Big Labor sees pensions as a “weapon”

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general and military philosopher, is quoted as writing, “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.” For this reason, one should read (or at least be aware of what is written at) In These Times, a socialist magazine where labor union activists propose strategies and report on the inside story at left-wing institutions.

They can’t make it clearer

I have often argued that organized labor is not interested in being a nonpolitical agent on behalf of workers. Thanks to In These Times, the Hewlett Foundation-funded American Compass think tankers who refuse to listen to me can now listen to Big Labor activists themselves on that subject.

Unions hold large assets in their pension funds. These funds were once the “banana stand” that crooked union bosses looted for their own nefarious purposes. The Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, controlled by Jimmy Hoffa and his organized crime allies in the 1970s, was the most infamous of the union funds used for Mob activities.

Today, union bosses and activist staff see union pension funds as a political kitty that can be used to advance Everything Leftism. And In These Times couldn’t be clearer about that desire. It titled an article advocating aggressive and militant ESG investing by union pensions “Pensions Can Be Labor’s Weapon.”

Conservatives are their enemy

There is nothing particularly new about the idea that Big Labor can wield investments as a sword of political power. In the 2000s, the AFL-CIO explored picking financial advisory firms based on their casting proxy votes for union priorities, union-backed politicians managing state pensions vowed to “mobilize the power of the capital markets for public purpose,” and union pension funds began investing in speculative environmentalist schemes.

But what is new is how frank labor supporters are about the nakedly partisan interest they have in ESG investing. The In These Times writer is clear about whom he considers to be labor’s adversary. He writes:

[T]he situation is not as simple as just dipping into pensions to hire more union organizers. But an entire world of possibility opens for unions if they treat the challenges of investing pension funds as political problems to be solved, rather than unshakeable laws of nature. Do you know who wants to ensure that all that union pension money cannot be leveraged to help the broader labor movement? MAGA Republicans! Indeed, the entire Republican crusade against ​“ESG investing” — short for prioritizing environmental, social and governance criteria — should be understood as terror over the latent power of capital for political progress.

That is not the sentiment of a movement willing to make a truce with conservatives by becoming nonpolitical in the interest of increasing its representational power. It is instead what Big Labor has been since Big Bill Haywood (before he was literally buried in the Kremlin Wall by Stalin’s regime) was allying with Eugene Debs to create “one big union” and a powerful Socialist Party: Political operations of a left-wing bent.

Don’t expect that to change. And if one’s advocacy plan rests on it, that plan is, like the designs of generals who know neither the enemy nor themselves, certain to fail.