Labor forces have been heavily in the White House during the Biden-Harris administration

Happy Labor Day! The Labor Party has been heavily in the White House during the Biden-Harris administration, and President Biden has created the kinds of policies you'd expect from the first sitting president to cross the picket line.

For nearly four years, the media acted as if Vice President Kamala Harris was doing nothing, when in fact she was leading many White House initiatives. One of them is relevant today because the vice president is the chairman of the first White House task force on worker organizing and empowerment.

This task force is not just a conversation.

They have taken more than 70 actions to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining for federal employees and workers employed by public and private sector employees.

If you're wondering why they haven't done more for the private sector in their historic infrastructure advances, well, the Biden-Harris administration has implemented a new rule requiring Project Work Agreements for nearly all major federal construction projects that are more than 35 million dollars. .

This rule and administration policy strongly encourage private sector contractors to hire union workers and provide things like child care to workers, as you might expect from a president who repeatedly says, “Unions Built the Middle Class.”

President Biden's Treasury Department also implemented prevailing wage and apprenticeship bonus credits for clean energy projects in the Inflation Reduction Act. They restored and extended overtime pay protections for millions of workers, protected workers from extreme heat through the Department of Labor, provided $200 million through the CHIPS Act to train workers, and required companies receiving more than $150 million in grants to have a child care program…

There's a lot more where that came from. An important takeaway from the various departments I mentioned is that the Republican pamphlet Project 2025 is trying to gut federal employees and instead staff these various departments with radical “conservatives” whose ideology is closer to nihilism than conservatism. It is safe to say that they will not continue to protect workers under these various agencies.

So while President Biden? he was rebuilding America's infrastructure, the Biden-Harris administration was also pushing to rebuild it through a strong workforce to rebuild the middle class. The positive impact that it will have on the entire communities of the country is still hard to be felt. but will be one of President Biden's lasting legacies.

It is also important to understand the connection between good-paying jobs and American democracy. When people feel satisfied, when they can pay their bills, when they can find decent work, it's easier for them to radicalize against democracy. So this labor push is serving on many levels to rebuild our country, strengthen democracy, and rebuild the middle class.

However, the White House is limited in its scope. It cannot mandate private sector companies to take action and cannot pass laws. Senior administration officials explained in calls attended by PoliticusUSA that they hope the federal government's actions will influence the private sector to serve as a role model.

It seems to be working to some extent, although in an era of what Hillary Clinton called “quarterly capitalism,” the struggle for anyone who isn't elite is real and ongoing.

By March 2023, when the President approved all of the VP's recommendations, the task force stated that agencies had advanced the recommendations and, indeed, those recommendations had produced results, both in the federal government and in the private sector. One of the most obvious consequences was a nearly 20% increase in the number of federal government employees in the union.

So when President Biden and Vice President Harris talk about Labor Day, it's more than rhetoric. They have put muscle, concerted effort, resources and the weight of the entire federal government behind their belief that a strong workforce is good for the country.

There's still a lot of work to do to repair the labor movement, so this Labor Day, make sure you and three of your friends or loved ones are registered to vote. As former first lady Michelle Obama said, we can't wait for Goldilocks candidates. We should. “Let's do something.”

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Sarah received President Barack Obama and then Vice President Joe Biden in 2016. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also repeatedly interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi and exclusively covered her first House appearance since then-President Donald Trump's first impeachment.

Sarah is a two-time award-winning video producer for Telly and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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