While there are several factors that have played a role in the supply chain and inflation crises facing the United States, many experts have noted that President Joe Biden’s policies with respect to labor unions have further exacerbated the issue. As families struggle to purchase gifts for their loved ones around the holiday season due to inflation and supply shortfalls, Biden’s deference to Big Labor should not come as a surprise.
As a candidate, Biden vowed to “be the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen” on the eve of the 2020 election. Since Biden’s inauguration, nearly every policy coming out of the White House has borne the union label, and consumers are paying dearly for it.
It should surprise no one that a former union chieftain, Martin J. Walsh, was tapped as the new secretary of labor, but this administration has made an effort to place union officials in leadership posts across a number of federal agencies. In April, the White House issued an ethics waiver exempting Celeste Drake, the director of the Made in America office at the Office of Management and Budget, from rules that would have barred her from communicating with her former employers, the Director’s Guild of America and the AFL-CIO.
Just try to imagine the righteous chorus of enraged Democrats if a Republican administration were to circumvent the rules to place an American Petroleum Institute lobbyist in charge of federal drilling policy. Nevertheless, the Biden administration seems to be handing out ethics waivers like candy when it comes to Big Labor.
Despite having been the former director of legislative, political, and grassroots mobilization for the 700,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, Alethea Predeoux was given a free pass in March in the form of an ethics rule exemption to oversee congressional communications and legislative initiatives for the Office of Personnel Management. The appointment underscores the Biden administration’s commitment to “elevating the importance of unions,” according to an OPM spokesperson.
The Biden administration restrained itself from flexing its union muscle for a full 23 minutes after the inauguration. That’s when it set a precedent by firing Peter B. Robb, the general counsel of the nominally independent National Labor Relations Board, whose term was not set to expire until November. And it didn’t take Biden long to turn that muscle on the public.
On his second day in office, he signed a union-backed executive order directing OPM to develop recommendations to pay federal employees at least $15 per hour. In April, Biden issued an executive order hiking hourly wage for federal contract workers to at least $15.
The Biden Big Labor agenda to raise the federal minimum wage across the board to $15 an hour might sound good at first, but the truth is that it would promote economic growth much in the same way that salt benefits garden slugs. A mandated wage increase would kill 1.4 million jobs over the next four years, according to the February report issued by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Eliminating jobs won’t help a nation trying to restart a post-pandemic economy that is being plagued by supply chain issues and labor shortages. And that’s the last thing needed by families who need work and are struggling with Biden-era inflation that threatens to spiral out of control. So far, efforts to slip minimum wage hikes into massive spending bills have failed, but the Biden administration remains committed to this destructive policy.
The most pro-union president you’ve ever seen is also pushing the so-called Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which includes provisions essentially gutting “right-to-work” laws that were enacted to protect workers in 27 states from compulsory union membership. The heavy-handed Biden cash-grab would force workers who opt out of unions to pay dues for the representation they didn’t seek or want in the first place. Parts of the PRO Act have even been folded into Biden’s massive so-called Build Back Better Act.
As the saying goes, “personnel is policy,” and it is clear that the president’s appointments of senior union officials are shaping his choices. So far, the president has been so eager for union support that he is willing to break commonsense ethics rules to ensure his union allies are happy.
There’s no doubt that the Big Labor stamp made its mark on a wide range of policy issues in Biden’s first year in office. That’s good news for union bosses, but for those who have suffered the consequences of inflation and supply chain shortages, their economic future in the hands of a union puppet is a grim prospect.
J. Kennerly Davis is the former deputy attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia and a former business executive and labor law attorney.
