PEP, March 2009: A friend of labor in the White House

Organized labor faced a lockout during the eight years George W. Bush lived in the White House.

What a difference an election can make!

The first bill President Barack Obama signed was a new equal pay law, which reverses a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that made it harder to sue for pay discrimination.
His administration quickly decided to cap executive pay at banks that get public bailout funds, responding to widespread outrage over the first phase of the bailout, when the Bush administration handed over billions of dollars with no reporting requirements or pay limits to the very people who brought us the global financial crisis.

And for ordinary working Americans, the compensation cap sent another message: an acknowledgment that the nation’s growing economic inequality — now the worst since the Great Depression — must be reined in.

Now unions are hoping for strong presidential support for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help labor organizing by letting workers sign representation cards rather than going through a cumbersome election process that lets employers intimidate and fire pro-union workers. Obama spoke in favor of the bill regularly during the presidential campaign; the legislation may be introduced in the spring.

The equal pay law, known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, was named for an Alabama woman who sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber after discovering that although she had more experience than male supervisors, she was the lowest-paid supervisor at her plant.

A jury found the company guilty of discrimination, but the Republican-dominated Supreme Court ruled that her claim came too late after management’s first violation (a deadline she didn’t know about at the time). The new law bases the deadline on each discriminatory paycheck.

The day after the Lilly Ledbetter signing, the Obama administration invited representatives of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations to the White House for the announcement of the administration’s Task Force on Middle-Class Working Families. (Out of the public eye, the administration has reportedly signaled organized labor that it would like the two federations to reunite; the seven Change to Win unions broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005.)

The task force, chaired by Vice President Joseph Biden, is charged with addressing the long-term stagnation of working families’ living standards and focusing “on policies that will really benefit middle-class families,” Obama said.

At the gathering, Obama signed three executive orders reversing Bush policies. The orders prohibit contractors from using federal funds to oppose organizing efforts by their workers; repeal a Bush administration order that requires employers to post a notice of how workers can withhold their dues if they disagree with a union’s politics, and require new government contractors to offer jobs to workers employed by previous contractors.

“Welcome back to the White House,” Biden told the labor visitors.