LABOR STANDARDS

Vice President Biden has stood with unions and marched in solidarity² with striking workers³ his entire career.  Before he left the Senate in 2008 and entered the White House as vice president, he had a 100% voting record on working family issues in 2007 and a lifetime voting rating – over 35 years – of 85 percent⁴.

Joe Biden outlines his labor advocacy in his Empower Workers Plan.⁵

He explicitly states support for:

• The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which will protect workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively and increase penalties on companies that interfere with that basic right
• Encouraging and incentivizing unionization and collective bargaining
• Extending the right to organize and bargain collectively to independent contractors
• Upholding project labor agreements
• Investing in communities by widely applying and strictly enforcing prevailing wages on all federally-supported infrastructure and transportation projects
• Creating a cabinet-level working group that will focus solely on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining in the private and public sectors
• Banning “right-to-work” (state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues)
• Increasing workplace safety and health by reinstating occupational and safety standards weakened under the current administration

Joe Biden was an original co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would have made it easier for workers to organize through card-check, which is included in the PRO Act.⁶

Joe Biden believes the federal government should not only defend workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively but also encourage collective bargaining.

IBEW Local 73 Political Action page 

2 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/20/biden-lands-food-workers-endorsement-138727

3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-presidential-candidates-visit-picket-lines-during-united-auto-workers-strike/2019/09/22/a36f2466-dbaf-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html

4 http://www.ibew.org/Journals/scans/IBEW%20Journal/2008-Fall%20IBEW%20Journal.pdf

5 https://joebiden.com/EmpowerWorkers/

6 http://www.ibew.org/Journals/scans/IBEW%20Journal/2008-Fall%20IBEW%20Journal.pdf