White House to hold worker summit

The Obama administration is planning a White House summit on worker issues, POLITICO has learned.

The event, tentatively set for the fall, is still in its earliest planning stages, and may turn out to be a series of White House events rather than just one. It will include discussion of how to encourage collective bargaining, a source close to the discussions said.


Planning for the summit comes at a time when the White House is pushing for more labor-friendly policies as part of its middle-class economics agenda, and as unions are losing power in former strongholds like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana.

President Barack Obama has lately publicized a pending Labor Department fiduciary rule intended to ensure that Americans receive retirement advice that is in their best interest. The rule, currently under review at the Office of Management and Budget, has raised hackles in the financial services industry. The Labor Department is also expected to issue soon a rule that would expand overtime eligibility for white collar workers.

The president has signaled he will veto a Senate-passed resolution overturning a December rulemaking by the National Labor Relations Board to speed up the process whereby workers vote on whether to join a union. The rule would prohibit pre-election litigation about eligibility issues—a common delaying tactic employed by management. Business groups object to the rule on the grounds that it won’t give employees sufficient time to make an informed decision.

The AFL-CIO and the Democratic party are seizing on raising wages and increasing worker power as the 2016 presidential election approaches. In January, the AFL-CIO held a summit on raising wages with a keynote speech from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), announcing that it would hold similar events in primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Even former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and likely presidential contender Hillary Clinton, two centrists not typically associated with collective bargaining advocacy, have lately called for the expansion of worker power in the face of stagnant wages. In a January report for the Center for American Progress (CAP), Summers called for more profit-sharing with employees and more collective bargaining power in the workplace.

Obama has twice in recent months called for changes to labor law more favorable to workers, as did Summers in the CAP paper. The New York Times reported that Clinton was also exploring labor-law changes. These changes have yet to be specified, but will almost certainly follow the lead of an AFL-CIO effort to revise the National Labor Relations Act that’s still in progress.

Passage of any such legislation would be a tall order. No significant changes to labor law have been enacted since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman’s veto, rolled back many labor protections in the NLRA. The last such attempt to strengthen and update the labor statute was the Employee Free Choice Act (“card check”), which in 2007 passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate. The bill was reintroduced under President Obama but lacked sufficient support and was never brought up for a vote.