White House officials say the administration’s no-intervention stance won’t change, even as growing job cuts threaten to disrupt people’s lives and complicate the economic case it wants to make to voters.
“Obviously, it’s better for the economy if we can have these kinds of win-win deals before there’s a strike deadline,” Celeste Drake, deputy director of the labor-focused National Economic Council, said in an interview before Biden spoke to a union. -Abundant public here on Thursday. “But frankly, the president has said time and time again that he supports the right to strike.”
Biden’s strategy toward labor disputes is a sharp shift from how the White House handled a potentially crippling rail strike last year. In that case, administration officials directly mediated and ultimately imposed a negotiated settlement between freight carriers and a coalition of unions after several members of the coalition voted not to ratify it. This was a unique case, White House officials say, because the negotiations were happening under the terms of the Railroad Jobs Act, which required the administration’s participation.
Drake, who was formerly the AFL-CIO’s trade specialist, argued that workers “feel empowered to organize and bargain hard.” And White House officials are playing down any chance the disputes will undermine Biden’s newly stepped-up efforts to politically capitalize on lower inflation and a strong labor market as he runs for re-election.
That said, strikes are, by their very nature, meant to disrupt the economy, officials acknowledge.
The Teamsters and UPS will resume negotiations sometime next week, with a July 31 deadline to reach an agreement. If no deal is reached, it could lead to the largest single-employer work stoppage in US history. White House officials who had said a few weeks ago that they were confident a deal would now be reached are less certain.
“We told the White House that we took a strong position: My neighborhood where I grew up in Boston, if two people had a disagreement and you had nothing to do with it, just keep walking. And we echoed that in the White House on numerous occasions,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien told wary members in a webinar this week. “The White House should not be concerned about the Teamsters; they should care about American companies. … We will not let anyone else execute a contract”.
In a sign that a contract agreement could be reached between the Teamsters and UPS before the deadline, UPS said in a statement Thursday: “We are ready to increase our industry-leading pay and benefits.”
The resolution of one of the labor disputes would be good news for the White House, which another White House official described as having “different levels of commitment in each case.” On Wednesday, as UAW leaders went to the West Wing to brief senior staff members on the status of negotiations, Biden asked to speak directly with UAW President Shawn Fain for an update, in what the White House describes as a “brief” meeting.
The UAW did not respond to requests for comment.
Separately, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su recently played an active role in helping broker a tentative agreement between West Coast dockworkers and port operators.
Also this week, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian and National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard went to AFL-CIO headquarters near the White House to discuss “core labor issues” with its leaders and other unions. , including how to ensure the administration is implementing key economic legislation to prioritize union work.
“The role of the federal government as a whole is not to get involved in every negotiation,” Drake said, adding that there are ways “we can help.”
“We are available to do that when they are welcomed by both sides,” he said.
Major unions, many of which have endorsed Biden’s re-election, believe the political tide had turned in their favor, especially after the Covid pandemic put a new spotlight on working conditions and economic mobility. It’s not just traditional unions pushing the envelope, as formerly non-union workers want to do.
On Thursday, Biden again touted his bona fide union. Speaking to an audience in a Philadelphia shipyard hangar with hard workers watching from the rafters, he pointed out how different unions in different states will make the components of a new naval ship that will be commissioned here to build offshore wind farms.
“Many of my friends in organized labor know that when I think about the weather, I think about jobs. I think union jobs. It’s not a joke,” he said.
Julie Tsirkin contributed.
