With Big Labor poised to spend another $2 billion again this election cycle, one might start to wonder what union bosses are getting for all that money.
Yet Big Labor isn’t satisfied with the current privileges granted by federal law. That’s why the PRO Act contains, as its flagship provision, the elimination of all 27 state Right to Work laws, which make union membership and financial support strictly voluntary.
It’s not difficult to see why the union bosses want to gut Right to Work protections for independent-minded workers. Without Right to Work, employees are forced to hand over a chunk of every paycheck to union officials just to keep their jobs. That money, once confiscated from workers, fuels the rest of the Big Labor agenda—including its massive political machine.
Considering that Joe Biden is one of the biggest beneficiaries from that war chest, he stands to benefit greatly if he can get forced dues flowing once again nationwide into Big Labor’s pockets—and into his campaign.
What’s more, union bosses are not content to force every worker currently in a unionized business to pay dues. As we’ve seen this year, the latest push from union-label politicians has been to expand the dues-paying ranks by forcing independent contractors, such as ridesharing drivers, to accept union boss representation by government mandate.
The other anti-worker policies contained in the PRO Act have been well-documented. From allowing the National Labor Relations Board to unilaterally overturn secret ballot votes in order to impose unionization, to drastically expanding striking powers, the PRO Act amounts to a veritable wish list of union boss demands.
Biden’s extreme pro-union boss positions hardly stop there, though. He also supports the Card Check Forced Unionism bill, which was blocked by bipartisan opposition when unions pushed it in 2010, at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.
That proposal is best known for effectively ending the secret ballot election for unionization by allowing organizers to pressure and cajole workers into signing cards that are later counted as “votes” for the union. The bill’s lesser known but equally outrageous scheme empowers government bureaucrats to impose forced-dues union contracts over the objections of both rank-and-file workers and employers.
And that’s to say nothing of the public sector, where Biden backs legislation forcing every state and local government in America to set up systems of union monopoly bargaining for public employees under penalty of outright federal takeover.
Joe Biden, backed by Big Labor’s political spending, has endorsed every single one of these priorities. In fact, now he’s even out publicly declaring his intent to gut the Senate filibuster in order to get his agenda enacted, and Congressional Democrats, who themselves have taken tens of millions in direct contributions from Big Labor, are marching in lockstep to make this wish list a reality. For the union bosses, that’s more than worth the $2 billion price tag.