Roughly 10.3% of U.S. workers belong to unions. But among workers under age 34, that number is only 7.3%. Under age 25, it’s just 4.4%. And the average person actually working for a labor union is 51 years old.
Labor unions are for older workers. They were already on their way out back when it was still common for U.S. workers, union or nonunion, to work for the same company for 30 years. That situation ended as people discovered that it was to their advantage to climb laterally within their industries. Today, many younger workers are eschewing the traditional employment relationship altogether, either dabbling in the gig economy on the side or diving in and making it their full-time jobs.
This is one of many reasons unions are less relevant today than they’ve been at any time in more than a century. They were already dying off because they have no relevance to so many modern jobs and younger workers. But as contract work becomes more common, they will only die off faster, because self-employed workers don’t unionize.
It is in this context that one must consider Joe Biden’s threat to make business owners pay a “personal price” if they try to warn workers of the drawbacks of having a union take over their workplace and claim monopoly bargaining powers.
“I’m going to hold company executives personally liable for interfering with workers who are attempting to unionize,” Biden said. “It’s not enough just to have their corporations pay a fine. If they’re part of the problem, they are going to pay a personal price.”
This sounds a lot like a personal threat. It’s certainly not good news for managers or business owners.
Biden went on to say, “I’m going to be the strongest labor president you have ever had.”
One could easily dismiss this and laugh at it. Biden might as well have said that to the National Association of Buggy Whip Makers. But his ability, as a president with a Democratic Senate majority, to wreck the economy through favors to his union paymasters must not be underestimated.
Biden supports the destruction of the gig economy through a national measure similar to California’s AB 5. He also supports a $15 national minimum wage. This would improve the bottom line for union workers whose contracts are based on the minimum wage, but on a much grander scale, it would force the automation of many unskilled jobs that are still feasible to have humans do.
And it isn’t as if Biden is warning union heads that they’ll pay a “personal price” for intimidation tactics against workers who would not unionize. In the Senate, he was one of the original co-sponsors of the “card check” bill that would have denied workers a secret ballot vote on unionization. Biden also wants to ban the right-to-work laws enacted by 27 states, which prevent the forced unionization of workers as a condition of their employment.
Why is Biden so eager to turn the clock back on the economy and the job market, even though so many consumers and workers are enjoying the freedom and convenience of the gig economy? It’s because labor unions provide Democrats with a ready source of cash and ground support in elections.
More urgently, exit polling shows that President Trump won the 2016 election in part because he only lost the vote of people in union households by 9 points — a significantly better showing than Mitt Romney’s 18-point margin of loss in that category.
If Biden wishes to avoid a repeat, he must pander more than ever during this campaign to a moribund special interest that can only be kept alive through the deliberate retardation of the nation’s economic dynamism and job growth. It is a sad thing to watch.
