Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is courting union members with what California Labor Federation spokesman Steve Smith described as “the strongest platform to support workers since FDR.” Biden wants to end “right to work,” allowing unions to collect fees from everyone they represent even if a worker does not choose to join. He wants to hold company executives liable if they interfere with workers’ efforts to unionize, and he wants to allow workers to form a union without holding an election if they gather signatures from a majority of them.

A lack of poll workers can lead to a lack of available polling places ― and voter disenfranchisement. Given that the pandemic has made door-knocking infeasible in so many areas, labor groups are diverting some of that energy and resources to the poll worker cause. “With COVID, door-to-door has gone by the wayside. So this is how we show up for the moment,” said Michael Podhorzer, who leads political strategy at the AFL-CIO labor federation, which includes 55 unions. “It’s a million-person workforce that kind of has to be replaced.

Streaming from Milwaukee, Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez touched on the recent appointment of Republican megadonor and Trump loyalist Louis DeJoy as postmaster general and the president’s other tactics against the Postal Service in Monday’s council meeting, calling out “a postmaster general who has no business being there” and “a president who knows he can’t win on the up and up, so he knows he has to cheat.”