LABOR
What America’s LGBTQ Workers Expect from Biden
President embraces an aggressive agenda, but one running up against a divided Senate
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
With public consciousness
of income inequality
widespread
in the US and the
demand for a $15 minimum wage
nationwide growing louder every
day, President Joe Biden comes
into offi ce with high expectations
about what he must do to help the
American worker.
His campaign promises refl ected
that reality, spelling out an agenda
that not only endorsed the doubling
of the federal minimum wage
but also backed a broad package
of steps to strengthen the rights
of workers to organize and win
good-faith bargaining from their
employers and to overturn the corporate
practice of forcing employees
with workplace complaints into
binding arbitration likely to be less
favorable to them than taking their
claims to court would be.
The new president’s ambitious
agenda — coupled with his decades
long record in Washington
and his nomination of Boston Mayor
Marty Walsh, a longtime union
president, as his labor secretary —
led a Cornell University union expert
to label Biden the most laborfriendly
president in 60 years.
The impact that enacting the administration’s
labor agenda would
have on LGBTQ Americans can’t
be quantifi ed with precision due
to the lack of comprehensive and
reliable data on the community’s
workforce participation, but what
occupational and economic data
exists make clear that there is a
lot to gain. Studies have repeatedly
shown that the LGBTQ population
has higher rates of poverty than
American society as a whole, that
queer Americans are disproportionately
represented in service industries
like food and restaurants,
healthcare, education, and retail
— all sectors currently the focus of
intensive unionizing efforts — and
that transgender workers have a
higher rate of union membership
than the US workforce as a whole.
The labor movement wields considerable
political muscle, particularly
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, at his February 4 confi rmation hearing as President Joe Biden’s labor secretary, with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
within the Democratic Party,
but it does not have the clout it
enjoyed in the decades following
World War II. According to the US
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10.8
percent of the American workforce
— roughly 14.3 million workers —
are union members. By contrast,
in 1983, the earliest year for which
the Bureau has comparable data,
20.1 percent of American workers
— roughly 17.7 million — were
union members. The Biden campaign
cited statistics from the mid-
1950s putting the percentage of
unionized workers as high as 35
percent.
The decline in union membership
is largely due to the diminished
role that heavy industry
— long the main target of union
efforts — plays in the American
economy, but offsetting growth
has occurred in service industries,
where the bulk of US job growth is
now occurring, and among public
sector employees.
In addition to the loss of industrial
jobs, organized labor has also
faced challenges from stepped up
right to work initiatives — with
provisions allowing employees to
opt out of paying dues to a union
approved by the majority of their
fellow workers — coming from Republican
led state governments. In
the past decade, under Wisconsin’s
former GOP governor Scott Walker,
that state initiated a trend to kneecap
unionizing efforts among public
sector employees.
Like most institutions in American
society, organized labor’s embrace
of LGBTQ rights evolved only
gradually. Rob Epstein’s documentary
“The Times of Harvey Milk”
chronicles the San Francisco gay
activist and city supervisor’s work
with labor allies as early as the
1970s, but what’s striking about
the account is the exceptional nature
of that solidarity. Over the
decades that followed, LGBTQ activists
struggled to win union support
for issues ranging from domestic
partnership to transgender
healthcare benefi ts and marriage
equality.
According to Jerame Davis, executive
director of Pride at Work, a
recognized affi liate of the AFL-CIO
that aims to strengthen the voice
of LGBTQ union members nationwide,
the picture has changed dramatically
in recent years. Several
powerful unions are now headed
GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL VIA REUTERS
by out LGBTQ leaders — including
Randi Weingarten at the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT),
Stuart Appelbaum at the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store
Union (RWDSU), and Mary Kay
Henry at the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU).
Davis acknowledged that the
biggest push for recognition was
required at unions in male-dominated
industries, but pointed to
representatives from the United
Steelworkers and the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
who now sit on the Pride at Work
board, as well as strong support
from unions such as those representing
bricklayers.
He specifi cally noted that union
contract negotiators now include
trans-inclusive healthcare benefi ts
in their bargaining package —
and pointed to statistics from the
National Center for Transgender
Equality indicating that as many
as 15 percent of employed trans
Americans say they belong to a
union, almost half again as high
a rate as among the US workforce
generally.
➤ WORKERS, continued on p.5
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