Labor and the Primaries
By 
In pushing South Carolina to the front of Democrats’ 2024 nominating calendar, President JOE BIDEN ensured that next year’s presidential primary more closely reflects his own political interests.
It’s a party leader’s prerogative. But the move hasn’t gone over well with a key Biden constituency: union members.
Some rank-and-file union members and organizers in South Carolina worry that moving the first-in-the nation primary from New Hampshire to the Palmetto State will weaken organized labor’s influence in selecting Democratic nominees and leave the impression that the party is unwilling to prioritize labor.
“It’s a terrible idea,” said ERIN MCKEE, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Charleston. “I am disappointed that President Biden would do this.”
Biden pushed for South Carolina to go first as an effort to reward the state that almost single handedly delivered him the 2020 nomination, thanks largely to Black voters. But the president also prides himself as a champion of organized labor, too. And few states have as poor a record on that front as South Carolina, which has the lowest union participation rate in the country.
Roughly 1.7 percent of South Carolina’s workforce are members of a union, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s far below the national average of 10.3 percent and it lags behind the rate of other states floated to take the first-in-the-nation slot, such as Nevada (14.1 percent), Michigan (15.3 percent) and Georgia (5.8 percent).
Local labor leaders recognize that South Carolina has a lot to gain economically by going first — in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, more than $11 million was spent at hotels in Des Moines alone. But in other potential first states, most of that money would flow to union workers. That wouldn’t be the case in South Carolina, where there aren’t any unionized hotels for Democrats to spend their campaign dollars. And there aren’t enough unionized print shops to accommodate the quadrennial influx of campaign mailers and yard signs.
“There’s a lot of concern here. Democrats are supposed to advocate for labor unions and South Carolina has some trouble there,” said AMANDA ROBERTSON, a labor activist from Rock Hill. “First in the nation, as far as that being a reward for a state, are we deserving?”
It’s certainly a fair question. I am not personally super worried about this–after all, the Black voters in South Carolina are probably more likely to push through a candidate with good economic justice policies than union members in the North themselves. But the fact that this all wasn’t even a consideration is telling as well. Unions and moving resources to union workers simply hasn’t been a priority even among Democrats in pretty close to forever. Making Michigan the first state for example would have provided a diverse electorate with a major union presence and lots of money going to union workers. It makes more sense across the board. Moreover, Biden’s strong relationship with labor took a big hit with his use of the Railway Labor Act to force a contract on the rail unions that had rejected it, so this isn’t helping rebuild that.