It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging [italics mine] the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.
The Chamber backs up its interpretation of the NLRA by citing First National Maintenance Corp. v. NLRB, a 1981 Supreme Court decision that said the NLRA “is not intended to serve either party’s individual interest.” This is willfully dishonest. The “individual interest” referred to in First National Maintenance was not whether to organize a workplace or not; the company in this lawsuit, a housecleaning service, was already unionized. The case turned on whether the company was obliged to bargain with its union over closing down part of its business; the court ruled it was not.
The Chamber would have you believe that the NLRA says: “Organize or don’t organize, we don’t give a damn.” Wrong. The NLRA says: “We’d like to help you organize.” Workers can still, of course, choose not to unionize, but the United States government doesn’t feign indifference to that choice any more than it feigns indifference to a citizen not voting in a national election. Uncle Sam won’t punish you for sitting out a presidential or congressional contest, but he really prefers that you vote, because that bolsters the legitimacy of representative democracy. Choose whichever candidate, or whichever labor union, you want, Uncle Sam says, but please do choose one. I know that sounds radical, but that’s what the NLRA says, and Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime to honor the preamble explicitly.
The Chamber caricatures the Biden administration’s stance as a “unions-at-all-costs approach,” but if you ignore that, the report is a handy guide to the various ways in which Biden respects the intent of the NLRA as no president has since Harry Truman. Some of what the Chamber brings up isn’t terribly significant, in my view, at least with respect to organized labor, but a lot of it is. I learned from this report that Biden’s actually done quite a bit more for unions than I knew.