From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject $15 an Hour for Federal Contractors Is Great. A Union Is Better.
Date May 8, 2021 2:45 AM
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[Biden could kick-start labor organizing, without approval from
Congress. ] [[link removed]]

$15 AN HOUR FOR FEDERAL CONTRACTORS IS GREAT. A UNION IS BETTER.  
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Elias Alsbergas
May 7, 2021
The American Prospect
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_ Biden could kick-start labor organizing, without approval from
Congress. _

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After Democrats in March voted down a national $15 minimum wage,
President Biden signed an executive order raising it for federal
contractors to $15 an hour by 2022. This is an excellent if
insufficient step, both for the national Fight for $15 and for
low-wage federal contractors. It’s heartening to see the president
use the powers of the executive branch to improve workers’ lives
when faced with a setback in Congress. But this is far from the most
powerful move Biden, who has proclaimed himself “the most pro-union
president,” could make with the power of procurement. With the
stroke of a pen, he could reinvigorate the American labor movement by
prioritizing workplaces with collective-bargaining agreements for
federal contracts.

The government spent over $586 billion on federal contracts
[[link removed]] in
fiscal year 2018, long before it spent trillions addressing the
COVID-19 crisis. These funds finance millions of contract workers,
according to a Brookings Institution study
[[link removed]].
They stretch across almost every industry in the American economy,
from construction to technology, defense to health care. Compared to
workers directly employed by the federal government, however, few of
these contractors are unionized. If Biden is to govern as the serious
“union guy [[link removed]]”
he claimed to be on the campaign trail, he could order the federal
government’s massive contracting apparatus to exclusively hire union
workplaces, “unless there is no such supplier that can perform that
contract at a reasonable cost or comparable quality,” as labor
lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan
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What, you might ask, would be the legal basis of such a determination?
The basic foundation of labor law in this country. The National Labor
Relations Act remains the law
[[link removed]] of
the land and holds that it is “the policy of the United States” to
encourage “the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.”

Actually taking this long-standing law seriously would turn the tables
on big business, forcing them to drop their staunch opposition to
unions if they ever wanted a public contract again. Major companies as
diverse as UnitedHealth Group, Deloitte, AT&T, and Lockheed Martin
take on federal contracts. This would open the floodgates to new
organizing in the private sector, where employers have waged brutal,
well-funded opposition campaigns to combat unions. One can only
imagine how different the failed Bessemer, Alabama, RWDSU drive
[[link removed]] would
have been if Amazon, a major federal contractor
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did not spend big opposing
[[link removed]] its
employees. It would help buoy private-sector unions whose membership
rolls have been declining for decades.

_READ MORE FROM THE REVOLVING DOOR PROJECT_
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Unions like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers would be poised for a membership explosion, considering their
existing footholds among federal defense contractors are a drop in the
bucket compared to the scale of the Defense Department’s aerospace
contracting. Health care workers’ unions like National Nurses United
could recruit thousands of new members employed by the Veterans
Affairs Department’s contracting. And the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers can only dream of easily unionizing utility
workers servicing tens of billions of dollars
[[link removed]] of Department of Energy
contracts.

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Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and HP, which manage
major federal contracts
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would be forced to drop their opposition to unions at their
workplaces. This would clear the biggest hurdle the burgeoning
white-collar tech and professional workforce has to organizing.
Workers struggling to build the Alphabet Workers Union
[[link removed]] would receive a major boost if
Google were forced to drop its opposition to keep its lucrative
Defense Department contracts. And so would the millions of workers
providing professional IT, engineering, program evaluation, or
technical skills to the federal government through contracts held by
any number of companies, big or small. Biden could spark worker
organizing in new industries at a scale we have not seen since World
War II, if he chose to.

Many businesses, historically unafraid of breaking labor law, might
form company unions to remain eligible for contracts. Legitimate
unions, however, have long fought to root out compromised management
organizations in their midst. And existing labor law already outlaws
such abusive arrangements. Important questions remain about how unions
would remain independent from companies that may
actually _encourage _unionization.

To answer this, one has to realize how unique the extreme anti-union
behavior of American companies is compared to Europe. Few European
countries allow companies to brazenly interfere in union elections
like they do in the U.S. Instead, tripartite models in places like
Finland officially craft economic and industrial policy with powerful
unions, business, and the public at the table. Collective bargaining
can be state policy and unions can still retain their independence,
not to mention the elections every union holds periodically to choose
new leadership. Despite these quibbles at the margin, the upsides of
mass unionization far outweigh any potential conflicts of interest.

Collective bargaining can be state policy and unions can still retain
their independence.

There are, of course, legal limits to Biden’s ability to promote
unions. He cannot, for example, mandate employer neutrality, even at
businesses that work for the federal government. Employers are
explicitly guaranteed the right to oppose unions in their workplace by
Taft-Hartley, the 1947 law that has put a straitjacket on labor for
the last 70 years. Such an executive order would also be viciously
fought by anti-union employers in the courts, but labor lawyers like
Geoghegan and Brandon Magner
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already thought through potential legal challenges. They conclude that
the federal government’s contracting authority is so broad, and the
National Labor Relations Act’s endorsement of collective bargaining
so clear, that an executive order requiring collective bargaining in
return for federal dollars would pass legal muster.

Like student debt cancellation, the real challenge is passing the
Biden administration’s self-imposed hesitancy. Remembering history
may help with that.

Franklin Roosevelt fundamentally reshaped the American labor landscape
with both executive orders and new laws. Before overseeing the advent
of a 40-hour workweek, FDR proposed shortening the work week to 30
hours
[[link removed]] to
increase employment. He worked with unions to pass laws from the
National Industrial Recovery Act to the Wagner Act, over the deafening
cries of business, to guarantee the right to collectively bargain. His
administration made employers recognize unions and forced them to
bargain before labor boards created by executive order. His National
Recovery Administration even introduced national industrial policy to
the economy, setting industry-wide wage standards, price controls, and
production quotas before it was struck down by a hyper-conservative
Supreme Court.

A simple executive order on federal contracting seems small in
comparison.

As the fight for the PRO Act continues, unions should be aware of the
massive power Biden alone wields to make organizing easier. Even if
that bill passes, unions should demand that Biden use the executive
branch to deliver for his core constituency. Student debt activists
provide a model. They identified the president’s power to cancel
student debt and used it as a hammer to make debt cancellation a
political issue every primary candidate staked a position on. Unions
could do the same.

Biden already recorded a video
[[link removed]] that will be
used to explain the benefits of unions at organizing drives for years
to come. His promises
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“hold company executives personally liable” and make them “pay a
personal price” for union-busting have yet to materialize, despite
his pledge “to be the strongest labor president you have ever
had!” While his Labor Department picks are very promising, it will
take more than administrative relief to reverse the labor movement’s
long decline. This single order would go a long way.

_ELIAS ALSBERGAS is a research assistant with the Revolving Door
Project who previously worked as a strategic research analyst for the
Machinists Union and as a public-transit labor organizer for the
Amalgamated Transit Union._

_The Revolving Door Project, a _Prospect_ partner, scrutinizes the
executive branch and presidential power. Follow them
at therevolvingdoorproject.org
[[link removed]]._

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