When Joe Biden announced he would drop out of the 2024 presidential race and endorse Kamala Harris in his stead, unions were muted in their initial response. Harris, formerly a senator from California, isn’t entirely without pro-union credentials: most notably, she introduced the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2019, which would rectify domestic workers’ exclusion from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), a move that solidified her strong support from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

But the vice president’s record on labor is far thinner than Biden’s, whose willingness to walk a picket line as a sitting president, combined with his worker-friendly appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), distinguished his presidency as pro-worker (though his shortcomings, particularly during railworkers’ dispute over grueling schedules and a lack of sick days, shouldn’t be stricken from the record).

Attempting to shore up critical union support, Harris recently said that she’d pass the PRO Act, the wide-ranging labor-law reform legislation that would empower workers to unionize, which has been stalled in congressional limbo for years. It’s good that the Democratic presidential candidate is setting that expectation (even if most Democratic nominees have made similar such pledges over the last half-century that have amounted to little). But the actual passage of such legislation depends far more on the makeup of Congress; given Republican representatives’ near-unanimous refusal to support the measure, it’s likely to go nowhere.

As Harris considered her choice of running mate, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain floated two vice-presidential candidates who might bolster unions’ support for the Democratic ticket: Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. This week, Harris chose Walz. As Fain suggested, organized labor’s leadership approves.

“By selecting Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris chose a principled fighter and labor champion who will stand up for working people and strengthen this historic ticket,” American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president Liz Shuler said in a statement.

Fain, whose union endorsed Harris last week and held a rally with her and Walz in a Detroit, Michigan, union hall on Thursday, was similarly effusive.

“Tim Walz has been a great governor and is going to make a great vice president. He’s stood with the working class every step of the way, and has walked the walk, including on a UAW picket line last fall,” the UAW leader said, referring to the governor’s visit to a Stellantis auto-parts plant in Plymouth, Minnesota, during the union’s strike at the Big Three automakers.

It’s not hard to understand the enthusiasm. Walz is a union member himself, having spent a decade as a high school teacher in Mankato as a member of Education Minnesota, a teachers’ union. As governor, he signed a suite of worker-friendly reforms into law. The measures include introducing twelve weeks’ paid family and medical leave, banning noncompete clauses, prohibiting captive-audience meetings, and creating a statewide council to improve working conditions in nursing homes. The reforms, signed into law in 2023 when Minnesota Democrats gained majority control of the House, Senate, and governor’s office, are a model for raising working-class people’s living standards, whether they’re in a union or not.

The ambitious legislation was a product of what many in the state’s labor movement call the “Minnesota model.” As Sarah Jaffe details, that model is rooted in a commitment to the idea that “‘we can win more together than we can on our own’ and that the working class has many needs that are not being met — at work, but also at home, in parks, in schools, in hospitals.” Built over years of cumulative working-class struggles seeding new relationships and momentum, the model has notched a number of wins: not only the aforementioned reforms, but also provisions targeting opaque and inhumane work quotas — a priority for the state’s Amazon warehouse workers, who have long been a vanguard of nationwide organizing against the company.

The list of progressive wins achieved during Walz’s tenure goes on: free meals for all public school students, driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, generous child tax credits, tuition-free college for low- and middle-income Minnesotans, a $15 minimum wage in Minneapolis and St Paul, and, as Jaffe notes, new union contracts for everyone from janitors to tenants to teachers. The successes reflect a capacious vision of the possibilities for improving working-class life rooted in workers’ needs, which include not only better pay and working conditions, but more access to education and better living conditions, stronger protections and greater democracy in all spheres of life.

“Walz is a clear example of a middle-of-the-road politician who is open to listening to movements,” labor sociologist Barry Eidlin told me. “It’s an ideal case of actually being able to pressure Democrats. Your scope of action is limited as vice president, but you have a guy with this track record talking to Harris, and that suggests a much closer dialogue with labor leadership.”

When pressed on whether the state’s worker-friendly legislation will fuel Donald Trump’s desire to paint the vice-presidential candidate as a “big-government liberal,” Walz has been unapologetic, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper, “My kids are going to eat here and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have a chance to live because we’re working on reducing carbon emissions and you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher and you’re going to have health insurance. If that’s how they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”

It’s worth noting that despite Walz’s strong record on labor, he also vetoed a bill last year that would have improved ride-hailing drivers’ pay and working conditions. Uber threatened to pull out of the state were the proposed legislation to pass, and despite gig-company workers’ rallies, including ones outside of Walz’s office pushing him to sign the legislation, the company got its way, with the governor instead choosing to commission a study of the sector’s working conditions. That study proposed raising driver pay 20 percent; Walz is now planning to sign that compromise legislation into law.

It’s an aberration worth noting, given Harris’s own ties to Silicon Valley and Uber in particular. Tony West, her brother-in-law, has served as Uber’s chief legal officer, and is now on unpaid leave to advise Harris’s campaign. A key provision in the PRO Act concerns correcting the long-standing misclassification of workers as “independent contractors” in sectors like the gig economy, and we can expect Uber and its fellow powerhouses in the gig economy will do everything they can to jettison that provision should the omnibus legislation gain momentum, a nationwide version of the lobbying blitz gig companies pulled off to defeat California’s Proposition 22.

That Harris’s running mate stood down to those companies in his time as governor is concerning. The future of the labor movement depends on resolving the issue of widespread misclassification, as well as winning joint-employer recognition for workers at corporations that use subcontracting to evade the responsibilities of directly employing workers, Amazon foremost among them — making it a matter at the top of any labor wish list.

Beyond prioritizing passing the PRO Act — and not a significantly watered-down version, either — there’s the need to keep the NLRB on the path it has forged under General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, which, by simply doing its duty under the law, has made it the most pro-worker board in nearly a century. The NLRB is facing an aggressive push by employers to have the agency declared unconstitutional, and as it defends itself from those attacks — ones to which it has been subject since its inception — it needs to be adequately funded and staffed, which will require an executive office willing to prioritize the issue as a counter to those in Congress dead set on hobbling the board’s efforts.

There are other matters to which the executive office could attend. The UAW’s Fain says that the union’s four core issues are a living wage for all, retirement security, taking workers’ time back, and adequate health care for all as a right. One can imagine these issues as the foundation of a labor agenda for the coming years: higher minimum wages, shorter working hours, expanded retirement security, and universal health care.   

Even as Harris’s selection of Walz as a running mate bodes well for rank-and-file workers’ ability to grow their strength and level of organization should Harris win the White House, those workers should take heed of the lessons wrought by Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama campaigned on passing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have made joining a union easier. His insistence that he would prioritize the reform helped secure union backing for his campaign. Yet he betrayed that promise, jettisoning EFCA as a pressing matter and doing little for the workers who had helped him win the presidency.

There is a long history of Democratic politicians abandoning workers in this fashion and union leaders, eager to demonstrate loyalty to the Democratic Party, failing to fight as hard for the bare minimum the working class needs when a Democrat is in the White House. Biden’s term was somewhat of an exception in this regard, with the pandemic leading workers to fight for more, which meant ambitious new union organizing campaigns and successful nationwide strikes. There is no doubt a Trump presidency would mean cascading crises for workers, but should Harris win the White House, there is a laundry list of reforms unions must push for, and no guarantee that any of it will be easy. The time to plan and strategize is now.