The small pro-labor news site that has the Biden White House’s ear

Journalists from around the world flocked to a General Motors plant in Michigan on Tuesday to document President Biden’s unprecedented visit to the striking autoworkers’ picket line.

Among them were staffers with a small nonprofit labor-advocacy publication called More Perfect Union. But More Perfect Union wasn’t just covering Biden on the picket line — it helped get him there.

Ahead of the announcement that Biden would join the striking workers. More Perfect Union’s executive director Faiz Shakir helped connect the White House and United Auto Workers leaders, smoothing the way for Biden to address a crowd of striking workers.

“We had a number of conversations with the White House,” Shakir, a former Bernie Sanders campaign manager, said of the planning for the Biden trip. “We’re also on the ground covering UAW and building relationships there. So that’s where we gave a little bit of help on the sidelines.”

Senior White House adviser Anita Dunn said in a statement that the administration was grateful to work with More Perfect Union, which she called “the go-to site for a resurgent movement” and “a valuable outlet for this White House.” UAW did not respond to a request for comment.

Shakir founded More Perfect Union in February 2021 because he believed that both the media and liberal advocacy groups were failing to represent the struggles of working-class life.

“In this world . . .” he said in an interview this week, “we hear almost everything from positions of power and influence.”

More Perfect Union first made its mark with coverage of the Amazon unionization effort, producing short documentary-style videos of warehouse employees describing their working conditions and Amazon’s efforts to stop union organizing. It also covered a Kellogg workers strike, unionizing efforts at Starbucks and a John Deere strike, and its reporting frequently inspiring stories by mainstream news outlets. Just a few months after it launched, More Perfect Union won a Sidney Award for its intensive three-week coverage of the Frito-Lay strike, which generated more than 4 million views.

With a tone that is often serious but always conversational, More Perfect Union highlights the struggles of workers from disparate sectors; one post on social media might be about striking railway workers, while the next might be about exploitation women face in the modeling industry. It also dabbles in memes, jokes, and commentary familiar to anyone who spends time online.

“Maybe I’m a dirty commie,” read one post on Instagram, “but I don’t think people should work every second of their waking life just to survive.”

Across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, the company’s video-first approach has drawn millions of subscribers and counting, racking up hundreds of millions of views. The 28-person organization, whose annual budget of $5.5 million comes mostly from donations from Democrat-aligned philanthropies, said this growth is accelerating; in the first six months of 2023, followers, views, and engagement outpaced 2022 and 2021, a feat for any news organization in the current fractured media environment.

Ben Smith — a journalist who has written about media coverage of labor and is also the co-founder of a new media company, Semafor — said More Perfect Union is doing “something actually interesting and new.”

“Labor coverage is so often about unions,” Smith said. But “they’re covering workers, telling really compelling stories that people on TikTok like.”

More Perfect Union also stresses that its audience is “uniquely cross-partisan.” According to a donor pitch deck shared with The Washington Post, its audience includes regular viewers of Fox News and Fox Business as well as MSNBC — but also fans of the popular liberal YouTube pundit Brian Tyler Cohen.

Still, More Perfect Union makes no apologies about having a decidedly pro-labor stance — and politics that strongly align with the left.

“We’re media with a mission,” Shakir said. “I proudly own the label of advocacy journalism.”

From the beginning, More Perfect Union’s advocacy found listeners in the Biden White House, he said. In early 2021, its staff urged White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain in a phone call that the president should speak out on behalf of the Amazon union drive, The Post reported at the time — and he did.

Yet on some issues it has split from the Biden White House — last year chiding the administration for not speaking out more about the Amazon campaigns. All this administration has to do is say it sees these workers and applauds them — and they’re not doing it,” Shakir told The Post at the time, suggesting that the White House should invite union organizers as often as it does CEOs of major corporations.

While the administration rejected the idea that Biden had not embraced labor advocates, weeks later it invited union organizers to the White House.

In an interview, former Obama labor secretary Seth Harris called More Perfect Union’s advocacy “aggressive, smart, effective.”

“Its purpose is to lift up the voices of working people and to help people in the policy sphere, including in Washington, understand workers’ struggle better,” Harris said. “That is an extremely valuable role. And it’s a role that is not played by the mainstream media.”

In July, More Perfect Union had exclusive access to a meeting between Biden, Sanders and union organizers — including Lexi Rizzo, the 25-year-old founder of Starbucks Workers United, who was fired earlier this year from her Buffalo store in what a judge described as part of Starbucks’ “egregious misconduct.”

In her statement, Dunn said that collaborating with More Perfect Union means “we know the people who count — the workers of this nation — will hear the president’s message.”