May 22, 2020
Brothers and Sisters,
Yesterday the CWA Executive Board voted to endorse Joe Biden for President of the United States.
The past three years – and indeed just the past three months – have proven that the 2016 election was the most damaging election of our lifetimes. Donald Trump’s victory that year will tear at the fabric of our society and the health of our communities for years to come and will worsen if he is re-elected.
That is why we are fortunate this year that the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Biden, is someone who will walk the walk when it comes to fighting for workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. Imagine finally having the weight of the White House behind efforts to expand and strengthen workers’ rights, rather than weaken them.
Joe Biden supports strengthening the right to organize and collectively bargain. He has endorsed the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, historic legislation that will reverse decades of legislation meant to crush private sector unions and shift power away from CEOs to workers. His plan to expand broadband includes language requiring companies receiving funds to remain neutral on workers’ organizing efforts.
Joe will appoint pro-worker NLRB and NMB members who believe in collective bargaining and want our labor laws to facilitate, not undermine, workers’ efforts to form and join unions. He will appoint a pro-worker Secretary of Labor who will enforce wage and hour and health and safety laws, not help employers take advantage of every loophole to avoid compliance. He will appoint judges who aren’t looking to crush unions and who understand the daily struggles of working people.
As we try to rebuild from the disaster of the Trump Administration and the coronavirus pandemic, Joe won’t attempt to turn every crisis into an excuse for tax cuts for the rich, but will see an opportunity to save and create jobs, with organizing rights. One of Joe’s goals is to make sure broadband is built to every American household. He opposes any tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs.
On health care, instead of repealing Obamacare, he will strengthen and expand it, with a public option that will give everyone the option of buying into a Medicare-like alternative to private health insurance. And he has a comprehensive plan to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.
Joe understands labor’s mantra: “Which side are you on?” He knows who built America and who built the middle class. When we need him, Joe and his White House will be there for us, ready to help. It’s about time the President of the United States was an ally and promoter of organized labor, not an enemy.
We asked each candidate to submit answers to our presidential questionnaire and a short video about their plans to help working people in their first 100 days. You can find Joe Biden’s video and his answers here: cwapolitical.org/biden2020.
Donald Trump’s campaign did not respond, but his actions in office have disqualified him from our endorsement. At every turn Trump and his appointees have made increasing the power of corporations over working people their top priority. Here are just a few examples.
In the first days of his administration, on two separate occasions, a group of Senators wrote Trump asking him to issue an executive order preventing federal contracts from going to companies that send call center jobs overseas. I even asked him face-to-face in person during a meeting in the Oval Office. He never responded.
Instead of supporting our bipartisan legislation to help save call center jobs, he pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that made it financially rewarding for companies to move our jobs overseas.
He renegotiated NAFTA, not to improve labor conditions for workers but to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies.
He has packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector “right to work for less” in an attempt to financially weaken unions by increasing the number of freeloaders.
Before he became Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia aggressively defended Cablevision’s union-busters, who fired 22 workers when they tried to win a contract with CWA.
Trump has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who vote again and again and again to make it harder for workers to organize and easier for employers to silence us.
At OSHA, there are fewer inspectors than at any time in history and workplace fatalities were already rising as a result before the COVID-19 pandemic. The only action OSHA has taken to address the impact of the virus has been to lower standards and give employers a free pass if they fail to follow even those minimal worker safety requirements.
This onslaught has been made possible thanks to the age-old trick of divide and conquer. Trump stirs up America’s darkest forces: racism and xenophobia. He wants us to believe that our fellow workers, rather than his wealthy benefactors, are the ones who are rigging the economy against us. The deepening racial divide we have seen in Trump’s America is no accident – it’s a tactic. He and every other enemy of labor throughout history have deployed it. They know: when workers are united, we win; when we are divided and pointing the finger at each other, we lose, every single time.
The last several months have starkly exposed the tragic and devastating inadequacies of Trump’s leadership. Trump did not start the coronavirus pandemic, but he has failed at every turn to prepare the nation for it, protect lives, and minimize damage to our economy, let alone set a national tone of shared sacrifice and unity in confronting this crisis.
The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long, and you can read more in my letter to the Executive Board recommending CWA’s endorsement of Joe Biden which is available at cwa.org/biden-endorsement-letter.
It’s time for us all to put everything into electing a President of the United States who will stand with workers for a change and put our nation on the road to healing and recovery. That person is Joe Biden.
In Solidarity,
Christopher M. Shelton
President