Taking stock of labor this Labor Day: workers are sitting pretty, in their most powerful and influential position after decades of diminishing power and rights,. Some 320,000 workers have walked off the job, engaged in 230 strikes, from the Writers to the Teamsters, hospital and hotel workers and flight attendants, while auto workers and school bus drivers rattle sabers, in a demonstration of that power and recognition that it is fleeting.
Workers are empowered by unemployment rates still at historic lows –below 4% for 19 months in a row, the longest strength in 50 years. Jobs creation is still healthy despite Fed Reserve actions raising interest rates to bring down inflation (now 3.2%, still lowest of G7 nations). The US added 13 million jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs – more jobs in Biden’s first two years than any President’s single 4-year term – while the labor participation rate hit 62.8 percent in August of 2023, the highest since February 2020, when the pandemic started.
The fact is that President Joe Biden has turned his campaign promise to be the most pro-worker and pro-union President in American history into action. Support for unions is at its highest level in more than half a century (273,000 last year alone joined or are trying to form a union last year and the public has supported actions), inflation-adjusted income is up 3.5% since the President took office, with the largest wage gains over the last two years going to the lowest-paid workers.
Scoff if you like, but this would not have happened on its own. In fact, the strong labor position goes against the unrelenting auguries of recession and counters the massive layoffs that should result from the Federal Reserve’s steady increases in interest rates which are intended to weaken the labor market (that is, increase unemployment) in order to lower inflation (on the backs of families that work for a living). And still, the USA’s inflation rate, now at 3.2%, has been the lowest of any G7 nation, while America has had the strongest economy, bolstered by strong consumer spending.
In fact, it is proof, positive of Biden’s economic approach – Bidenomics – that boils down to “growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up”, reversing the insidious “trickle down” policy focused on tax cuts and incentives that actually encouraged employers to shut down American factories and offshore jobs, drive down wages and increase unemployment, and only served to benefit the richest while exacerbating the gap between rich and poor (CEO pay is now 398.8 times the annual average salary of workers, compared to 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989).
Biden Proves to Be Most Pro-Labor President Since FDR, & Economy Benefits (dailykos.com)