Meeting the candidates: President-elect Joe Biden at the table with the ILWU Titled Officers during an International Executive Board meeting in December of 2019.
Joe Biden released his plan to help workers and support collective bargaining rights on his website. It states: “There’s a war on organizing, collective bargaining, unions, and workers. It’s been raging for decades, and it’s getting worse with Donald Trump in the White House. Republican governors and state legislatures across the country have advanced anti-worker legislation to undercut the labor movement and collective bargaining. States have decimated the rights of public sector workers who, unlike private-sector workers, do not have federal protections ensuring their freedom to organize and collectively bargain. In the private sector, corporations are using profits to buy back their own shares and increase CEOs’ compensation instead of investing in their workers and creating more good-quality jobs. The results have been predictable: rising income inequality, stagnant real wages, the loss of pensions, exploitation of workers, and a weakening of workers’ voices in our society.” Biden’s plan goes on to list how his administration will aggressively pursue companies that violate labor laws and support legislation that makes organizing and collective bargaining easier for workers and unions.
Furthermore, Biden restated his plan to end so-called “Right-to-Work” laws. Some highlights from his labor agenda include:
• Financial penalties on companies that interfere with workers’ organizing efforts, including firing or otherwise retaliating against workers.
• Enacting legislation to impose stiffer penalties on corporations and hold company executives personally liable when they interfere with organizing efforts, including criminally liable when their interference is intentional.
• Institute a multi-year federal debarment for all employers who illegally oppose unions.
• Ban employers’ mandatory meetings with their employees, including captive audience meetings in which employees are forced to listen to anti-union rhetoric.
• Extend the right to organize and bargain collectively to independent contractors.
• Ensure workers in the “gig economy” and beyond receive the legal benefits and protections they deserve.
• Codify into law NLRB rules allowing for shortened timelines of union election campaigns.
• Stop employers from stalling initial negotiations with newly formed unions.
• Ban state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues or comparable payments from all workers who benefit from union representation that unions are legally obligated to provide.
• Create a cabinet-level working group that will solely focus on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining in the public and private sectors.
• Expand long overdue rights to farmworkers and domestic workers.
• Increase the federal minimum wage to $15.
• Increase workplace safety and health.
• Expand protections for undocumented immigrants who report labor violations.