The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Ideological Case

The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining (full series)
Sectoral Bargaining | The Practical Case | The Political and Advocacy Case
The Ideological Case | The Economic Case

The Ideological Case

The ideological case against sectoral bargaining is subtly different than the political-advocacy case. Organized labor has always been susceptible to Marxist or Marxist-influenced class-conflict analysis, which has been alien to the Whig-Republican and later conservative view of work, entrepreneurship, and working people from Marxism’s beginning.

In a long Twitter/X thread, Gilded Age history podcaster Avi Woolf argued:

The freedom to have access to land to work, for those who could, or to use their labor as they wish, was thus genuinely sacred and vital for them. It was not just about independence but also individualism. For free soilers, and for the Gilded Age Republican party generally, workers did not form a distinct “class.” Everyone worked in some capacity and was free to change jobs or places and try their luck elsewhere, like any entrepreneur.

Woolf further argues that industrialization changed how the Republicans related to working people, including by compelling the GOP to concede to a role for governments in regulating working conditions. This was a change from the GOP’s preference to aid workers through the government provision of general goods like homesteads to farm, land-grant universities at which to gain knowledge and skills, or government-funded railroad projects to use to transport their produce.

Meanwhile, the union movement rose alongside Marxism and other forms of socialism in the late 19th century. Key early labor union leaders, among them Samuel Gompers of the AFL, flirted with socialism early in their ideological development. Others like Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World and trade unionist-turned-politician Eugene Debs embraced radicalism and socialism throughout their careers. In the 1930s, as the Wagner Act labor-relations regime developed, members of the Communist Party USA and their fellow travelers exercised substantial influence over the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the more left-wing of the two major labor confederations of the time that later merged to form the AFL-CIO.

But thanks in large part to following strategically inept directions from their de facto masters in Moscow, the CPUSA cadres could not make the American labor movement a Communist one, like that of France’s CGT or Italy’s CGIL. Even influential democratic socialists like Walter Reuther could not make the movement an explicitly socialist one, like the German movement. Old-fashioned American liberalism epitomized by AFL-CIO head George Meany was too strong and too successful in the era of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

But socialism would leave its mark on how American labor organizers conceive of economic life and the world. The New Left of the 1960s defined by the Students for a Democratic Society activist faction would move into labor organizing. Likely the most prominent SDS alumnus to trade student radicalism for union radicalism was Paul Booth, a longtime political strategist for the AFSCME government worker union. Alongside the SDS alumni, the labor movement’s membership shifted from industrial workers at private firms like those of Reuther’s UAW toward civil servants, teachers, and other government functionaries like those of Booth’s AFSCME. The result was a rise in socialist thinking in the labor movement, a greater incentive toward support for government planning and nationalized industries, and a firmer focus on workers’ supposed class interests over personal material interests.

UnionStats estimates that in 1973, there were 14.9 million private-sector unionized workers and 3.1 million government-sector unionized workers. By 2009, the sectors had briefly switched prominence, with the 7.9 million government worker unionists outnumbering their 7.4 million private-sector counterparts. Following some post-2010 limitations on government-worker bargaining (most effectively the bans on the SEIU “dues skim” home healthcare worker “union” scheme in states that Republicans controlled after the 2010 midterm elections), the private-sector unions retook the lead, but their margin is only an estimated 400,000 organized workers.

Unions changing from where their dues bread was buttered provided added fuel to an ideological shift that was already ongoing and unlikely to reverse. In the 1990s, a slate led by card-carrying socialist John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO. His lieutenant Richard Trumka would lead the union federation until his death in 2021. During the Sweeney-Trumka regime, the union federation went so far as to share outright Marxist propaganda encouraging workers to “seize the means of production.”

When they are not Marxist in economic analysis, union staff and senior leadership are Everything Leftist in social analysis. Trumka’s successor, Liz Shuler, has endorsed radical transgender activists. The motivating ideology of union officials, who would be strongly empowered if sectoral bargaining were adopted, is “social justice unionism,” essentially Everything Leftism as applied to organized labor. As I defined it previously:

Under social justice unionism, organized labor is not a fully independent actor pursuing the material interests of its membership or even the working class at large. Instead, it is a cog in a political and cultural machine that works towards a full-spectrum left-wing agenda, including on issues far outside what might be considered organized labor’s “economic core.”

There is no reason to believe that sectoral bargaining will somehow uproot social justice unionism. If anything, the intellectual and corporate dynamics would likely further entrench the ideology at the heights of a newly empowered organized labor with the power to lord its position over every working person in the country.

The incentive structure within organized labor officialdom selects for a primarily ideological cadre. While top-level executives in Big Labor make an easy six-figure paycheck, that is less than a top productive profit-seeking businessman makes. This fact selects for one of two categories of union leaders: leftist ideologues and embezzlers. The embezzlers are easy to explain: With vast opportunities for racketeering and theft, Mafiosi and common thieves alike can pad their compensation packages with ill-gotten gains.

But the crooks tend, ultimately, to end up in jail or worse, as James Riddle Hoffa would explain if he had not encountered misfortune at or around the Machus Red Fox in 1975. So that leaves the leftist ideologues as the other class of union officers—one that is likely larger and more able to stick around than the crooks who keep giving each other up to the Feds. Union organizing (or its kissing cousin, community organizing) is a key resume-building item for many prominent left-wing leaders. Most prominently, Center for American Progress head, former head of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and former Obama administration official Patrick Gaspard was political director of 1199SEIU, the famed “union that rules New York.” Below the level of the highest officers, union leadership offers the power to build resumes for a career in liberal politics. Claims that organized labor has a “conservative heart” must deal with the fact that organized labor has a radical leftist brain and staunchly progressive musculoskeletal system.

Expanding union power through sectoral bargaining, whether or not that comes with bigger union budgets filled with forced dues, will further empower these left-wing ideologues. It is these ideologues, not the union membership at large and certainly not a minority (however substantial) of that membership, who decide how unions operate. Some have argued that organized labor can be a counter to the coordination of “woke capitalism” and the elite-class formal institutions. If anything, organized labor is a vehicle to increase the coordination of the elite formal institutions, and through ESG investing of pension funds organized labor is a perpetrator, not an opponent, of woke capitalism.

On the other side of the coin, organized labor avowedly loathes working arrangements that encourage entrepreneurship and self-ownership rather than class consciousness. American Compass’s Jonathan Barry rightly notes that “Conservatives have long appreciated that workers include working owners, especially small business owners and independent contractors.”

The political and class independence of working owners is a large part of why Big Labor holds such a visceral hatred for independent contracting, especially aided by the “gig economy” brokerage platforms that ease the conduct of independent work. If freelancers see themselves as members of the petite bourgeoisie rather than as members of a Marxist working class that must seize the means of production in class consciousness and organizing, they will not be amenable to enrolling as socialist labor’s “woke conscript” foot soldiers in the Everything Leftist cause. As expressed by Biden administration Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su:  “We build critical coalitions not only because of the enhanced potential for favorable outcomes, but also because the process of coalition-building itself sometimes changes each of us.” Sectoral bargaining would increase the number of woke conscripts forced to submit to Big Labor workplace commissars. It must be rejected.

In the next installment, the world has been running a sort of general economic experiment since the end of social democracy’s “thirty glorious years” in the 1970s.