President Joe Biden is taking nearly 70 new steps to live up to his pledge to be the most pro-union president in U.S. history. Biden has said he will adopt the recommendations of a task force on worker organizing and empowerment formed last April. The task force is chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris and vice-chaired by Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh.

“The National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935, noted that it is the policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining, and to protect the exercise, by workers, of their full freedom of association. Unfortunately, the federal government has not always done its part to turn this policy into action,” the report notes in discussing the task force’s mission. 

“While some past administrations have taken individual actions to empower workers and strengthen their rights, the Biden-Harris administration will be the first to take a comprehensive approach to doing so with the existing authority of the executive branch,” it continues. “Our goal is not just to facilitate worker power through executive action—it is to model practices that can be followed by state and local governments, private sector employers, and others.”

The task force’s recommendations focus on promoting union membership and collective bargaining among federal workers and employees of federal contract workers, and, as the sheer number of recommendations suggests, this is a matter not of a single bold stroke but of patient chipping away at impediments to participation in unions. But that’s not to say they’re meaningless. 

The list includes ensuring that unions can communicate with workers, letting workers who are in bargaining units know what their union representation rights are, and training managers and supervisors not to engage in unfair labor practices or violate neutrality in union organizing campaigns. The report specifically cites Department of Agriculture firefighters, noting, “The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) employs 30,000 employees, of which 10,000 are firefighters. USFS firefighters are traditionally underpaid and lack access to healthcare and other benefits, particularly during the offseason. Allowing the union greater access to USFS firefighters would eliminate a barrier to the union building its membership.”

Other measures include preventing federal contractors from spending public money on anti-union campaigns and requiring disclosure of anti-union campaigns by contractors, and “attach[ing] preferences or otherwise encourag[ing] strong labor standards for recipients of federal grants and loans.”

The recommendations also dovetail with an executive order Biden signed last week requiring the use of Project Labor Agreements on federal construction projects of over $35 million. Project Labor Agreements set labor standards for specific construction projects, covering both union and non-union workers and coordinating across the contractors and unions involved.

The labor task force offers up a key example: “Offshore wind development requires a specially-trained workforce for the fabrication, assembly, and installation of wind turbines, substations, and subsea cables. American labor unions have established training and apprenticeship programs and the institutional capacity to provide offshore wind developers and their contractors with a highly skilled workforce capable of advancing projects in the safe and timely manner needed to achieve the administration’s offshore wind goals. Project labor agreements can help provide a pathway for workers, particularly those from underserved communities, to be recruited into union training and apprenticeship programs for the development of offshore wind projects.”

Biden’s executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour went into effect on Jan. 30. That order affects up to 390,000 workers, while the Project Labor Agreement order is expected to improve jobs for nearly 200,000 workers. With any major legislation that could help workers blocked by every congressional Republican plus Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, this is what Biden can do: leverage executive power and the federal bureaucracy to strengthen labor protections and the right to organize and improve wages and working conditions in dozens of small but meaningful ways.