Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1339678
"the most pro-union president you've ever seen" is a laughably low hurdle to clear. None of the prior presidents of my lifetime — from Nixon on — showed evidence of vying very hard for that dis- tinction. As labor's numbers and political clout have waned over the decades, one party has come to take labor support as a given, necessitating neither courtship nor commitment, while the other has grown more nakedly hostile to the needs of workers vis-à-vis those of capital. Make no mistake: for all the ersatz concern he voiced for working folks — "I will always put American workers first, always," he boasted — Trump proved faithful to his party's priorities, always putting the desires of billionaires before the needs of workers. From rolling back eligibility for overtime, to pledging to veto an increased minimum wage, to arguing against legal protections for LGBTQ workers, to gutting workplace safety regulations in the face of a pan- demic, to scrapping programs to address ra c i a l b i a s o n t h e j o b, to i n s ta l l i n g enemies of collective bargaining on the federal agency intended to protect work- ers' right to organize — the ways in which the Trump administration has sought to undercut employees' clout in their work- places have been too numerous to count. It's a hallmark of the terrible, tragic paradoxes shaping our cultural and political life that a lot of white working people proved so eager to accept as their champion this charlatan of a would-be authoritarian who built his brand by playing a cartoonishly belligerent boss on TV. In 2004, he crossed an IATSE picket line to perform that role on "The A p p r e n t i c e ." B u t y o u d o n' t n e e d a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you shouldn't need an organizer to tell you on which side of a picket line Trump will be found. After years of the previous adminis- tration's war on workers, even complete neglect of our issues would represent significant progress. But the labor plat- form on which Biden ran was actually really good. Biden promised not simply to undo the damage recently done by Trump, but to reverse anti-union labor law dating back to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. His agenda includes increasing the minimum wage, fighting wage theft, penalizing union-busting, expanding overtime guarantees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, correcting the misclassification of employees as inde- pendent contractors, ending corporate shell games that permit companies to duck their obligations to their workers, strengthening the right to strike, extend- ing fundamental rights to agricultural and domestic workers, and promoting union organizing. It's an ambitious array. Much of the agenda Biden announced during his campaign, it needs to be said, was predicated upon his anticipated ability to corral Congressional action. But his party was able to eke out only very tenuous control of the Senate; it remains to be seen whether that will be sufficient to push through bold new legislative action. The Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the House last year but which Mitch McConnell sty- mied in the Senate, would prove, were it enacted, the most dramatic overhaul of labor law since Taft-Hartley. Biden's campaign platform backs the PRO Act, but its passage in the Senate as currently constituted is by no means a sure thing. There may be no easy path to big legislative wins, but significant por- tions of Biden's labor agenda might be achieved through executive action. Much of the damage effected by Trump, to the interests of workers and otherwise, was done through rule-making and executive orders, and might be undone via the same mechanisms. Indeed, the initial days of the Biden administration have been marked by a barrage of executive action resulting in many reversals of his predecessor's policies. One dramatic and welcome move Biden took on his first day in office was to fire Peter Robb, whom Trump had appointed to the position of General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB's General Coun- sel wields great power to decide how labor law is implemented, and Robb — a union-busting management-side lawyer who'd had a hand in Reagan's notorious crackdown on striking air traffic con- trollers in 1981 — had been installed by Trump to undermine the NLRB from within. On his watch, the NLRB instituted a raft of policies running directly con- trary to the agency's legislative mandate to promote collective bargaining. Robb's term in office had not been set to expire until November, and he is the first NLRB General Counsel to have been actually fired by a president. (In 1950, President Truman asked for and received the resignation of the NLRB's then-Gen- eral Counsel, but Robb refused such a request from Biden.) Because the NLRB is an independent agency, some of Robb's allies question the legality of Biden's move, although a Supreme Court case from just last year (upholding Trump's f iring the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) provides precedent for Robb's removal. Axing Robb was widely regarded as a bold and 10 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D Rob Callahan