Mar 12, 2021 4 min read

At the tail end of his first 100 days in office, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a measure that afforded working men and women the right to join unions of their own choosing. The act was revolutionary. No union leader took it more to heart than the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis.

The UMW Journal declared, “The bill will only be helpful to those who help themselves.”

The mine workers did help themselves. An avalanche of organizing followed, including right here in Western Pennsylvania. The focal point was Fayette County, where for many years the union struggled against the rabidly anti-union employer, the largest in the county, the H.C. Frick Coal and Coke Co.

Lewis and the union told miners, “The president wants you to join the UMW.”

In fact, President Roosevelt was ambivalent about unions, at least initially. Compared to President Joe Biden, he was a piker.

Biden, in a Twitter video last Sunday directed largely at workers trying to organize in Alabama, declared, “I have long said America wasn’t built by Wall Street, it was built by the middle class. And unions built the middle class.

“Unions put power in the hands of the workers,” the president continued. “They level the playing field. They give you a stronger voice for your health, your safety, higher wages, protections from racial discrimination and sexual harassment.”

Biden said companies that erect roadblocks to unions are in the wrong. He referenced the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, saying “we should encourage unions.”

He added, “So let me be really clear: it’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union. But let me be even more clear: it’s not up to an employer to decide that either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers – full stop.”

With particular reference to the nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., the president said, “Today, and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace.

“This is vitally important – a vitally important choice as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race.”

Biden added that there should be “no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda” by owners. “No supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences.”

Never in the annals of the presidency has any president spoken out so forcefully and affirmatively on behalf of unions.

The labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein tweeted that he was struck especially by Biden’s “repeated attacks on employer intimidation” tactics.

“This is new, nothing like it before. Politicians always give great speeches at union conventions and avoid union organizing campaigns because of possible failure. But Biden broke the norm.”

Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara, noted, in another tweet, that the video had been viewed 1.4 million times. “It needs another 14 million, for starters.”

There was certainly a political component to the Biden address. Lichtenstein told Mother Jones magazine’s Noah Lanard that when “Biden puts down a market like this, (It says) if you’re a waffling Democrat, here’s the policy of the government.

“Unions create Democrats,” Lichtenstein noted. “The fact is unionists tend to vote more Democratic than otherwise. So, it’s in the interest of the Democrats.”

More to the point, boosting union membership is in the interest of workers, regardless of party affiliation. And that makes it good for the country and for the health of our suddenly fragile democracy.

Following World War II, unions were robust entities which not only held tremendous sway over the economy, but delivered the goods for workers. Millions entered the middle class, as Biden said, thanks to unions. The pressure exerted by unions on wages generally lifted up millions of other workers.

Union membership peaked at 35% of the workforce in the 1950s. It’s been headed downhill ever since. The bottom fell out starting in the early ’70s. Not so coincidentally perhaps, income inequality began to rear its ugly head around the same time.

Lichtenstein predicted that Biden’s words in support of unions and in opposition to the anti-union tactics deployed by management “will be used in every union organizing campaign for the next four or eight years.”

“Maybe Biden is beginning the hard work of creating a sense of shame on those companies who transgress the rights of workers. In some ways that’s even more important than getting a law changed.”

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.