Biden Settles Longshoremen Strike, But Does It Matter for Harris?

This dive on the pressure the Biden administration put on the companies to settle the east coast longshoreman strike runs up against the reality that Harris may be doing poorly with union voters.

First on the strike:

With the nation’s economy — and much of the president’s legacy — hanging in the balance just weeks before the election, White House chief economist Lael Brainard told management that they needed to come up with a new offer to the striking longshoremen. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stressed that Hurricane Helene magnified the importance of a deal. Labor Secretary Julie Su expressed optimism that the union would agree to a temporary extension if raises were included.

Then in a surprising move, as the call was wrapping up, Zients told the board members of the U.S. Maritime Alliance that he was going to tell Biden in about an hour that they had agreed to propose a new offer to the union. By that point, the shipping executives had agreed to do no such thing. Zients was saying they would.

“I need the offer today — not tomorrow. Today,” Zients said on the call. “I’m going to brief the president in an hour that you believe you can get this done today.”

Less than 12 hours later, White House officials were celebrating a deal to reopen the ports until January — postponing the issue until after this November’s election. 

So Biden is at least the best president for unions since FDR. But support for him in 2020 among union members was only pretty average over the last several decades and Harris may be slipping back to the same levels of Hillary Clinton. There’s certainly a lot of things going on here. First is gender and I don’t think we can ignore that. I also don’t know what we do about that. But also, it’s worth noting that Biden’s pro-union mentality is an anomaly among leading Democrats going back to the Carter administration and that union workers don’t trust Harris on this issue because she seems more like the type of Democrat that has ignored union issues in the past.

For example, from the first piece:

Business groups and even some Democratic allies had wanted Biden to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to force an end to the strike through a federal injunction. Biden and his team both publicly and privately promised not to go that route, insisting that the owners needed to reach a deal with the union and highlighting their corporate profits since the end of the coronavirus pandemic. The strategy reflected Biden’s personal determination to support labor even amid immense political pressure.

The White House’s strategy is not without its critics, both among Democrats and Republicans, who consider it far too deferential to labor unions. Biden has vowed to be the most “pro-union president in U.S. history,” and some economists have said that goal often undermines other priorities. Biden has backed union requirements on federal building projects, which some critics say drive up federal costs, and has defended the Jones Act, a shipping law that critics say makes goods more expensive in Puerto Rico. He became the first president last year to join a picket line, speaking to striking United Auto Workers members.

In other words, there are plenty of Democrats who simply don’t see unions with the same level of importance as they do, say, abortion. Well, that was an error and it’s an error that goes back a long time. See the second link above, a long New Yorker piece.

Some liberals believe that arguments about economic self-interest don’t sway Trump’s working-class supporters because they are motivated primarily by racial grievance. This is undoubtedly true of some, and racial prejudice can be hard to disentangle from economic concerns. In a recent Times article, a working-class voter from Wilkes-Barre told a reporter that she was not racist, but went on to say that opportunity should be “for everybody,” not just “Blacks and people of color,” whom she alleged were being handed money while white Americans were “being let down.” Trump has deftly exploited such sentiments. But, in “Rust Belt Union Blues,” Skocpol and Newman point out that white working-class voters have long had prejudiced attitudes about race—a fact that, until recently, didn’t stop them from supporting Democrats. Newman, who grew up in Pittsburgh and conducted dozens of interviews with current and retired union members in western Pennsylvania, including Herman Sauritch, told me that she had noticed a pronounced change in whom workers saw as their enemies. For older union members, “ ‘us’ was the workers and ‘them’ was business, which Republicans were lumped into,” she said. For their younger counterparts, “ ‘them’ was largely based on perceptions of a cultural élite.”

This new conception has taken hold, in no small part, because conservative media outlets, from Fox News to talk radio, have relentlessly propagated it. But Democrats also bear some responsibility for the shift. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted that, in the nineteen-seventies, Democrats began telling a story about economic progress that made almost no mention of the conflict between workers and capitalists. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and on through to Barack Obama, the new narrative was “a variation of the Republican story that prosperity comes from unencumbered businesses,” Podhorzer said. This faith in markets would have startled pioneering labor leaders like Walter Reuther. The Democrats’ business-friendly turn occurred, ironically enough, just as inequality was widening to levels not seen since the Gilded Age—a problem that deepened as Democrats embraced free-trade agreements. They also supported the deregulation of Wall Street, which helped cause the 2008 financial crash. After the meltdown, the Obama Administration bailed out banks that had engaged in fraud but did little for the homeowners they had victimized, who could hardly have been faulted for wondering whose side the government was on.

Biden’s tenure, in particular his large public investments and support for striking workers, has marked a break from this approach. But, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel has noted, Biden’s Presidency has been oddly “themeless”—bereft of a captivating explanation of why these policies are necessary to create a more just society. The theme Harris has emphasized in her campaign—expanding opportunity to revive the middle class—implicitly acknowledges how deeply entrenched inequality has become but seems directed as much at business owners as it is at workers. Tellingly, the speech Walz delivered in Erie contained more details about the fifty-thousand-dollar tax deduction that Harris wants to offer to new small businesses than about her plans for increasing the pay of low-income workers. On her Web site, Harris devotes a mere sentence to the latter issue, promising that she will “fight to raise the minimum wage” without indicating by how much.

Another thing Newman noticed in interviews with younger workers was their anger at union leaders who reflexively supported the Democratic Party without getting anything in return. I heard this sentiment from Scott Sauritch, Herman’s son, who praised Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, for speaking at the Republican National Convention rather than rushing to “kiss Kamala’s ass.” (On September 18th, the Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate in the election, after internal polls showed that nearly sixty per cent of its members backed Trump. But local Teamsters unions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada immediately endorsed Harris.) The language that Sauritch used to describe Harris—whom he referred to at one point as an “evil bitch”—made me wonder how much his aversion to her had to do with her gender as opposed to her policies. Yet I could see why he felt that union leaders were too beholden to the Democrats. In 2018, two years after he’d attended the Hillary Clinton campaign rally, he was invited to a press conference at the White House announcing new tariffs on steel imports. The day before the event, he told me, the U.S.W. had instructed him not to wear his union shirt, in order to prevent Trump from using the footage in a commercial. Sauritch feels that the request would never have been made if the same policy, which he saw as helping workers like him, had been introduced by a Democrat. He wore the shirt anyway. (A U.S.W. representative told me that Sauritch had been advised that wearing union gear was optional.) During the press conference, at Trump’s invitation, Sauritch told the story of how his father lost his job at the metal-pipe plant when Japanese imports were battering the steel industry. Even more than the tariffs themselves, what had lingered with Sauritch from the event was the feeling of being recognized, unlike at Clinton’s rally. “He showed respect,” Sauritch said, of Trump.

OK, there’s a lot going on here. First, we have to remember that everyone mentioned here is in the older unions. The growth of the union movement is almost entirely in academia, K-12 education, service work, and nursing. That’s a very different kind of union worker than a pipefitter or truck driver. And while the overall density of the labor movement remains stagnant, the percentage of the labor movement made up of these newer workers slowly grows. And again, yes, race and gender do matter for some of these people.

But that can all be true and two other things can be true. First, Democrats absolutely did turn away from the labor movement after the 60s. I’ve been writing up obituaries for a lot of older Democrats and they all did this–not just Carter, Clinton, and Obama, but Michael Dukakis, Jerry Brown, and Gary Hart. Not to mention Ralph Nader, which is a whole other deal. There were a few exceptions like Tom Harkin and Dick Gephardt, but they really were exceptions and their attempts to top the ticket never came too close to fruition. Biden’s always been a bit more complicated on this because of his representing the state of Citibank in the Senate, but you can’t argue with his presidential record. There was a wide-scale belief among younger Democratic leaders in the 70s and 80s especially that unions were old hat, they existed primarily for GOTV efforts and fundraising, and the future was tech and higher ed. How many mainstream prominent Democrats did we hear saying things like “unemployed coal miners should learn coding.” It was a lot more than zero. The historical literature on the move of the Democrats away from really supporting unions is now quite long and basically irrefutable.

Even with Biden, what is the Democratic message for working class voters? And here I’m not talking about the policy message. If people cared about policy, they wouldn’t be voting for Trump. I’m talking the identity message. Trump does well in these groups because he makes them feel good about themselves. What are we doing for that?

This leads to larger questions of identity. I’m not going to sit here and romanticize working class identity. I know white working class identity well from my childhood and I wanted nothing to do with it, then or now. There’s a reason I got the hell out of my home town and never really looked back. I certainly never abandoned the struggle for dignity among workers in my home town, but by writing about it as a historian and essayist (I guess), I could think about it and deal with it on my own terms. Terms like “elites” and “outsiders” have no real basis in geographical or even class reality. In fact, at this point, with the globalization of the economy and the nationalization of political polarization, these terms mean even less than ever. And yet they have great power.

Thus, why would a union member see Harris as an elite? She’s a woman and she’s a person of color, you bet that’s a part of it. But she’s also from California. She comes from a professor and legal background. She likes wine. She knows which fork to use at dinner. She hangs out with billionaires. And not the Donald Trump type, who is “one of us” because he hates everyone and throws his dick around. These reasons are all dumb, but you have to take them seriously, not to pander to them, but to at least figure out what to do about them. Most certainly, ignoring the ones that make Democrats look bad is not going to help because they are all part of the problem.

This might be rather inchoate and the difficulty of expressing these thoughts in a way that satisfies me is part of the problem with my book writing right now.

Let me put it in a very different way. Where I come from, in the Pacific Northwest, people love their Oregon Trail identity. Every small town seemingly has a covered wagon or statue or something like that. Now, if it’s you or me, we say, who cares about this, it’s dumb. But what if you have a lot of people moving in who want to take them down because they are racist? What if those people are also buying the house next door and fixing it up, either for themselves or for an AirBNB? What if they are working for a tech company? What if they are engaging in an entirely correct economic analysis that the trees make a lot more sense for your state standing for tourism and recreation rather than being logged? What if you don’t even lose your job over that, but you fear that you might? What if they vote for Democrats and begin to embrace Native voices? What does that say about your beloved pioneer identity? You might have been a Democrat for a long time, but all of a sudden, none of these new Democrats seem like you. They don’t hate the people you do. They care about a sustainable economy but they don’t care about your work, union or not. They don’t see value in a performatively white culture (now about schools, that’s obviously a very different thing).

Well, this is basically the story of the polarization of the Pacific Northwest since 1960. The question is how do we address these issues without pandering to racism or sexism? How do we attract union voters and other voters without a college degree without condescending to them, while making them feel comfortable as who they are, without constantly talking about what college our kids are going to and our vacations? How do we actually organize them?

And to be clear, that organizing has to take place outside a political cycle. This is why I constantly urge people to rethink their approach to politics. An election is one of two things–it’s where you consolidate your gains or cut your losses. The real organizing comes before that, where you have made the gains and worked toward the future and built the capacity. The political education starts there, not at the election. This to be clear is one part of the problem with the unions too–they’ve allowed increasingly toxic identities to form by not doing the political education outside of election endorsements, which workers so often ignore.

This is one of these questions where anyone who says they have the answer is full of shit. The answer or likely many answers don’t exist yet because we aren’t even asking the right questions.

And this is why, or one of the reasons why, despite Biden being the best president for unions since FDR, Harris may do worse on union voters than even Hillary Clinton, who actually didn’t really care about them. Harris has walked a picket line, something unthinkable in the Atari Democrat era. But thanks to all these identity/economy/nationalism/globalization/race/gender issues–none of which can actually be disconnected from the others–it may well not matter.