By Jonathan Chait
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
In its period of exile, the Democratic Party has a lot of
decisions to make. One of those decisions concerns its relationship with
organized labor. Joe Biden and members of his administration—and, indeed, much
of the party’s leadership—believed that forming a historically tight
partnership with organized labor would help arrest the party’s decline with the
working class. They turned out to be wrong. Working-class voters, even the
small and shrinking share of them who belong to private-sector unions,
continued drifting away, seemingly unimpressed by Union Joe’s long list of
policy concessions.
Having seen their labor strategy collapse, Democrats are
weighing two choices. One school of thought, favored on the progressive left,
is that if Biden didn’t win back working-class voters, it’s because he wasn’t
pro-union enough. For example, a recent
newsletter by Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama-administration official turned
podcaster, argues that the path to winning back blue-collar voters requires
(among other things) that Democrats “become even more pro-union.” Pfeiffer
doesn’t explain why a more ardent alliance with organized labor would succeed
for future Democratic candidates when it failed for Biden, or even how
exceeding Biden on this score would be possible. The necessity and utility of
the maneuver is simply taken as axiomatic.
A wiser strategy, one that a handful of Democrats have
gingerly broached, would be to revert to the party’s traditional, pre-Biden
stance toward labor. This approach would recognize that the political cost of
trying to satisfy the labor movement’s every demand is rising, and the number
of votes that the movement delivers in return for such fealty is shrinking. The
experience of the Biden administration, and of some Democratic-run localities,
suggests that automatic deference to unions can undermine what ought to be
politicians’ top priority right now: lowering the cost of living. Which means
it is making the goal of winning back working-class voters harder, not easier.
***
The Democrats have been the pro-labor party since the New
Deal. But, before Biden, their alliance with labor was never unqualified.
Democrats broadly supported laws that protected the right to organize, as well
as the generous minimum-wage and social-insurance laws that unions favored.
However, they made exceptions when they believed that union demands ran
contrary to the public interest. Franklin D. Roosevelt himself sometimes
intervened
against striking unions, and even opposed public-sector
unionization on principle. Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy had episodic
fights with labor even as they usually took its side. Bill Clinton broke with
labor to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement. Barack Obama offended
teachers’ unions by supporting education reform, and defied some industrial
unions by capping the tax break on expensive health-insurance plans.
Biden chose a different approach. He vowed to be “the
most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American
history.” In practice, this meant not merely giving unions their customary seat
at the table and vigorously enforcing labor law, as previous Democratic
administrations had done, but exceeding that support in both symbolic and
substantive ways. Biden called himself “a union man,” joined an auto-worker picket
line and, with rare exceptions, gave labor nearly absolute deference on any
issue in which it held a direct stake. His administration directed $36
billion in federal spending to bail out the Teamsters’ pension fund.
Yet even before he abandoned his reelection bid, Biden’s
standing among working-class voters was dismal. Once Kamala Harris replaced
him as the nominee, she failed to garner an endorsement from the International
Association of Fire Fighters, the International
Longshoremen’s Association, or the United Mine Workers of America—or even
the Teamsters. Harris won a majority of union households, but according to Pew
data, these voters swung toward Donald Trump by six points compared with
2016, in terms of two-party vote share.
Why did the administration’s approach to unions fail to
reap electoral rewards? One reason is that, as some union leaders have
acknowledged, their members have begun basing their votes more on cultural
issues, such as guns, immigration, and trans rights, than on economic ones. But
there is another factor at play, one much less widely recognized: Uncritical
fealty to union demands can cause Democrats to adopt policies that actually
threaten working-class voters’ material well-being.
Biden’s long list of concessions to unions was not free.
He kept in place tariffs Trump had imposed during his first term, raised them
on Canadian lumber and solar panels from Southeast Asia, and made no effort to
revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership or any free-trade agreement. He imposed
more stringent rules favored by labor on domestic shipping and federal
construction projects. None of these measures had a large effect
individually. Collectively, they and others like them impeded Biden’s goal of
reopening the economy and then bringing down the inflation that followed.
The potential for conflict between labor-backed positions
and the broader public good can sometimes sit in plain sight, unnoticed by
unions or even third-party observers. A recent New York Times story
quotes a labor official in Nevada complaining that the Democratic Party
alienated union members by failing to focus on affordability. The same article
cites the union’s complaints that Democratic legislators in the state voted in
2023 to end a requirement for daily hotel-room cleanings.
That requirement, adopted in the early days of the
coronavirus pandemic, was expensive and became obsolete once scientists
realized that the virus did not, in fact, spread through surface contact.
Amazingly, the union that backed the daily-cleaning measure—and withheld
support from Democrats who finally rescinded it three years later—is permitted
in the article to pose as a champion of affordability, when it was fighting for
a make-work requirement that pushed up hotel costs.
***
Labor’s preferences were easier to align with Democratic
policy goals in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Unemployment was
high, the economy needed more stimulus, and policies that created more jobs
were helpful in generating economic growth. (John Maynard Keynes famously
argued during the Great Depression that hiring workers to dig holes and fill
them again would still stimulate the economy.) But under the current conditions
of low unemployment and elevated inflation, make-work policies and excessive
government spending are much more harmful.
The rise of the abundance agenda, which focuses on
removing barriers to providing Americans with a higher standard of living,
especially by increasing the housing supply, has made the tension between these
goals a subject of contentious debate on the left. This doesn’t make the
abundance agenda anti-union. As Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein point out in Abundance,
a book that otherwise mostly skirts the labor issue, countries with much higher
union density than the United States have managed to build transportation
infrastructure far more cheaply. Indeed, the paradigmatic case of
abundance-agenda liberalism in action, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s
rapid rebuild of a collapsed I-95 bridge, was undertaken cooperatively with
unions.
The abundance agenda does, however, create more than
occasional friction with union demands. Public-employee unions support strict
rules on compensation and firing that make it harder for the government to work
as nimbly as the private sector. In California, where the housing shortage is
especially dire, unions have used laws that hold up housing construction as
leverage to extract concessions from developers. The California high-speed-rail
authority, which is closing in on two decades of work without any usable track,
continues to boast
of the high-paying jobs it has created. This reflects one side of a
philosophical divide within the party over whether to treat high labor costs as
a core goal of public-infrastructure projects—or as, well, a cost.
The abundance agenda thus implies that Democrats need to
return to their pre-Biden relationship with organized labor. This has generated
intense backlash. At a high-profile conference in April, the moderate
commentator Josh Barro said, “When I look at policies in New York that stand in
the way of abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually
find a labor union at the end that’s the driver.”
This comment, a video clip of
which was promptly shared on X, was treated like an act of war by the online
left. “Bashing unions and calling for cutting wages and benefits will only lose
us even more working class voters and elections,” Greg Casar, a progressive
Democratic House member from Texas, posted in
response. Left-wing magazines such as Jacobin, The
Nation, and Current Affairs
seized on Barro’s comment as having exposed a barely concealed desire to crush
labor.
The divide revealed by this episode is not about the
general merit of unions, or about specific policy questions related to unions,
but whether policy specifics need to be taken into account at all. The labor
movement and its progressive allies treat support for labor as a binary
question. To oppose any discrete union policy is to join the ranks of enemies
of labor and therefore the progressive movement itself.
That might sound like an unfairly broad characterization.
But the polemics attacking the abundance agenda as anti-labor are notable for
their lack of substantive engagement. They treat even the most indefensible
union demands as implicitly sacrosanct. One example is a requirement in New
York City that subway trains employ two operators. In a column published first
in Common
Dreams, republished by In
These Times, and republished yet again by Jacobin,
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis describes opposition to the two-operator rule as prima facie
evidence of abundance liberals’ “skepticism of labor.” She does not bother to
argue, or even assert, that this rule has any public-safety (or other) value.
Running through this line of argument is the idea that
unions can do no wrong. Ro Khanna, a progressive representative from California
who has praised aspects of the abundance agenda, recently told a meeting of the
Teamsters,“The problem is not with the Teamsters. The problem is with the
Democratic Party. We can’t expect people to vote if we don’t stand for
working-class issues.”
Recall that the Teamsters declined
to endorse Harris in 2024 even after the Biden administration bailed out its
pension fund. If that doesn’t count as standing up for working people, Biden
must be wondering if he can have the $36 billion back to spend on something
else.
Campaigning and governing both involve trade-offs.
Democrats can and should defend the right to organize and support positions
held by unions that don’t impose a major drag on the public good. Winning the
support of working-class voters requires compromising with their views on
social policy, which risks alienating other progressive groups. Making policy
decisions sometimes presents a choice between the financial well-being of an
interest group, including unions, and the broader public.
The Biden administration tried to inhabit a reality in
which none of these choices existed. They could appeal to social liberals and
compensate for their shortcomings with the working class by giving the unions a
virtual veto over policy. The formula is so seductive that many Democrats still
refuse to notice that it doesn’t actually work.
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