Biden: Strong Unions Needed to Build Middle Class

by James Parks, Nov 5, 2009

The nation cannot rebuild its middle class without strong unions, Vice President Joe Biden said today. Biden said he and President Obama believe it is impossible to grow the middle class without growing unions.

Biden, who chairs the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families, met with a panel of  scholars assembled by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to discuss the challenges facing America’s middle class in the 21st century economy.

At the live webcast event, EPI President Lawrence Mishel said unions set standards in the workplace. Decent standards help ensure “employers are not competing to see who can make the jobs worst, but who can make the products better,” Mishel said.

Heather Boushey, CAP’s senior economist, said unions are important for workers so they can approach employers about sharing the benefits of productivity and about the ways to have more workplace flexibility.

And it can’t just be about one worker. These are challenges for everyone. I don’t think we can overestimate the important role of unions in building a middle class and what they can do if we help them grow again.

Biden said middle-class life is much more fragile than it should be with families struggling to pay medical bills. In America today, it is more than likely that both parents work long hours but find it harder to buy a decent home and send their children to college, he said.

It’s not just about a paycheck, it’s about a standard of living. [It's about] any family that can’t afford to go without two paychecks in a row without finding themselves really up against it and having to make really difficult choices.

The panel identified several trends that affect middle-class families, including a steady erosion of good manufacturing jobs, corporate attacks on unions, the growing economic role of women, the need for a work-and-life balance in today’s economy, economic inequality and mobility, and the increased gap between productivity and wages.

University of Massachusetts professor Ralph Whitehead and Mishel pointed out that although U.S. workers are more productive and better educated than workers of previous generations, they do not share in the benefits of the economic growth that results from their efforts.

Other panelists included Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Jim Kessler, vice president of the nonpartisan think tank Third Way.

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