White House Recommends 70 Actions To Increase Private Sector Unionization

The White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment has issued a report making 70 recommendations to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining for public and private-sector employers. The task force said its recommendations were guided by three principles:

• Position the federal government as a model actor;
• Use the federal government’s authority to support worker empowerment by providing information, improving transparency, and making sure existing pro-worker services are delivered in a timely and helpful manner; and
• Use longstanding authority to leverage the federal government’s purchasing and spending power to support both workers who are organizing and pro-worker employers.

President Joe Biden established the task force in April 2022 with the specific goal of reversing the country’s decades-long decline in union membership. Vice President Kamala Harris chairs the task force and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is vice chair. The task force also includes more than 20 heads of agencies and cabinet officials.

Their specific recommendations included calls to:

• Expand union access to federal funding and grants;
• Impose restrictions on federal contractors or grantees who may use federal funding for any anti-worker activity;
• Increase unions’ pre-decisional involvement to federal agency policymaking and participation in advisory committees;
• Conduct expanded outreach to inform workers of their rights to collectively bargain and unionize, including via required posters and public service announcements;
• Ask the U.S. Department of Labor to “continue to prioritize actions to prevent and remedy the misclassification of workers as independent contractors” and to do so through enforcement, partnerships with federal and state agencies, guidance, rules, and education for employers and workers, and outreach; and
• Push for increased use of federal mediation services for employers and unions to reach initial collective bargaining agreements.

The task force also advocated for passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which MSCI opposes. Read more about the task force’s recommendations here.

The release of these recommendations followed news that President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring that large projects funded by the 2021 infrastructure law use project labor agreements, or pre-contract commitments by employers, to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with at least one union. That executive order stands to affect $262 billion in federal contracting dollars and nearly 200,000 private sector employees working on federal contracts.

Read more about the executive order here.