For labor unions, the Obama era has been bittersweet. Imagine a man slowly dying in the hospital, who nonetheless exerts immense power over government and receives one enormous gift after another from the president of the United States, and you start to get the picture.
President Obama’s latest giveaway to the unions came as part of the Labor Department’s $175 million grant program for “providing more Americans with affordable access to education and job training opportunities to help grow the middle class.” As the Washington Examiner‘s Sean Higgins reported Thursday, union training programs will get $25.5 million of that cash — more than 14 percent, or a share roughly twice as large as union representation in the private sector.
This gift comes as no surprise. Nor is it by any means the biggest nor the first such favor Obama has provided his political allies in organized labor. Unions may be a weak and dying segment of the electorate, but they nonetheless command large sums of money and wield the muscle power that keeps Democratic candidates strong.
The bailout of the United Autoworkers’ benefits fund at the expense of non-union employees in the auto industry was one of Obama’s first acts in office. Since then, his appointees have been working overtime to carve out new and unprecedented privileges for union bosses.
His National Mediation Board overturned nearly eight decades of legal precedent by allowing unions to take monopoly bargaining power for airline and railway employees even if fewer than half of them vote for it.
Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has handed down one pro-union decision after another. Most recently, the decision on joint-employer status overturned 34 years of precedent, threatening to destroy the subcontracting and franchising models that have allowed many businesses (McDonalds and Uber, for example) to expand and thrive. All this in the name of empowering unions at smaller companies to dictate the terms of how much larger companies are run.
Obama’s NLRB has also approved the formation of so-called “micro-unions,” which helps unions infiltrate companies where a majority of workers would oppose union representation. It has backed shorter time-frames for unionization elections — again in an effort to increase the rate of union election wins. It has expanded unions’ ability to challenge basic rules governing employee conduct, such as avoiding profanity on the job and not gossiping about coworkers.
In 2010, Obama’s NLRB even handed down a decision allowing union organizers to conspire with employers to make secret, sweetheart deals against workers’ interests — as in, let us win this unionization election and get access to employees’ dues money, and in exchange we won’t demand too much on their behalf.
The Obama administration’s naked pro-union activism has been so aggressive that three states have passed right-to-work laws during his presidency to provide workers and employers a partial opt-out from Obama’s labor policy. That’s more than at any time since the Eisenhower era.
What all of Obama’s favors for union bosses have in common is that they swim against the tide of the U.S. labor market. Unions are irrelevant to nearly all of today’s private sector workers and especially to the younger ones. Only 25 percent of union membership is under age 35, compared to 38 percent of all non-union workers.
With all of the legal and regulatory protections that workers enjoy today, unions’ gradual decline in membership has not and will not plunge the American workplace into the plot of a Charles Dickens novel. Workers have noticed, but neither Obama nor the unions bosses want to read the handwriting on the wall.
