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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Biden courts union labor at electrical workers’ convention in Chicago

President Joe Biden's appearance at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Convention in Chicago is the latest in a series of friendly overtures he has made to labor unions since he began his term.

CHICAGO (CN) — President Joe Biden delivered a speech at the 40th annual International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Convention Wednesday afternoon, touting his support for union labor. He also used the opportunity to ask union members to support his party and his administration, as the midterms loom with gloomy expectations for Democrats.

"You can count on me to keep fighting for you," Biden said at the convention.

Biden's appearance Wednesday was the first time in the union's history that a sitting president had visited one of their conventions, and he was welcomed with great fanfare by IBEW President Lonnie Stephenson. The IBEW's leadership cadre have been Biden allies since the 2020 presidential campaign when the union formally endorsed Biden during the Democratic primaries in February. During his speech, Biden credited IBEW with helping him win the presidency.

"The only reason I'm standing here as your president is because the IBEW came on with me early," Biden said.

That endorsement was not without controversy. A week after the IBEW announced it was supporting Biden, over 1,200 of its members — the union is currently about 755,000 strong in the U.S. — called on leadership to retract the endorsement, and to democratize the endorsement process so that rank-and-file members in IBEW locals had a bigger say in the union's political stances.

At the time the union had a dedicated block of Bernie Sanders supporters, who made support for labor militancy a cornerstone of his campaign. A 2020 internal poll by North America’s Building Trades Unions, publicized by Politico, also found that 47% of rank-and-file trade union members — IBEW included — preferred former President Donald Trump to Biden.

On Wednesday, IBEW President Lonnie Stephenson hinted that the union would continue to support Biden regardless of any rank-and-file hesitancy.

"He has our back, and we have his," Stephenson said.

Biden told convention attendees that he intended to be the most pro-union president in history, touting his stump line "a job is about more than a paycheck" and crediting organized labor for building America's post-WW2 middle class. As the post-war prominence of the professional class wanes and many college-educated millennials find themselves downwardly mobile, he said he also expected unions to rebuild the middle class in the 21st century.

"If every investment banker went on strike, not a whole lot would happen... If you all went on strike, the country would shut down," Biden said.

Biden's comments are the latest in a series of friendly overtures he has recently made to the U.S.' growing unionization movement. Last Thursday he met with Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls, who in April organized the first successful union drive for Amazon workers in the U.S. The same day, he also spoke with 39 other labor leaders, including representatives of the swiftly-growing Starbucks Workers United union.

Biden has also urged Congress to pass a $15 federal minimum wage, and in April 2021 voiced support for the union-empowering Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. His American Jobs Plan calls for a $100 billion investment in infrastructure renewal, internet access improvements and workforce development that the White House claims will create "hundreds of thousands of quality jobs."

On Wednesday Biden pivoted further leftward, expressing support for raising tax rates on the super-wealthy to as high as 39% and saying that billionaires should not pay proportionally lower taxes than electricians. The national average pay for IBEW electricians a little over $77,000 annually, putting them at a tax rate that hovers between 20% and 30% depending on their state. The tax rate for U.S. billionaires, according to a 2021 economic analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisors, was only about 8% on average between 2010 and 2018.

Despite this, the 46th president's relation to the labor movement has at times been tepid.

He has only walked a picket line a small handful of times over the course of his political career — most recently in the days preceding the 2020 Nevada Democratic Primary, where he joined a Culinary Union strike in Las Vegas alongside five other Democratic presidential hopefuls. He also stayed largely neutral during the 10,000+ strong United Auto Workers strike against John Deere in Autumn 2021, saying only that the workers "have a right to strike" without specifically supporting them.

Biden put any labor reservations he might have aside on Wednesday, urging union members to build collective power capable of challenging corporate profit-seeking. It's a sentiment he also expressed earlier in the day when he visited a farm in Illinois' Kankakee County.

At the farm, he said he would fight to promote small family farmers — who he called "the backbone of our country" — so they could collectively compete against large industrial agriculture firms. As he has in the past, he affirmed his commitment to capitalism, but said more needed to be done to ensure small business' viability on the free market.

"I'm a capitalist but capitalism without competition isn't capitalism, it's exploitation," Biden said.

Biden's courting of workers in both urban and rural Illinois belies his sinking approval rates, which as of Wednesday sat at about 42% nationally according to polling aggregate FiveThirtyEight. Democrats as a party face likewise falling approval ratings heading into the 2022 midterms. As of Wednesday 46% of voters indicated they'd rather vote for Congressional Republicans, while only 43% said they'd support Democrats.

"Keep the faith," Biden told IBEW members.

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