This summer, President Joe Biden and Department of Labor Secretary Julie Su are traveling to different states to promote their Good Jobs Initiative. While it might seem like a plan to celebrate American workers, it’s really an attempt to push Bidenomics on businesses and workers.
The initiative lays out a set of principles the White House claims are a part of this agenda. Some might be similar to what many of us would certainly appreciate: High pay, job stability, robust benefits, automatic promotions, and being valued by our employers.
Unfortunately, the initiative does not offer solutions to make more of these job features possible. It demands these outcomes in a vacuum, ignoring the challenges that government barriers pose to businesses and workers who depend on an environment of mutual benefit.
Rather than seeking ways to increase worker choice and flexibility to pursue career paths people want, Biden’s good jobs agenda offers top-down Bidenomics policies in which government intervention is favored over personal choice.
This includes efforts to ensure “contractor labor solutions are minimized.” This is political jargon for the Biden administration’s efforts to eliminate small businesses and self-employment.
As of December, 64 million people work freelance jobs each year, and tens of millions more work at small businesses that are opened under franchise models or that contract their services to other businesses.
Biden’s Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board has ignored the people who cherish these career paths, implementing damaging independent contractor and joint employer rules to minimize such contracting relations or, in plain words, eliminate them. Biden is so determined to enact his vision of labor that he vetoed a bipartisan resolution passed by Congress to overturn the joint employer rule.
That’s because the Biden administration can execute the rest of its agenda with top-down control far easier on larger businesses. This agenda includes trying to unionize as many workplaces as possible.
This is also why Biden touts the PRO Act, a huge union favoritism bill, as a top legislative priority. And it’s why the NLRB has added multiple new pro-union rules and case decisions, including the Cemex decision that jeopardizes secret ballot union elections.
Biden and Su also want to force workplaces to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as “a core value and practiced norm in the workplace.” This is not about discouraging discrimination in society, which is something most people appreciate and strive for. Instead, DEIA mandates seek to force businesses to institute a political agenda that undermines their mission of providing goods and services.
Do not take my word alone. Biden’s Good Jobs Initiative lists examples of where good jobs can be found. Each example is rife with government use of taxpayer funds for government-directed projects, typically involving union labor. While some select recipients of taxpayer funds, including union leaders, may wholeheartedly support this initiative and lend political support to the Biden administration as a reward, it seems private sector businesses operating without government direction or union control are unworthy examples of good employment.
The results of advancing the Good Jobs goals sound a lot like the rest of Bidenomics — higher inflation, fewer jobs, reduced economic dynamism, and a workforce increasingly uncertain about the future. People would be better served by leaders who respected workers’ pride in their jobs and focused on creating an economic environment that increases worker choice and flexibility to pursue their own definition of meaningful work and prosperity.
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Austen Bannan is an employment policy fellow at Americans for Prosperity