The National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith into bargaining.
The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.
Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing possible again, after decades in which unpunished employer illegality was the most decisive factor in reducing the nation’s rate of private-sector unionization from roughly 35 percent to the bare 6 percent at which it stands today.
I mean, there are things the president can directly influence as head of the executive and things he can’t. Blaming Biden for the failed student loan forgiveness is ignorant of the limits of the office, or for the overturning of RoeVwade. At the same time, he directed the HHS to make abortion pills widely available through the mail, and worked through the department of education to find traunches of loans that could be forgiven. In the case of unions, on the one hand he killed the railroad strike, but also facilitated contracts to get the workers sick days, etc in the following months of negotiations. There is plenty of legitimate criticism you could make of Biden, but we should also recognize the good as well.