Any Union That Doesn’t Endorse Bernie Sanders Is Leaving a Huge Pile of Money on the Table

Bernie Sanders announced a massive new labor plan today. One plank in particular on Medicare for All and union contracts stood out to me as a unionized worker: a rule that would give me and my coworkers an enormous monthly raise.

Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Speak At The Iowa AFL-CIO Convention

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at the Iowa Federation Labor Convention on August 21, 2019 in Altoona, Iowa.Joshua Lott / Getty


On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders released arguably the most ambitious labor platform of any major presidential candidate in history.

All labor activists should read the platform in full. Some of Sanders’s proposals address longstanding concerns Democrats neglected to address when President Barack Obama had a Democratic Congress behind him, like better protecting workers’ pensions and new union certification by “card check,” which would certify a union in a workplace when a majority of workers sign a card indicating they want to join and remove some of bosses’ opportunities to destroy fledgling union drives. Other planks have the potential to fundamentally change the balance of power between workers and employers — ideas like bargaining by economic sector rather than employer-by-employer, giving federal workers the legal right to strike, and a law mandating “just cause termination” for all workers.

But as someone who recently sat on a union bargaining team, the platform’s last plank spoke to me directly. It reads

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