Presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris supports a laundry list of progressive policies that would harm American workers.
Harris supports raising the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, a tax almost entirely borne by workers. Harris supports a ban on fracking, which would kill 7.7 million jobs.
Harris’s labor policy platform is designed to force every American worker into a union. Big Labor is one of the Democratic Party’s fattest cash cows, spending at least $1.8 billion to elect the Biden-Harris ticket and down ballot Democrats in 2020. The more union dues-paying workers there are, the more money flows into Democratic campaign coffers.
The centerpiece of Harris’s plan is banning right-to-work laws, which allow workers to earn a living without being forced into a union as a condition of employment. Right-to-work laws, which protect more than 166 million Americans in 27 states, promote economic growth and prosperity.
The percentage growth in the number of people employed from 2007-2017 in right-to-work states was 8.8 percent, twice the growth in forced-unionism states. Across the same time period, forced-unionism states experienced net migration of negative 7.4 percent, whereas right-to-work states experienced a 1.6 percent growth in the number of residents.
Harris also supports the “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” legislation that bans right-to-work laws nationwide and enacts unprecedented new restrictions on independent contracting. The practical effect of the PRO Act’s onerous “ABC” test is to force freelancers to become W-2 employees, allowing Big Labor bosses to strongarm them into unions. A recent study showed that this provision alone would raise taxes on more than 7.7 million Americans, 96 percent of whom make less than $400,000 per year.
Having failed to pass the PRO Act through Congress, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered for Big Labor through regulation. The Biden-Harris Department of Labor has enacted PRO Act-style restrictions on independent contracting and imposed crippling new regulations on the franchise business model. The Biden-Harris National Labor Relations Board has intervened to tip the scales towards Big Labor in organizing drives, and endorsed the most vulgar workplace conduct imaginable in service of union goals.
Force is the animating theme of the Harris labor plan. Private sector union membership is at 6 percent, an all-time low. Since workers are not buying what Big Labor is selling, Harris would use the full force of the federal government to force them to join a union anyway. Harris’s platform calls for expanding Big Labor’s tentacles into new industries, specifically naming the gig economy. That would be disastrous, as gig economy workers prefer to remain independent contractors on a 3-1 ratio.
Like Biden, Harris will partner with the establishment media to gin up false momentum for unionization, magnifying isolated incidents into a larger trend. Take the Pharmacy Guild, a union the media has breathlessly covered as the new frontier for Big Labor organizing. Only three CVS stores have joined the Pharmacy Guild. Yet, the media uncritically reprints the Pharmacy Guild’s assertion that they will unionize 90 percent of CVS and Walgreens stores in the next five years.
When workers decide, they typically reject unions. After a lone, contested victory with the NLRB’s help, the Amazon Labor Union has failed to organize subsequent Amazon warehouses and is on the brink of total collapse. Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama voted decisively against joining the far-left United Auto Workers union.
All signs point to Harris being even further left than Biden on labor policy, bad news for workers that value the freedom to earn a living without paying a union boss.
Tom Hebert is the Director of Competition and Regulatory Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of the Open Competition Center.