizes the root
causes of the ever-widening wealth and income gaps in this country.

Similarly, if President Biden had chosen to frame the railroad dispute
around the companies’ denial of safety and health on the job, he
might well have helped the workers gain the paid sick leave these
companies are withholding. A preemptive call for congressional
imposition of the rejected tentative agreement was not Biden’s only
alternative. Without signaling intentions to the contrary, he could
have let both parties believe that they had to reach a modified
agreement that addressed the sick leave issue; he could have informed
the public that if a crippling strike were imminent, it was because of
the refusal of these rapacious corporations, who made some 20 billion
dollars in after-tax profits last year, to grant a few days of paid
sick leave.

As Paul Waldman queried
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a Washington Post article, what if Biden had publicly called out the
rail CEOs by name: “Lance Fritz, from Union Pacific. You got $14.5
million in compensation last year. Your company made $9.3 billion in
profits. You spent $7.3 billion on stock buybacks to juice your share
price. And you won’t give the men and women who made that money for
you _four lousy sick days_?”

And if all else failed, and Biden still concluded that congressional
intervention was necessary, he could have insisted on a legislated
contract that included paid sick leave, a protection that workers in
145 other countries are guaranteed
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law. 

Admittedly, the labor movement itself did little to push President
Biden in this direction. Some of the rail unions were undoubtedly
chagrined that their members had voted down the tentative agreement.
But that happens, and just as union leadership is generally able to
anticipate what its members will require to approve a negotiated
agreement, quality leadership also recognizes that occasionally it
must return to the bargaining table or picket lines and try again.
Those unions, and national labor movement leadership as a whole,
should not have merely issued statements and tweets criticizing the
companies, but also insisted that Biden not accept, much less impose,
a contract that did not satisfactorily resolve the sick leave issue.

Nonetheless, it is not too late for Biden to use the full powers of
his presidency to confront employers who force workers to choose
between protecting their health or retaining their jobs — and to
challenge them in other matters as well.

As a first step, President Biden should go back to the Obama
Executive Order
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requires various categories of federal contractors to provide their
employees with paid sick leave, and extend that Order to other
categories including the railroads — all of whom operate under
enormous government contracts. 

More broadly, he should start engaging the Howard Schultz’s and
other notorious union-busting corporate employers (and their enabling
law firms) directly. Surely there will be times where quiet diplomacy
is called for. But the larger influence that the president has when
holding bad actors accountable cannot be minimized. It is hard to
imagine anything that would more genuinely and lastingly cement
President Biden’s pro-union legacy than strategically confronting
those who obstruct workers from exercising their basic freedom to
organize and bargain collectively that the President so passionately
espouses.

_JON HIATT is of counsel to Solidarity Center's International Lawyers
Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network, and a non-residential visiting
scholar at the Berkeley Labor Center._

_ONLABOR is a blog devoted to workers, unions, and their politics. We
interpret our subject broadly to include the current crisis in the
traditional union movement (why union decline is happening and what it
means for our society); the new and contested forms of worker
organization that are filling the labor union gap; how work ought to
be structured and managed; how workers ought to be represented and
compensated; and the appropriate role of government — all three
branches — in each of these issues._

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* railroad workers
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* sick days
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* Joe Biden
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* unions
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* International Labor Organization
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