Voters punished union bosses and their favored politicians last month

OPINION:

Ever since the Nov. 5 presidential election returns came in and Democratic Party honchos’ nightmare of a second Trump presidential term became inevitable, the recriminations have been flying.

Republican Donald Trump’s decisive 312-226 Electoral College win over Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, happened because President Biden is too decrepit and waited too long to call off his reelection bid.

Mr. Trump won because Ms. Harris dodged interviews for a large portion of her 107-day campaign and failed to give straight answers to simple questions when she finally started granting them.

Mr. Trump won because this or that faction of the Democratic Party steered its agenda in the wrong direction.

But the reality is that Ms. Harris lost, above all, because voters across America were repelled both by the process through which the signal legislation of the Biden-Harris administration was enacted — with the support every Democratic member of Congress — and by the impact of those laws once they took effect.

Organized labor’s lobbying blitz that ultimately succeeded in sending the first of these extraordinarily unpopular bills, the American Rescue Plan, to Mr. Biden’s desk in March 2021 had commenced roughly a year earlier, during Mr. Trump’s first term. In the spring of 2020, using the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic shock stemming from political efforts to contain it as cover, government union bosses pushed for passage of a massive, taxpayer-funded bailout package rewarding the nation’s most fiscally irresponsible state and local politicians.

As Politico reported at the time, in early May 2020, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees kingpin Lee Saunders and his lieutenants began “hitting the national airwaves” with TV and internet ads in key presidential and Senate battleground states, demanding that Congress adopt a no-strings-attached “relief” package for states and localities.

Another key government union boss pushing for a huge bailout of spendthrift pro-union politicians was Randi Weingarten, whose American Federation of Teachers and AFL-CIO empire insisted states would need an added $200 billion to $300 billion from the federal government to reopen schools safely and “stabilize” their K-12 education budgets.

By the time Mr. Biden had been inaugurated and ready to sign an American Rescue Plan package including well over $500 billion in bailout money for states and localities and government school districts and universities, nearly half the students enrolled in K-12 government schools were already safely attending in-person classes full time. But in a number of union monopoly-stronghold states on the East and West coasts, the vast majority of students still had access only to remote learning.

Today it is undeniable that government union bosses held the education of tens of millions of schoolchildren hostage to shake down taxpayers for hundreds of billions of dollars, and the Biden administration helped them do it, both before and after it entered the White House. And there is good reason to believe, as a New York Times opinion writer acknowledged on Nov. 6, that parents’ justified anger over how labor unions and their favorite politicians have abused them and their children “fueled Donald Trump’s decisive win.”

While the American Rescue Plan paid off primarily government union bosses, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by Mr. Biden in August 2022, has lavished taxpayer dollars on manufacturing union bosses such as Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers.

A key aim of this legislation, which is expected to cost taxpayers over $1 trillion by 2034 unless it is repealed, is to bribe and browbeat companies and contractors into acquiescing to union monopoly control over their workforces. Since it took effect, the manufacturing employment recovery that began with the easing of the COVID-19 business lockdowns in May 2020 has ground to a halt.

Through 2023 and 2024 up until Election Day, forced-unionism partisans backing first Mr. Biden and then Ms. Harris for the presidency were convinced that the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act were policies that would “build constituencies” and help their backers “win elections,” as pro-labor journalist Josh Marshall ruefully recalled in a Nov. 18 commentary. Mr. Marshall went on to acknowledge that this was one of the greatest political miscalculations of all time. Elected officials in both parties would be wise to learn from this fiasco.

• Stan Greer is senior research associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.