The White House Task Force on Worker Empowerment Has Released Its Report. What’s In It?

Earlier this month, the Biden Administration’s Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment released its report to the President, with nearly 70 recommendations to build worker power and improve job quality. The Task Force, led by Vice President Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, was born out of Executive Order 14025, which President Biden issued in April 2021. The Executive Order noted that in recent decades, the federal government has not used its full authority to promote worker organizing, and called on the Task Force to identify existing executive branch levers and authorities that could be used to empower workers and remove barriers to worker organizing and collective bargaining.

The Administration’s leadership on building worker power is urgently needed. Union membership in the United States, particularly in the private sector, has been on the decline for decades. In the years following World War II, around a third of workers belonged to a union. Today, just 10 percent do. Union membership is higher among public sector employees, with 34 percent belonging to a union. By comparison, just 6 percent of private sector employees belong to a union.

Unions enable workers to join together and collectively bargain for good working conditions, such as pay increases, annual cost of living adjustments, or health and safety measures. This makes the decline in union membership concerning. As union membership has fallen, income inequality has risen, fraying the fabric of society and calling into question the notion that hard work is all that’s needed to afford a good life. Many jobs are low-paying and poor-quality, and this has led to widening racial and gender inequities, as people of color and women often hold those jobs. Building worker power and improving the quality of jobs are key to promoting a strong, inclusive economy, and the Task Force recommendations can advance this goal.

The Task Force identified a number of problems preventing workers from organizing and bargaining collectively, including lack of knowledge about their rights, lack of access to union organizers, retaliation from employers, and the federal government contracting with non-union firms. While many of the recommendations concern federal employees and employees of federal contractors, others would benefit all workers, such as recommendations to build greater awareness among workers about their rights. Below are just a few of the Task Force’s recommendations:

• Remove barriers to federal workers seeking to organize and provide more information to unions looking to organize federal workers, including ensuring union organizers have access to workers on federal property. This recommendation is key, as union organizers are an important resource for workers to learn about their rights and learn how to form a union. Notably, this recommendation extends to employees of federal contractors.
• Instruct the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL) to lead a government-wide initiative to increase awareness among workers, particularly employees of federal contractors, of their right to organize and bargain collectively with their employers.
• Instruct agencies like the National Labor Relations Board to conduct more outreach to workers on their right to organize and bargain collectively, particularly young workers and workers from underserved communities.
• Expand collective bargaining rights to the TSA screening workforce.
• Create a resource center within USDOL where workers, employers, the public, and other federal agencies can find information on the benefits of unionization.
• Ensure that federal contract dollars are not spent on union-busting campaigns.
• Continue tackling worker misclassification at USDOL, a violation that leads gig workers, home health aides, janitors, and other workers to lose out on the rights to which they’re entitled, such as minimum wage and overtime laws as well as the right to form a union.
• Remove data silos so the USDOL can get a clearer picture of employer behaviors and violations across a range of sub-agencies and policy areas.
• Direct the Domestic Policy Council to define a high-quality job and identify job quality metrics that federal agencies can use to assess their efforts to advance job quality.

Taken together, the Task Force recommendations encourage the federal government to leverage its role as employer, policymaker, and purchaser to empower workers, as well as to set the tone and model behavior for state and local governments and the private sector.

As the Task Force itself acknowledged in its report, these recommendations cannot take the place of legislative changes like those proposed in the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for private sector workers to organize and bargain collectively. As recent worker organizing efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and REI have shown, forming a union is incredibly difficult, especially in the face of powerful employer opposition. Indeed, despite a notable uptick in efforts to form unions in 2021, few were successful and the private sector unionization rate remains at a historic low of 6 percent.

Still, while the PRO Act is necessary, the Task Force recommendations would, if implemented, improve worker power and job quality, particularly for federal employees and employees of federal contractors. We need to use all the tools at our disposal to ensure workers have a seat at the table, and it is clear from the report of the Task Force that we have a great deal of work ahead of us.

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