Does Big Labor truly represent the American worker?

Editorial note: The essay originally appeared on Labor Day at National Review.

Since at least the 1930s, if not the late 19th century, labor unions have claimed the power to speak on behalf of all American workers. But, on this Labor Day, should we still give them that power, when labor unions represent less than 10 percent of the workforce?

Politicians act as if union bosses do speak for all workers, perhaps conditioned by the fact that seemingly every group, from accountants to zookeepers, has at least one advocacy or trade coalition working on its behalf. This may have been defensible in the days of George Meany, who led the AFL-CIO from the 1950s through the 1970s, when as many as one-fourth to one-third of wage and salary workers were unionized.

But recent Bureau of Labor Statistics reports indicate that less than one in ten workers, and less than one in 16 workers in the private sector, are union members. Meanwhile, almost half of union members work for state, local, and federal governments, even as less than 15 percent of all workers in the U.S. work for government. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that career path, the Union Membership and Coverage Database estimates that union members are more likely to be college-educated than the workforce as a whole.

So union bosses actually speak, at most, for a disproportionately privileged, government-employed segment of workers. This is a warning to political figures and campaigners who would use union bosses as a proxy for the voice of workers as a whole: The bosses are unrepresentative, and they answer to a segment of workers that is not of the hard-hat and lunch-pail set that many politicos hope to reach.

Indeed, union bosses’ approach to politics is nakedly partisan and ideologically committed to the Everything Leftism of the professional activist class that staffs the union office. It’s easy to spot the partisanship: OpenSecrets’ compilation of union political spending in 2024 shows unions sent 87.3 percent of their contributions to Democrat campaigns, with 11.8 percent sent to Republicans.

These contributions are far more Democratic leaning than union families themselves. Exit polls from the 2024 general election showed that then–Vice President Kamala Harris beat Republican President Donald Trump by only a 53–45 margin among the 19 percent of Americans who are members of “union households” (pollster-speak for union members and their families).

The divergence between more centrist-leaning union families and the Democratic Party’s left wing, occupied as it is by union bosses, suggests Big Labor maintains a model of politics that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russian revolutionary cell in 1917. Because the workers have not attained appropriate class consciousness, their power must be directed through a union’s professional-activist staffer class functioning as a nominally elected dictatorship of the proletariat until the workers adopt the politics of graduate students (who have, not coincidentally, proven to be one of the few fertile organizing grounds for Big Labor in recent decades).

Those hoping to hear workers’ voices need to find an alternative to union bosses who have shown they barely speak for their members and their families, much less all laborers. And those workers need the freedom to ensure that their voices can be heard over the voices of union bosses who erroneously purport to speak for them.