While Biden touts manufacturing, labor unions are changing

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While President Joe Biden gave a speech heavy on manufacturing jobs to a convention of union members in Philadelphia, the face of organized labor is changing before his eyes.

Biden has long tagged himself the most pro-union president in history, but what that means in practice may be due to shift as new labor movements increasingly focus on younger, more educated, social media-savvy workers.

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“Wall Street didn’t build this country — the middle class built this country and unions built the middle class,” Biden said to members of the AFL-CIO, repeating an often-used phrase. “Without unions, there’d be no middle class. That’s a fact.”

The president then listed off his administration’s efforts to boost “good-paying union jobs,” including $3 billion for airport construction, $5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations, enforcing the Davis-Bacon Act to require union labor on public works projects, and creating 600,000 new manufacturing jobs since Inauguration Day.

But as manufacturing jobs and their unions continue a 70-year decline, today’s unionization efforts focus on decidedly different labor.

Late last year, the first Starbucks store in the United States voted to unionize. That set off a wave of other efforts at the company’s stores across the country, with more than 70 stores in 25 states now set to be represented by a union. An additional 275 of the company’s 9,000 locations in the U.S. have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union vote.

Similar unionization drives have hit REI, Google, local cannabis dispensaries, and software company Activision Blizzard, among others. Last month, organizers from Starbucks, REI, the Baltimore County Public Library, Amazon, and animation studio Titmouse met with both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House.

Dan Bowling, who teaches labor and employment courses at Duke University, said the renewed interest represents a big opportunity for labor unions and for Democrats — if they take advantage.

“Biden gave a traditional, blue-collar, old-school union speech in Philadelphia,” Bowling said. “It was not vetted by [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)] and the Squad, I guarantee you. Bringing back manufacturing jobs in the Midwest sounds like Donald Trump.”

Bowling has seen the change inside his own classroom, where his labor courses moved from a seminar room to an overflowing lecture hall over the last 15 years. He thinks Biden and other pro-labor Democrats are missing out if they don’t adjust their messaging to reflect interest from young people who may work in white-collar jobs or even in short-term retail gigs.

“I would tell him we have a potential new wave of unionization here,” he said. “We have an open ear to an entirely new class of the highly educated professional workers, which are very open to unionization. Many people feel that is the future of unions.”

It would be a big shift from the past. U.S. union membership peaked in 1954 at 35% of all workers, falling steadily over the ensuing decades to reach just 10.3% last year. The overall percentage of U.S. union members remained flat from 2019 to 2021 but increased for workers aged 25 to 34, from 8.8% to 9.4%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In January, there were 170 union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board, more than double the number from January 2021.

Pew Research Center polling indicates support for unions, with 7 in 10 Democrats saying their decline is bad for the country and 76% saying it’s bad for workers. Even among Republicans, 40% said the decline of unions is bad for the country, and 45% reported it as a negative for workers.

Other white-collar professionals looking at unions include several journalism newsrooms, Washington, D.C., think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, and even physicians at Stanford University.

Molly Kinder, a fellow at Brookings, has written that the stresses and big corporate profits of the lockdown era helped fuel the movement.

“Wealthy shareholders, executives, and billionaire heirs and founders were the pandemic economy’s real winners, while frontline workers benefited minimally from their employer’s success,” she wrote in May. “Despite the potential moment for change the pandemic presented, on average, the 22 companies we analyzed are paying workers only modestly more in real terms than they did before COVID-19 — and, for most workers, still not enough to get by.”

Biden made a similar reference in Philadelphia, saying that lines for boxes of food stretched for miles in 2020 while America hatched a new generation of billionaires.

Labor unions traditionally donate heavily to Democratic candidates. Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign at a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh, with labor organizations contributing $27.5 million to back his White House bid.

How the new labor push works out for Democrats remains to be seen. Starbucks, which has pledged more than $100 million to social justice grants over the last two years, is pushing back hard on unionization efforts. Amazon, another huge corporation accused of union-busting, is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also controls the left-leaning Washington Post.

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For Biden, ever mindful of staying on the good side of Midwestern voters, the task may be to balance blue-collar labor with the coming younger class of workers who represent the labor movement’s future.

“It’s an opportunity,” Bowling said. “Let’s see if Democrats take advantage.”

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