Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a radical re-working of federal workplace law with the aim of swelling the ranks of organized labor.
The Democratic presidential candidate’s “Work Place Democracy Plan,” released Wednesday, would end state right-to-work laws, make union organizing radically easier, and even give federal workers the right to strike.
“When Bernie Sanders is president, we will make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions by implementing the Workplace Democracy Plan and establishing a national goal to double union membership during his first term in office,” the campaign said.
Organized labor has yet to coalesce behind any candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary. For the first time in decades, the field is crowded with pro-union candidates and the movement has its pick. The AFL-CIO has said its endorsement is not automatic for Democrats.
Sanders, an avowed socialist, has long supported a pro-union agenda. His proposal nevertheless appears to be an attempt to out-bid his rivals. No president, Republican or Democrat, in the last four decades, for example, has backed the right of federal workers to strike. Both parties have seen that as incompatible with effectively and safely running the government.
Sanders would rewrite the 1978 law that prohibits federal workers from striking to guarantee that federal employees have “the same labor rights as workers in the private sector.”
“This is a real pacesetter. It’ll be interesting to see how the other campaigns react to this,” said Neil Sroka, spokesman for the Howard Dean-founded advocacy group Democracy for America. “Doubling union membership would be an atom bomb, politically.”
Vincent Vernuccio, senior fellow at the right-leaning Mackinac Center for Public Policy, noted that several of the plan’s ideas were considered too radical by the Democratic Party just a few years ago.
“Clearly the union nominations are key to the Democratic primary and we may be seeing that here,” Vernuccio said. “He’s clearly setting the anti-freedom bar high.”
Labor is a major player in Democratic party politics. Unions overall poured an estimated $219 million into the last presidential election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Of that, 88% was either donated to Democrats or spent on their behalf. Only 12% of the union spending benefited Republicans.
Sanders’ plan would eliminate all state right-to-work laws, stripping workers in 27 states of the right to opt out of being in a union. In states without the laws, unions typically negotiate contracts with management that obligate all workers to either join the union or pay it a regular fee, a practice dubbed a “security clause.” Right-to-work laws prohibit those types of contracts. Unions in states where security clauses are prohibited often struggle to organize workers and keep dues coming in.
Sanders would adopt “card check” legislation, which would make union organizing radically easier. Under current law, when a union claims to have majority support from workers, a company can demand a federally monitored secret ballot election to verify the claim. Sanders would eliminate this, requiring businesses to recognize and negotiate with a union if it merely presented signed cards from what it says is a majority of workers.
The plan would further benefit union organizing by requiring businesses to automatically turn over all worker contact information to unions seeking to organize the workers. The workers themselves would not be able to object to the information being turned over.
The Vermont senator’s plan also includes items on union wish lists not related to organizing. It would prohibit even insolvent pension plans from cutting benefits for retirees, a major concern of many unions. Sanders would have the government step in when necessary to bail out plans.
“If Congress could provide a multi-trillion bailout to Wall Street and foreign banks in 2008, we can and we must protect the pensions that were promised to millions of Americans,” the campaign states.
Sanders’ would also codify the “joint employer” standard previously advanced by the Obama administration. Joint employer refers to when one business is so intertwined with a second business that it becomes legally responsible for the second business’ workplace policies. For decades, the legal standard required one business to have direct control over another’s policies. The Obama administration had its Labor Department and other agencies adopt a much vaguer standard, indirect control. The Trump administration has since moved to restore the original standard.
The plan proposes “to end the ability of corporations to misclassify workers as independent contractors or label them as a supervisor,” though it does not explain how it would do this. Classifying a worker as a contractor or a supervisor can exempt them from various different protections under workplace laws.
The Sanders campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
