Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Wednesday that if he is elected president this fall, he will be “hollering” for unions and said the labor movement can rest assured they will have a seat at the table in his White House.
Speaking to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said he’d push to strengthen the collective bargaining rights of unions that President Trump and the GOP have tried to strip away.
“We are going to have a breathtaking opportunity to create good-paying union jobs and deliver the promise of America to Americans who have been denied it for much too long,” Mr. Biden told the group, which represents 750,000 workers across North America.
Mr. Biden said he’d push to “rewrite our economy so that prosperity flows not just to CEOs, but to the workers who actually built the country.”
Mr. Biden slammed Mr. Trump, accusing him of giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a free pass over allegations that Russians paid Taliban fighters to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
“He is out there, not doing a damn thing about the fact that there’s overwhelming evidence that Putin has gone and is paying significant bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan!” Mr. Biden said. “If my son were still alive after having spent a year in Iraq, I don’t know what the hell I would do.”
He also criticized Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying tens of thousands of lives could have been saved had he responded in a more appropriate way.
“This is a guy who says I am commander in chief and then doesn’t command anything in this fight against the COVID-19,” Mr. Biden said.
The virtual event came shortly after Vice President Mike Pence announced Wednesday that the number of coronavirus cases had eclipsed 3 million.
Mr. Biden is slated to travel to Dunmore, Pennsylvania, on Thursday to visit a metal works facility and outline an economic recovery plan that focuses on raising wages and creating jobs.
Mr. Pence also is scheduled to be in Pennsylvania, which is considered a key battleground in the 2020 presidential race.
