“Welcome back to the White House”

(@ noon – promoted by NLinStPaul)

Smell that fresh air? A new breeze is blowing.

Ever since the Wagner Act legalizing unionization passed 74 years ago, right wingers have been trying to gut it. Corporations at first ignored it altogether until forced by the Supreme Court to surrender their opposition. With a post-Roosevelt Republican majority embedded in Congress, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was the first official move to make unionization tougher.

There have been a few bright moments in the decades since then, as when occupational safety and health laws were passed in the 1970s. But mostly, whether it was The Great Communicator delivering a nose-thumbing message to striking air traffic controllers, George Bush issuing executive orders favoring employers over workers, sophisticated covert union-busting efforts devised by well-paid professionals, or relentless Chamber of Commerce-promoted propaganda, the labor movement in the United States has been under constant attack.

Over the years, these attacks – together with the changing demographics of the workplace and, ironically, the movement into the middle class of more and more Americans that union activity made possible – have greatly weakened unions. Only 8% of private sector workers are now unionized. One effect of this lack of clout was made clear during the Cheney-Bush years when the Department of Labor that is supposed to protect workers shrugged off its duty. In fact, in 2006, the average penalty assessed employers for violations that “pose a substantial probability of death or serious physical harm” was $881.

The Cheney-Bush administration initially played a divide-and-conquer approach with labor, attracting support from the Teamsters, as did Richard Nixon way back when. But his Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, went a good deal further, making broad attacks on unions. As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney noted after a February 2003 meeting of the organization’s Executive Council: “I have served on the AFL-CIO Executive Council for 22 years. I have met and worked with every Secretary of Labor over those 22 years … I have never met a more anti-worker, anti-union Secretary of Labor than Elaine Chao.”

Today, at the White House, Americans got their first whiff of what promises to be a new attitude toward workers and the labor movement. In introducing his role as chief of President Barack Obama’s new Middle Class Task Force, Vice President Joe Biden said to the assembled crowd, which included many labor leaders: “Welcome back to the White House.”

Obama himself said: “I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem, To me, it’s part of the solution.” And he signed executive orders – reversals of Bush executive orders signed during his first month in power – that will protect access to federal contracts for unionized companies and let workers know of their right to organize unions.

It’s always wise not to get too giddy. Task forces have a way of getting bogged down in minutiae and shelved after publication. But with pro-union, pro-worker Hilda Solis in the wings ready to take over the job of Secretary of Labor, with the President’s past support for the crucial Employee Free Choice Act a matter of record, with the first bill he signed dealing with equal rights on the job, and with labor leaders actually invited into the White House, we could be on the verge of an era more favorable to workers and unions than any time in the past 40 years. Hard as economic times are, it’s impossible not to smile about that.