The Democratic Party’s 2016 platform is a veritable wish list for organized labor, making numerous elaborate promises to tilt federal law and regulation in its favor and against business.
The document repeatedly calls for changes that aid organized labor, including removing requirements for accountability and transparency on the part of unions. Individual workers would have less say over whether they should belong to union or what a union does with their dues money. The platform argues that the most important thing is to boost the power of unions overall. Anything that weakens them should be opposed.
“The Democratic Party believes that when workers are strong, America is strong. … A major factor in the 40-year decline in the middle class is that the rights of workers to bargain collectively for better wages and benefits have been under attack at all levels,” the platform declares.
Labor leaders were ecstatic over the language. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted that it was “the most progressive in American history.”
It is a stark contrast with the Republican Party’s platform, which is one of its toughest ever on labor issues.
Among other issues, the Democrats’ document promises to enact a “card check” law that would “direct the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union if a simple majority of eligible workers sign valid authorization cards.”
That effectively would eliminate federally monitored secret ballot elections to determine whether the workers in question really want a union. Instead, the government would recognize unions largely on a labor group’s say-so that the card signatures it provides are genuine.
The Democrats’ platform declares that right-to-work laws are “wrong for workers” and will “vigorously oppose” them, though it doesn’t clarify if that means it will seek to roll back the 1947 federal law that allows them.
Right-to-work laws say that workers cannot be forced to join or otherwise support a union as a condition of employment. A total of 27 states have the laws. Labor leaders hate the laws because they are associated with membership declines and depleted treasuries due to workers deciding that they don’t want to be in a union.
Another section of the platform declares, “We oppose legislation and lawsuits that would strike down laws protecting the rights of teachers and other public employees.”
That appears to be a reference to the Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which challenged whether public-sector union contracts can force public-sector employees to have to support a union to keep their job. The court split 4-4 on the case in March, leaving in place a lower court ruling approving the practice.
The platform further promises to fight any efforts to require unions to submit to “annual recertification efforts.” These are votes to determine if the union still has the support of a majority of its members. The union loses official recognition if the vote determines it doesn’t have that support.
The platform also opposes any effort to limit the practice of union-management contracts that require employers to automatically deduct union dues from workers’ paychecks rather than having the workers themselves write a check to the union. Unions prefer the laws because they ensure a steady stream of revenue.
The Democrats also adopted a call to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the current rate of $7.25 an hour. Organized labor has long supported a high minimum wage since it makes cheaper, nonunion labor less economically competitive with unionized labor.
“It’s evident Big Labor’s push to increase the minimum wage is not about providing workers a so-called ‘living wage,’ but is, rather, a coordinated, disguised effort to boost union membership — putting them in an easier position to organize the workplace with the owners’ blessing,” said Heather Greenaway, spokeswoman for the pro-business Workforce Fairness Institute.
In a section titled “Fixing Our Broken Immigration System,” the party vows to “establish an affirmative process for workers to report labor violations and to request deferred action.” Put more plainly, they are promising to help illegal immigrants file labor-related lawsuits against their employers if they face deportation.
Under current federal immigration law, employers are required to fire workers who are not legally eligible to work in the U.S. However, the National Labor Relations Board, the main labor law enforcement agency, and other federal agencies say worker protection laws extend to illegal immigrants and that firing workers based race or national origin is discrimination. This can create a Catch-22 situation for employers: If they fire illegal immigrant workers they can be prosecuted for violating the workers’ civil rights. If they don’t fire the workers they can be prosecuted for violating immigration law.
The Catch-22 is also problematic for enforcement agencies who can find themselves at odds with different federal agencies. The labor board has pushed for the Department of Homeland Security to give their prosecutions precedence by providing temporary visas for illegal immigrants to testify against their employers. The Democratic platform would codify that practice. In effect, it would give illegal immigrants a strong incentive to file lawsuits since doing so would prevent them from being deported.
The one area where the platform didn’t give labor leaders everything they wanted was trade. They have been pushing hard against adoption of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, the one major area of difference they have with President Obama, who is pushing Congress to adopt it.
The platform does contain tough language on trade generally, warning that, “Over the past three decades, America has signed too many trade deals that have not lived up to the hype.” It then lists a number of pro-labor requirements trade must meet and says TPP must meet them.
Tellingly, though, it doesn’t say whether TPP meets those standards, even though negotiations on the deal have been concluded and further amendment of the deal is not possible. The platform, therefore, leaves open the possibility that TPP could pass.
Labor leaders were pleased, nonetheless. The Teamsters announced that the platform “includes language that is close to an outright rejection” and vowed to “continue to point out TPP’s fundamental flaws and mobilize to defeat it.”
