Despite allegedly being the most pro-union president to come along since Harry Truman—much to the dismay of the majority of the nation’s employers—after six years in the Oval Office, other than labor-friendly, feel-good rhetoric and presidential appointments, unions have very little gain to show for the billions they’ve spent on Barack Obama and his party.
On Tuesday, Politico ran a story entitled Obama butters up labor — because they’re about to lose on trade and begins with:
If you think President Barack Obama has been going out of his way recently to say nice things about unions, you’re not wrong.
The timing isn’t a coincidence: He’s about to have a fight with them over trade, which the labor groups are going to lose.
While the subject of the article discusses Obama’s push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP) trade deal, the real subject of the article is what a disappointment the Obama presidency has been for unions.
“He’s our best friend when it doesn’t matter,” one union official told Politico.
Notwithstanding Obama’s union-friendly appointments to the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board, after six years, unions still have not ‘rebounded’ as they’d hoped and, if anything, it’s only gotten worse for them.
With Obama, unions got their much-fought for ObamaCare, but then they got whacked with the “cadillac tax.”
With Obama, unions got their friends into the NLRB, but they’re still losing members.
With Obama, unions got federal contractors required to post “union rights” posters, but then got hammered with Right-to-Work laws in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Sure, with Executive action on immigration reform, unions stand to gain millions of new members through newly-unionized immigrants. However, that does little for the millions of members that pay the bulk of union dues, or those who have been left behind.
Despite the rhetoric, with Obama, unions are losing more than they’re gaining and, now, they’re about to lose again with Obama’s “fast track” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP).
While unions have threatened to withhold campaign contributions from Democrats, that too seems more bark than bite.
Obama does not have another campaign to run and he (and the unions) knows it. Because of this, Obama can risk alienating unions on trade.
Afterall, what will they tell their members to do when it comes to the 2016 elections? Stay home? Vote Republican? Not hardly.
More than likely, unions will loosen up the purse strings, just like they do every campaign season.
Obama’s rhetoric, as pointed out by Politico, while soothing, isn’t solving the unions’ problems at all.
The problem, labor experts say, is that unions have a long list of frustrations with Obama that go beyond the trade issue. They’re furious at parts of Obamacare that they believe will hurt their workers, including a tax on generous health insurance plans that begins in 2018. They also believe Obama hasn’t put a high enough priority on their issues generally, and hasn’t actually accomplished anything that helps them with organizing or collective bargaining.
[snip]
“My sense is, they certainly welcome the president’s criticism” of legislation in Wisconsin and other states that would weaken unions, said a former senior Obama administration official who talks frequently to labor groups. “But at the end of the day, that rhetoric doesn’t organize any workers, it doesn’t help unions to win at the collective bargaining table, and it doesn’t bring a stronger foundation to the collective bargaining process more generally.”
Perhaps, without realizing it, Politico summarized what International Association of Machinists’ President Tom Buffenbarger warned about Barack Obama back in 2008: “He’s a poet, not a fighter.”
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