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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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