“Don’t any of you guys vote Republican,” Vice President Biden said to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters convention in Las Vegas last week. “Let me put it this way: Don’t come to me if you do. You’re on your own, Jack!”
Biden’s warning, which received virtually no coverage in the press, is part of the Obama re-election campaign’s 2012 strategy for organized labor. It’s a two-part plan. One, use the president’s executive powers to give labor all sorts of advantages that can’t be achieved through legislation. And two, when labor leaders complain that they haven’t gotten everything they want, tell them they have nowhere else to go.
The vice president’s speech was a direct response to some very public grumbling from a top-labor leader, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. In recent weeks, Trumka has been accusing Republicans of taking a “wrecking ball” to workers’ rights — nothing new there — and then warning Democrats that if they don’t do everything in their power to stop Republicans, they might lose labor’s support.
“I have a message for some of our ‘friends,’ ” Trumka said at a union gathering in Washington last month — and yes, the Teamsters’ text of the speech put “friends” in quotation marks. Then he ad-libbed: “For too long, we have been left after Election Day holding a canceled check waving it about — ‘Remember us? Remember us? Remember us?’ — asking someone to pay a little attention to us. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a snootful of that s–t.”
Not much ambiguity there. And now, we have the White House response, delivered by the vice president: Sorry, Rich, but don’t even think about not supporting Democrats.
There’s no doubt the Obama administration has used the full powers of the executive branch to do favors for labor. There is the well-known case in which the National Labor Relations Board has taken the legally dubious step of punishing Boeing for building a production facility in nonunion South Carolina to go along with its older, unionized facilities in Washington state. And there are lesser-known examples, like the National Mediation Board’s legally dubious decision to change the standards for union elections in the airline and rail businesses. The administration is even investigating Delta Air Lines because its flight attendants displeased organized labor by voting not to join a union.
While Biden reminds unions that they have no other choice, President Obama himself is playing a more nuanced game. At his June 29 press conference, Obama was asked about the Boeing situation and began his answer with a vow to stay out of the case. But then he continued: “As a general proposition, companies need to have the freedom to relocate. … And if they’re choosing to relocate here in the United States, that’s a good thing.”
It wasn’t an answer designed to make union officials happy. But as much as Obama needs union money and support, he also knows that organized labor is a small and shrinking part of the private sector (about 7 percent of the private work force) and a much larger (38 percent) but increasingly controversial part of the public-sector work force. So Obama crafted his answer to send two messages. One, he’s not going to do anything to stop the NLRB’s attack on Boeing, and two, he understands that job creation — the public’s No. 1 concern — trumps union demands. Labor leaders will have to be satisfied with that.
Ever since Obama came into office, labor has made no secret that its top agenda item is the passage of so-called “card check” legislation that would eliminate the secret ballot in union elections. But they couldn’t win that even when they had huge Democratic majorities in Congress. What Biden and Obama are telling them is that they’ll have to be happy with the help the administration can give them on its own.
And in the end, will angry and frustrated labor leaders abandon Obama and the Democratic Party? Of course not. On Monday afternoon, just a couple of days after Biden’s speech, another big union, the National Education Association, gave Obama its endorsement. It’s the earliest endorsement the NEA has ever given — long before the Republicans even begin to choose a candidate. In coming months, other unions will do the same.
The bottom line is, the White House knows that labor leaders will complain, and talk tough, and say they’ve had a snootful of bad treatment. And then they’ll come around.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
