What is it about recent Democratic presidents? They lean on labor unions to get elected. They couldn’t get elected without them. Then, once in the White House, they turn around and stab them in the back.
In Bill Clinton’s case, he stuck us with the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA—the mega-free-trade agreement with the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed into law in 1994. Back then, it was promised that NAFTA would net us two hundred thousand jobs a year. Instead, it has proved as harmful to the U.S. economy as labor leaders predicted.1
As Matt Stoller, writing in Salon magazine, reported: “Today, the U.S. has lost one out of every four manufacturing jobs that existed before NAFTA—over 5 million, with 42,000 factories closed. A modest trade surplus with Mexico was replaced with a large, persistent deficit. . . . NAFTA’s new investor protections dramatically increased the ability of corporations to outsource entire factories to Mexico”—resulting in the “giant sucking sound” presidential candidate Ross Perot warned us about. All of which resulted, not just in job loss, but also in lower wages and smaller pensions for millions of American workers—and less bargaining leverage for labor unions.2
Twenty years later, we’ve seen the damage NAFTA caused. So how does our new progressive president learn from this history? He pushes for an even bigger trade deal.
If corporations liked NAFTA, they will love TPP—and American workers hate the prospect of it. As some Democratic members of Congress succinctly put it, TPP is “NAFTA on steroids.”
First unveiled by the Obama administration in 2009 as the centerpiece of the new president’s “pivot to Asia,” TPP is the largest free-trade agreement ever adopted, setting new partnership rules for trading between the United States and eleven Asian markets: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. These countries make up 40 percent of the global economy. China was deliberately left off the list.
The administration sold TPP as a critical step in opening Asian markets to American companies, yet every single labor union, public and private, denounced it as another giant, corporate power grab that would endanger food safety and access to medicines and national security, and destroy millions more American jobs. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research predicted that a whopping 90 percent of workers in the United States would see a decrease in real wages because of TPP.3
The proposed agreement was also opposed by the vast majority of congressional Democrats. In 2012, twenty-four senators sent a letter asking the White House to make workers’ rights a top priority in treaty negotiations. And on April 21, 2014, three Democratic leaders in the House—Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, George Miller of California, and Louise Slaughter of New York—blasted the draft proposal in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times: “This agreement would force Americans to compete against workers from nations such as Vietnam, where the minimum wage is $2.75 a day. It threatens to roll back financial regulation, environmental standards and U.S. laws that protect the safety of drugs we take, food we eat and toys we give our children. It would create binding policies on countless subjects, so that Congress and state legislatures would be thwarted from mitigating the pact’s damage.”4
There were two other big problems with TPP: the blank check Obama wanted in order to negotiate the deal on his own, so-called fast-track authority, and the total secrecy surrounding negotiations. Both were deal-breakers for congressional Democrats.5
For TPP, Obama sought the same unbridled power to make a deal, or that fast-track authority that President Clinton was once awarded for NAFTA. Under its terms, the president alone could negotiate a new free-trade agreement—with the role of Congress reduced to giving a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote, after the deal was completed. No other options. Congress, whose oversight of trade deals is explicitly outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, would be stripped of that authority, with no power to amend the deal.6
For most Democrats, once burned by Clinton and NAFTA, fast-track authority was a nonstarter, a total abdication of their congressional responsibilities. “Fast track would be yet another insult to the American worker,” Congresswoman DeLauro told reporters at the beginning of the 114th Congress. And she predicted Obama’s request would be denied: “It will not happen. We are not going to do it.”7
From the beginning, Obama’s request for fast-track ran into roadblocks in Congress. While most Republicans supported the concept of TPP, many were reluctant to yield Obama unlimited executive authority on trade, after having slammed him repeatedly for, they believed, abusing his presidential powers by issuing executive orders on health care and immigration reform. In fact, they had sued him for doing so. Among Democrats, the problem wasn’t just the president but the underlying deal. In fact, when legislation to create fast-track authority was first introduced in 2014, the bill failed to attract one single Democratic sponsor.
If Obama was concerned about opposition within his own party, however, he didn’t show it. During a ten-day trip to Asia in November 2014, the president dismissed TPP’s critics as conspiracy theorists. “My point is you shouldn’t be surprised if there are going to be objections, protests, rumors, conspiracy theories, political aggravation around a trade deal,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “That reflects a lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations.” Of course, the reason this lack of knowledge existed is that Obama’s administration had been working overtime to keep the deliberations top-secret.8
Ironically, it was only after Republicans had seized control of both houses of Congress in 2015 that Obama had the opportunity to win fast-track authority for TPP—and he was able to do so only by turning his back on fellow Democrats and making a deal with Republicans.
For Obama, after six years of hanging progressives in his own party out to dry time and again, asking Congress to give him a blank check on trade was when Democrats finally rebelled.
Seldom has anything like what happened with TPP been seen before in Congress. It was Obama and Republicans v. Democrats. In the Senate, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and most Senate Republicans sided with Obama. Lined up solidly against him were 30 out of 44 Democrats.
In the House, Obama faced an equally embarrassing scorecard. On his side were Speaker John Boehner, the entire Republican leadership, and a majority of House Republicans. Opposition was led by Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and 160 out of 188 Democrats.9
Also lined up against the president were 100 percent of America’s labor unions. Veteran labor leaders I spoke to said they could never remember a time when every single labor union, both public and private, both large and small, were united on one single issue. But they all stood solidly against fast-track.10
How’d a Democratic president end up opposed by a majority of his own party? He brought it on himself—by trying to push another dubious trade deal onto a group of Democratic lawmakers who still regretted voting in 1992 for NAFTA.
The Obama White House didn’t help matters by its secretive behavior. Drafts of the long, complicated treaty were shared with representatives of the twelve countries and six hundred corporations that had a stake in TPP, but not with the public or members of Congress. While the White House denounced those who complained about this secrecy, insisting that any members of Congress could read the trade deal any time they wanted, in reality it was not that easy. Yes, members of Congress could read the entire near-thousand-page document, but they could do so only in a special, secured room, all alone, with no staff or advisers, no cell phone, no pen or paper, no notes—and, of course, they couldn’t take a copy with them.
And Obama had another big problem as well. For six years, congressional Democrats hadn’t felt much love coming from the president. On any number of progressive-minded issues—many of which we have gone over in this book—Obama had refused to make a big push in Congress, even when the power of the bully pulpit could have made all the difference. Democrats also blamed him, in part, for losing control of the House in 2010. In May 2015, when I asked California congresswoman Jackie Speier whether, this far into his presidency, Obama had a reservoir of goodwill among House Democrats he could count on to line up a few votes for TPP, she responded candidly: “I can’t say that he does.”11
What little goodwill did exist was lost when Obama stooped to personal attacks against his progressive critics, dismissing Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, as just another “politician, like everybody else.”
In the end, with near-unanimous support of House and Senate Republicans, Obama won fast-track approval, but only after turning his back on labor unions and betraying the vast majority of his own party. For many progressive Democrats, it was the final blow in a long string of disappointments from Barack Obama.
Frankly, labor leaders might not have resented Obama’s fighting against them on TPP so much—if only he had fought for them on other important issues. But he never seemed to have the time or inclination to do so, and that was clear from the very beginning.
Case in point: the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA. In 2008, that was the number-one issue for labor unions. I know this particularly well. My radio/TV program is strongly supported by many of our great labor unions: the Laborers, Machinists, Teamsters, AFSCME, Ironworkers, SMART Union, Steelworkers, AFT, NEA, Ironworkers, and AFGE. In interviews during the 2008 campaign, the presidents of every one of those unions told me their top priority was EFCA—which Barack Obama supported and promised to make one of his top priorities as president.12
EFCA wasn’t complicated. It simply said that workers could organize a union, and have that union certified to bargain with the employer, simply by collecting the signatures of a majority of employees on cards. Employers could no longer demand an additional secret ballot vote, as they could in the past, and use that opportunity to browbeat, threaten, or fire pro-union workers.13
“The current process for forming unions is badly broken,” Congressman George Miller of California had argued when he first introduced the bill in 2007, “and so skewed in favor of those who oppose unions, that workers must literally risk their jobs in order to form a union. Although it is illegal, one quarter of employers facing an organizing drive have been found to fire at least one worker who supports a union. In fact, employees who are active union supporters have a one-in-five chance of being fired for legal union activities. Sadly, many employers resort to spying, threats, intimidation, harassment and other illegal activity in their campaigns to oppose unions.” EFCA would fix that. So Miller reintroduced the bill on March 10, 2009, alongside Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, with every expectation that the new Democratic president would help them push it over the top.14
Labor leaders knew they had their work cut out for them in the Senate. Democrats never quite achieved a sixty-vote veto-proof majority, especially after they lost Kennedy’s seat to Scott Brown. And even some Democrats, like Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln and Delaware’s Tom Carper, refused to support the bill. Complicating things further: As a Republican, the late Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania voted for EFCA; when he switched parties to become a Democrat, he opposed it. Go figure.15
What surprised union leaders the most, however, was not their troubles in the Senate, it was the silence from the White House. Where was Barack Obama when they needed him? Nowhere to be seen or heard.
Several times during that period, I asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs what President Obama was doing to help secure passage of EFCA. The response was always the same: “He strongly supports the legislation.” Yes, but what is he doing to help make it happen? Is he twisting arms? What senators has he talked to? Again, all we could get out of Gibbs was: The president has told everybody he supports the bill. As if all a president has to do is snap his fingers and Congress snaps to attention. As we’ve seen on countless issues now, it doesn’t work that way, and never will.
Clearly, Obama was not lifting a finger or phone to help round up votes for EFCA, despite his campaign promises to union supporters. No speeches. No statements of support. No EFCA rallies. Nothing.
But we later discovered it was even worse than that. Unbeknownst to labor leaders, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, with Obama’s blessing, had put out the word to Democratic leaders in Congress that there would be no vote on EFCA until after Obamacare had passed and been signed into law. By that time, it was too late. Scott Brown was in office, more Democrats had defected, and EFCA disappeared without ever even being brought up for a vote.16
For President Obama and organized labor, it was a clear case of: promise made, promise broken.
Another blow to organized labor came on February 15, 2012, when President Obama signed the Federal Reauthorization Act, a seemingly innocuous refunding measure that contained a poison pill for labor unions—which strongly opposed it.
For Obama, signing that bill destroyed all the goodwill he had gained with unions three years earlier, in naming new progressive members to the National Mediation Board. In 2010, the NMB adopted a new rule governing elections for railroad and airline workers seeking to unionize. Before then, those workers had been covered by the 1935 Railway Labor Act, rather than the National Labor Relations Act that covers most American workers.17
Under the old NLRA rule, in order to organize a union, workers had to obtain a majority of all potential voters in a bargaining unit, not just a majority of those who voted. (Note: If that same rule applied in electoral politics, most members of Congress could never get elected.) Under the new rule, the outcome of an election was determined the same way it is for other unions, or for president of the United States: Whoever gets the most votes, wins.18
Everybody was happy with the new arrangement—except big corporations and Republicans in Congress, who introduced legislation to override the NMB rule, which President Obama vowed to veto. After Republicans forced a thirteen-day shutdown of the FAA over the issue, Senate Leader Harry Reid announced a compromise: The override language would be dropped from the bill, which meant the new NMB rule remained in place. But, and here was the big problem—BUT—a whole new demand would be added to the process. Rather than having to gather signatures of 35 percent of workers to hold an organizing election, unions would have to submit signatures from a majority of all workers—just for a vote to be held.19
As unions pointed out, that unnecessary extra step would give management an opportunity to derail or delay any election, despite majority support of actual workers, by packing an employee list with retired workers, challenging voter eligibility, hiring temporary promanagement shills, or otherwise monkeying around with the core electorate. And, remember, this compromise was forced through when Democrats still controlled the Senate.20
Led by CWA president Larry Cohen, union leaders blasted Democrats, who had always refused past requests to attach pro-union provisions to funding bills, for now agreeing to an anti-union amendment to an FAA appropriations bill. “The leadership in the Senate didn’t even see fit to include [the pro-labor NMB rule] in this gutting of the statute,” Cohen protested. “Our little crumb of an advancement is left as a rule, so the day that there’s ever a Republican president elected . . . they’re going to strip the rule. The statute will remain. It’s worse than it’s ever been.”21
If unions thought they could count on their friends, they were mistaken. Democrats passed the bill, a Democratic president signed it, and millions of union members were left asking themselves: Why did we spend so much money and energy electing Democrats who turn around and stab us in the back?
Yet another “Et tu, Brute?” knife wound occurred during the fight for the Affordable Care Act. Without labor unions, there would be no Obamacare. It’s as simple as that. For decades, unions were the ones that made universal health care a top priority of the Democratic Party. Unions convinced Americans of the need for it. Unions built the constituency for it. Unions negotiated health-insurance protection for their own members—and wanted to extend it to all American families. Unions were the major force in rounding up the votes for Obamacare in Congress, even after the president disappointed them by dropping the public plan option.
Without labor unions, there would be no Obamacare. Barack Obama knows it. And labor leaders know he knows it. So imagine the shock felt by some union presidents, then, when it turned out that Obamacare, as signed into law, would actually undermine some long-held union health plans. They were only further shocked when they appealed to the White House for relief—and Obama turned them down.22
At issue were so-called Taft-Hartley, or multiemployer plans, which cover workers, such as construction workers, who might work for more than one company in a year. Unions claimed that Obamacare as written would drive up the costs of such plans to the point where employers would drop them. To save the Taft-Hartley plans, they asked the White House to support an amendment to Obamacare that would make their low-income workers eligible for the same type of federal subsidies other low-income Americans received through the new health exchanges.23
Unions figured they had a good shot at it. After all, they had delivered for Barack Obama. Now it was his turn to deliver for them. During this period, I ran into a group of labor leaders—including Teamster president James Hoffa, UFCW president Joe Hansen, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka—who had just left a meeting in the West Wing. They told me they were confident White House officials understood their dilemma and would grant the necessary relief.
A couple of months later at its convention in Los Angeles, as a sign of how important this issue was to organized labor, the AFL-CIO passed a strongly worded resolution reaffirming its continued support for the Affordable Care Act, but warning that without relief on the Taft-Hartley provision, they would support the repeal of Obamacare.
But Obama didn’t need them any longer. Obamacare was already the law of the land, and Obama would veto any legislation to repeal it. On September 13, 2013, the administration summoned a group of labor leaders to the White House and told them their request had been denied. With friends like these . . .24
No one has ever accused President Obama of being a champion of organized labor. Reviewing the first term in November 2012 in The Nation, reporter Josh Eidelson noted that, at best, “his record was mixed. . . . He appointed National Mediation Board members who made it easier for airline and railroad workers to form a union, then signed a law making it harder. His stimulus kept teachers on the job, but his [Department of Education’s] ‘Race to the Top’ program rewarded states that made it easier to fire them.” He supported labor-backed reforms on Wall Street, but did nothing to realize the Employee Free Choice Act. He stepped up trade cases against China, while pushing the antilabor Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. He came as close as any president to passing universal health care, but he undermined some of the best union health plans.25
That left unions in somewhat of a bind, going into the president’s re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections of 2014. Many of their members, who volunteered in record numbers in 2008, felt betrayed by the Democrats they had worked so hard to elect, starting with President Obama. What ended up motivating union members in both 2012 and 2014 was less excitement about all the support they were getting from Democrats—and more how much worse it would be under Republicans.
For example, Lee Saunders—president of the mighty AFSCME, the largest health-care and public workers union in the country—reminded his members how Mitt Romney had supported anti-union Republican governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio. ATU president Larry Hanley says transit workers understand that “the right wing is completely engaged in a full frontal attack to eliminate our rights to even bargain contracts,” and that “the way you fight back is to deny the White House, the Senate and hopefully the Congress to the Republicans.”26
They may not get the support they were counting on from Democrats, union members concluded, but that was better than getting wiped out by Republicans. Hanley summed up their attitude in 2012: “We do not see this as an election that will, if we’re successful, bring in a whole new wave of pro-labor legislation.” But, he said, we have “worked hard to make sure our people understand that if Republicans are successful at taking over the federal government, there will be no such thing as a labor movement.”27
Let down by Obama, labor unions were forced to play defense, not offense. Which doesn’t work as well, as a winning political strategy, as being enthusiastic about the team you’re playing for. And for all their efforts on behalf of Obama in 2012, they were rewarded with . . . the TPP.
It was sometime during Obama’s second year in office that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, as part of his daily briefing, announced that President Obama would hold a big meeting at the White House the next day on jobs, and proceeded to read a long list of business executives who would attend. I raised my hand and asked, since they were going to talk about jobs, what labor leaders had been invited. Gibbs looked down the list. Answer: none. Which shows you what kind of priority organized labor was for Barack Obama.
There’s no doubt that President Obama supports an increase in the federal minimum wage. If he had the power, he’d raise it himself, in a New York minute, without waiting for Congress to act.
There’s also no doubt that Republicans are sometimes willing to vote to increase the minimum wage, depending on who’s in the White House. The last time they did so was in 2007, when 82 out of 202 House Republicans voted to support President George W. Bush in raising the minimum wage to $7.25. But they weren’t about to extend that same favor to a Democratic president.28
Obama missed his best opportunity to raise the minimum wage, making no effort to do so during his first two years in office—when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, and he was preoccupied with health care. After that, he did little but exhort Congress to act.
In his 2013 State of the Union address, he proposed raising the minimum wage as a way of lifting people out of poverty: “We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages. But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. . . . Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 a hour.”29
On my show the next morning, Senator Tom Harkin, then-chair of the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, blasted President Obama for proposing so small a hike. At $9.00 per hour, people are still living in poverty, Harkin argued. It should be raised to at least $10.10 an hour. By a year later, Obama had agreed.30
In his 2014 State of the Union address, Obama saluted business leaders, mayors, governors, and state legislators who had acted on their own to raise the minimum wage, proving you didn’t need an act of Congress to get things done.
At the same time, he challenged Congress to get on board. “Today the federal minimum wage is worth about twenty percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here. And Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting the minimum wage to $10.10. It’s easy to remember: 10.10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers with more money to spend. It does not involve any new bureaucratic program. So join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.”31
But, true to form, Republicans in Congress refused to do so. Leaving Obama no choice but to act on his own, with two minimum-wage-related actions. First, immediately following his State of the Union address, on February 12, 2014, he signed an executive order requiring all federal contractors to pay their employees at least $10.10 an hour. “If you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes,” he argued, “you should not have to live in poverty.”32
The following year, in June 2015, he directed the Labor Department to radically revise its regulations on overtime pay. Under the old rules, salaried workers had to earn less than $23,660 per year in order to qualify for time-and-a-half overtime pay when they work more than forty hours per week. Under the new proposal, workers would be guaranteed overtime if they earned up to $50,400 per year. Labor Secretary Tom Perez estimated that action alone represented a pay increase of $1.2 billion for over 5 million American workers.33
In April 2015, Democrats in Congress raised their proposed minimum wage from $10.10 to $12.00 per hour, but that legislation also went nowhere.34
And that’s where it stands. As of July 2015, twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia had adopted a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25. So had many cities, and many big companies, including Gap, Aetna, and Walmart. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles raised their minimum wage to $15.00 per hour. Even McDonald’s raised the minimum wage, but only for a fraction of its employees.35
Yet, despite his best efforts and intentions, Barack Obama, unlike George W. Bush, will leave office without having found a way to persuade Congress to raise the minimum wage for all workers nationwide. Thus, as of this writing, the federal minimum wage remains $7.25—which, in terms of purchasing power, is lower than it was in 1968. Little wonder that so many working Americans are struggling.36