Biden’s Labor Board Is Boosting Bottom-Up Union Organizing

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been in the headlines a lot this past week. Some good news: the board ordered Starbucks to reopen the stores it illegally closed in Ithaca as retaliation for unionizing. Much less good: yesterday a Trump-appointed judge in Texas granted an injunction in favor of a union-busting company by claiming that the NLRB is unconstitutional. In light of these events — plus ongoing debates over whether Democrats are different enough from Republicans to merit our vote — I want to share my research demonstrating not only that Joe Biden’s NLRB has been very pro-union, but that the board’s actions have been a central factor enabling labor’s recent uptick.

One of the ways my forthcoming book on worker-to-worker unionism parts ways with previous calls for bottom-up unionism is on the question of governmental politics. Most other advocates of grassroots militancy have asserted — based in part on a misreading of the 1930s upsurge — that labor law reform and other transformative state policies can only be a consequence of mass labor struggle, not one of its causes. According to this argument, worker advances are exclusively won through disruptive struggles from below, forcing those in power to make concessions to preserve order.

Such claims contain strong grains of truth, but they draw one-sided strategic conclusions. Though unions shouldn’t subordinate themselves to politicians or depend on legal reforms to win, the experience of labor’s grassroots uptick since 2020 shows that electoral politics and policy changes are essential to help workers win widely.

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