‘All-of-government’ approach undermines workers’ free choice

President Biden’s commitment to the labor movement is undeniable. He pledged to be the "most pro-union president in American history,” and his actions — including mobilizing federal agencies with missions unrelated to labor relations — have mirrored this sentiment.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an agency created by Congress to ensure workplaces are safe, is rewriting its policies so that unions can infiltrate non-union private-sector employer facilities. The White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, which implements the president’s climate agenda, emphasizes that part of its “all-of-government approach to tackle the climate crisis” involves creating “good-paying, union jobs.” The Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal agency tasked with regulating financial markets, is looking to open the shareholder proposal process so that unions can impact shareholder proposals “opportunistically” to influence contract negotiations.

Essentially, under President Biden’s governance, every federal agency exists for two purposes: The first is to execute whatever function Congress originally created said agency to do, and the second is to essentially force union representation on workers, thus depriving them of their free choice.

Over two decades ago, in “The Death of A Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation,” George Washington University Professor Jarol Manheim wrote that a “corporate campaign is an organized assault on the reputation of a company that has offended some interest group.” Today, the administration’s “all-of-government” approach amounts to a massive federally funded corporate campaign aimed at every American employer not presently organized by unions.

As punishment for the “offense” of simply not being organized by a union, these employers face particular hostility from the supposed arbiter of private-sector labor relations, the National Labor Relations Board. Now packed with pro-union Biden appointees, the Board continues to issue decisions that appear singularly focused on increasing union power without regard to their impact on workers or businesses.

The NLRB is acting as if it is unbound by either its own past precedents or decades of Supreme Court decisions. The agency’s rulings have tipped the scales dramatically in favor of unions on dozens of issues — from gerrymandered bargaining units to employer property rights to joint employer arrangements. The NLRB’s General Counsel has brought actions aimed at silencing employers during union organizing drives, which effectively denies workers the information they need to make an informed decision about joining a union.

Recent Board decisions also actively shield union supporters who use vulgar, sexist and racist language in the workplace, thereby creating a hostile work environment. Perhaps worst of all, the Board is now pushing forward with efforts to deny workers the right to a secret ballot union election, taking away any promise of voter privacy and election integrity. All of these actions continue, even as multiple claims of biased practices have surfaced whereby the NLRB is accused of deliberately flouting the law to give unions a leg up during organizing drives.

The administration’s “all-of-government” approach in general and the NLRB’s aggressive posture in particular are aimed at increasing union membership rates regardless of what American workers actually desire. The unionization rate, just 6% of private-sector workers, is lower than it has ever been, and polls have shown that the majority of the workforce is “not interested at all” in joining a union. If unionization is indeed the right move for workers, the administration and NLRB should not need to push their pro-union agenda so recklessly. Perhaps it’s time for the labor movement to abandon forced unionization by government mandate and focus on an agenda that is consistent with the needs of the diverse and dynamic 21st century workforce.