Reprinted from The Washington Post by on March 1, 2021.
President Biden on Sunday did something unusual for a president, Democratic or Republican: He explicitly endorsed the right of workers to organize into unions.
The prompt for the message released by the White House was an organizing drive for Amazon workers in Alabama. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) Biden didn’t encourage the workers to vote to join the union, mind you, but he did offer his support for the right of those workers to have that choice.
This isn’t typical presidential behavior, even for a Democrat. When Biden was vice president, then-President Barack Obama had an often rocky relationship with organized labor. Former president Bill Clinton used opposition to unions as a way to broaden his base of support. Donald Trump and George W. Bush, of course, were never expected to express anything but hostility to labor. …
