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SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

It's Biden vs. Newsom for the Title of Labor's Best Friend

Labor Day weekend sees them duking it out on the question of who's
more pro-union.

Every Labor Day weekend for the past 85 years or so has featured
Democratic pols praising unions. This year, however, it featured a good
deal more than that: in particular, a tussle between the nation's two
ranking Democrats as to which was the more genuinely pro-labor.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom took the occasion of Labor Day to sign
into law what is the single most pro-labor piece of legislation the
nation has seen in a very long time: a bill establishing sectoral
bargaining in the fast-food industry. The new act creates a ten-member
commission consisting of worker and management representatives and state
officials that will set standards for wages and working conditions for
the state's roughly 550,000 fast-food workers. The statute also raises
those workers' minimum wage to $22 an hour. It further allows
fast-food companies and franchises to skirt some of the commission's
rulings if they agree to let their workers unionize.

At the same time, Newsom has made clear he's not enamored of another
bill that the legislature has sent to his desk, this one permitting mail
balloting for farmworkers seeking to unionize. As the legislature's
vote makes clear, a large number of California Democrats, including
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, support this change. The reasons for
Newsom's reluctance are much the same as those laid out in Miriam
Pawel's

**New York Times**Labor Day op-ed
:
that the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Act, enacted in the
1970s during the first go-round of Jerry Brown's tenure as governor,
affords farmworkers an opportunity to unionize, and that in recent
decades, their union-the United Farm Workers-hasn't even tried to
organize workers. Pawel, who is a distinctly pro-union progressive, has
chronicled the transition of the UFW from a union to a movement to a
foundation in her books on the UFW and its founder, Cesar Chavez, as
well as in her book on the Brown family's dominance of California
Democrats.

But the one Democrat who plainly outranks Newsom-President
Biden-took the occasion of Labor Day weekend to make clear that no
other Democratic pol, and most especially no Democratic pol whose name
has been bandied about as a possible 2024 presidential candidate (see,
above: Newsom), can steal his thunder as the most pro-labor Democrat
since Franklin Roosevelt. Biden had already appointed the most pro-union
officials the nation may ever have seen to the Labor Department, the
NLRB, and the Trade Representative's Office; he had already endorsed
unionization campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks. But just to drive home
that this Newsom guy still had some distance to go before his union bona
fides came up to the Biden standard, on the eve of Labor Day the
president endorsed

California's mail-ballots-for-farmworkers bill as it languished in
Newsom's in-box.

There are a number of ways to gauge the extent of labor's comeback, at
least in the court of public opinion. Gallup's Labor Day poll showed
unions with a 71 percent approval rating, the highest it's been since
the mid-1960s. But the fact that the president of the United States and
the governor of its largest state were duking it out for the title of
labor's BFF is one more indication of the reputational resurrection of
liberalism's most important institution.

Now, if we could only fix the goddam federal labor law ...

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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