What is a labor union, and why does that question matter?

What is a labor union?

The question is deceptively simple. A labor union is a representative organization of workers, if not “the working class.” A labor union is a political advocacy group, especially one for government workers like public school teachers. A labor union is a social organization of working families.

And those deceptively simple answers all carry a share of the truth, but do not—even together—tell the full story. But back in the middle of the 20th century, perhaps in 1955, when the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations federations of labor unions merged into the modern AFL-CIO, one would not need to ask the question and even the off-hand answers would be more complete.

After all, just about every person, certainly every person with an interest in politics and public policy, would be familiar with labor unions and trade unionism. Roughly one-third of America’s 51 million nonagricultural workers—over 16 million people—were members of labor unions, and the vast majority of those workers worked in private industries, many of which—like Detroit’s auto factories, Pittsburgh’s steel foundries, and Los Angeles’s aircraft assembly plants—were on the cutting edge of the American economy.

Even if an adult worker were not himself a union member, he was likely very familiar with labor unionism. Perhaps a family member or friend would be one of the one-in-three. If not, at least one church elder, fellow member of a fraternal social club like the Elks or Moose, or comrade from military service or a veterans’ society would have been. And if somehow none of that man’s close acquaintances were union workers, he would still in his business have dealt extensively with unionized workplaces, likely experiencing union hostility to American enterprise firsthand.

But today, only one in sixteen or so private-sector workers are union members. It is unlikely that one of today’s workers is a union member himself, unless he works for state or local government. It becomes even less likely if that worker lives outside the West Coast (including Alaska and Hawaii), the Acela Corridor, or Greater Chicago, three of the areas that retain relatively high unionized shares. Today’s labor unionist is unlikely to be a factory-line worker, housebuilder, or trucker, and far more likely to be a public schoolteacher, Department of Motor Vehicles clerk, or even a graduate student.

The labor union leaders of the past—men like the AFL-CIO’s George Meany, the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, or the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa—had a plausible claim to speak for the American working class. Their members constituted a large chunk of the workforce, and their members worked in the industrial occupations driving mid-century economic growth.

Today’s union bosses are largely anonymous except to politicos, and the “working class” they claim to represent and the often non-working class they do represent are very different. The AFL-CIO’s Liz Shuler, the SEIU’s April Verrett, and the NEA’s Becky Pringle are largely unknown, except when conservative activists clip their more radical or emphatic statements and share them online.

They still pretend to speak for American workers as a class; indeed, they insist that only evil Republicans stand in the way of every single American worker joining their cause. But today’s union members are not, largely, the men powering the engines of economic growth by the sweat of their brows. Instead, they are a self-selected group of ideologically compliant left-wing special interest factions, a majority of whom either work directly for the government or work for nominally private employers utterly dependent on Big Government for their revenues like Medicaid-dependent hospitals, “private” universities dependent on federal research grants and student loans, and casinos that exist at the sufferance of municipal and state legislatures.

The “Long Decline” in union membership tells the story. Today’s union members number 14.6 million, almost 1.5 million fewer than Meany, Reuther, and Hoffa commanded three-quarters of a century ago. Meanwhile, today’s labor force has over 100 million more workers than the mid-20th century. As its membership has fallen and shifted from the broad economy to historically bound slivers of mass employment (like the decreasingly important Detroit Three automakers), specialized occupations whose industries are designed with collective bargaining in mind (like actors, airline pilots, and professional athletes), and government workers who are often ideologically committed to social and economic Everything Leftism, organized labor increasingly radicalized to the socialist left. Moderating workers have left unionism, and its activist cadres were formed in socialist and other leftist activism.

Today, some argue that the solution to the American worker’s ills is more power for Shuler, Verrett, and Pringle; the leftist cadres they employ; and the rump labor unions they command. They are wrong. Conservative efforts to limit union power have been an eight-decade success, promoting freedom in political association, public accountability, and economic stability through labor peace.

Those who seek to empower Shuler, Verrett, and Pringle play on the entirely understandable ignorance of organized labor among Americans, especially right-leaning Americans. This project seeks to give readers the answer to the question “What is a labor union,” and to inoculate them against manipulation and political-economic error.

What labor unions are

…unionists have argued since the origins of trade unionism that workers must form a united class interest opposed to employers (“capitalists” in the Marxist phrasing) or the employers would trample them underfoot and reduce workers to de facto slavery.

At the simplest, economist’s toy-model level, a labor union is a group of workers who have elected to “collectively bargain” with their employer. Instead of pursuing their individual workplace interests, the workers in a union agree on wages, hours, and working conditions to cover them all in a set contract, known as a “collective bargaining agreement” (CBA). Under American law, that CBA covers workers whether or not they wished to give up their independence to bargain collectively themselves, and it covers them whether or not they joined the union after its establishment.

Collective bargaining is designed to be adversarial and fundamentally zero-sum; “more” for the workers is expected to mean “less” for the employer, and vice versa. There is no pretension or attempt to secure mutually beneficial growth (an “expanding pie”), and rhetoric during negotiations invokes armed combat between workers and managers as a matter of course. Historically, the combat was often literal rather than rhetorical, on both sides.

Today, the typical final weapon in collective bargaining is the work stoppage—if called by the union, a strike; if called by management, a lockout. Professional sports fans will be unusually familiar with lockouts; for practical reasons, legal protections given to locked-out workers against replacement that mainstream businesses try to avoid don’t matter to sports team owners or leagues when disputing with professional athletes or sports officials.

The striking (or locked-out) workers make a bet that the employer will lose enough revenue that he will have to give in to their demands to reopen his business and resume production. The shut-down employer bets that workers will have to take what he has offered and no more because they need their paychecks. Both sides are damaged by the stoppage, which disrupts the normal functioning of the workplace. The employer can try to reduce the damage by hiring replacement workers (subject to legal regulations), and the workers can try to supplement their pay with outside work, but the loss to the public and the economy remains.

Workers who do not support the union’s collective bargaining agenda or its strike strategy are essentially out of luck, and that can be a serious infringement on their expressive rights when that agenda focuses on non-economic matters like immigration policy, LGBT interests, or even foreign affairs.

Major labor unions represent many “bargaining units”—the wonky term for groups of workers who participate in collective bargaining with an employer—or very large bargaining units with thousands of participants. There are ideological and practical reasons for unions being organized this way.

Ideologically, unionists have argued since the origins of trade unionism that workers must form a united class interest opposed to employers (“capitalists” in the Marxist phrasing) or the employers would trample them underfoot and reduce workers to de facto slavery. From that perspective, all consolidation of worker interests into a larger organization — “one big union” — is good. That an ideologically formed, socialist vanguard would lead the “one big union” was taken as read.

More practically, CBAs are negotiated for a period of years (typically three to five) and require less effort to enforce than to agree. This would leave one-unit unions with little to do in most years and big wind-up efforts in negotiation years. Instead, unions (typically organized geographically, hence “union local”) pool resources of multiple bargaining units into a single union representing multiple groups of employees in the same occupation, profession, or industry.

These unions form regional and national associations to coordinate regional and national collective bargaining strategies and political activities. The largest associations are the national labor federations, of which there is as of 2026 only one, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, almost always referred to by its initialism, AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a membership association of national labor unions, and most are members. Not all major unions are; the National Education Association (NEA) and International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) are prominent “independent” unions that, while aligned with Democrats politically and with the AFL-CIO on most discrete issues, are not AFL-CIO members at the national level.

How unions function

…unions frequently demand (and, because such programs are cheap compared to actual pay and benefits, often receive) mandatory left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings for staff…

With any interest group in public policy, the first question that many ask is “Who funds that?” In the case of organized labor, the answer is “the members of the union, mostly.” The largest share of union revenues, both for government-worker and private-sector bargaining units, is membership dues. Strictly speaking, “dues” are the regular, usually per-pay-period or monthly, assessed charges to remain a union member in “good standing” with the power to vote for union officers and to vote on approving a negotiated contract. Typical union dues are one or two percent of gross pay.

Unions also levy large fees on union members, including initiation fees and special assessments. Unions have the power to fine union members for offenses against the union’s interest. Unions that operate electoral advocacy committees, which includes the major national unions and the AFL-CIO federation, collect additional “separate segregated” political contributions from members, which are legally required to be voluntary.

Most controversial are “agency fees,” better known (especially among conservatives) as “forced dues.” In 24 states, unions may require employers to agree to a so-called “union security clause” that requires workers who do not wish to be union members to pay a portion of union dues, the extent of which is dictated by Supreme Court precedent. The remaining 26 states have a “right to work” law that prohibits enforcing these contract clauses, allowing dissenting non-union-members not to pay for collective representation that they would prefer to reject (but cannot, because unions demand exclusive representation power regardless of the presence of an enforceable security clause).

Unions spend the money they collect on numerous programs. Some is lost to overhead and administration—keeping the staff paid, the account books kept, and the office lights on. Some is spent on contributions to charitable causes and social funds, continuing unions’ tradition of being fraternal-style organizations for their members. And the majority of the typical local union’s expenses go toward collective-bargaining-related expenses, such as negotiating and administering contracts and recruiting new workers and new bargaining units into the unions.

But a substantial proportion of regional, national, and federation-level union expenditures go toward political activities and lobbying. Unions are treated by the IRS as 501(c)(5) organizations alongside local farm bureaus, with the attendant exemption from corporate income tax. Unlike charities but like social-welfare groups (501(c)(4) organizations), unions may directly intervene in elections under tax regulations, and they routinely endorse candidates for offices at all levels of government—almost without exception Democrats or, in jurisdictions where the Democratic Party is too weak to form governments, centrists or Republicans otherwise weakly tied to conservatism or the broader GOP.

Once union-friendly candidates who owe their positions to Big Labor’s favor are elected to office, labor unions spend dues revenues to lobby those candidates. Often the subjects are core socialist economic policy: higher minimum-wage and other employer mandates, increased spending on welfare programs, greater powers for labor unions over business operations, and forced dues-collection powers. But the subjects of lobbying also include non-economic-core issues, including immigration (unions are anti-anti-open borders, as a general rule), LGBT interests (unions are almost without exception completely committed to maximalist transgender recognition), and abortion (unions frequently demand employers to pay for abortion under health insurance programs, and support abortion access policies).

Conservatives make a frequent error in their internal model of how unions lobby and for what they advocate. Many treat national labor unions as if they were simply special interest groups, like the National Rifle Association or Planned Parenthood, which will prioritize their single interest over coalition politics if forced. Unions may be perceived to have a “single interest” in employment levels and compensation in the represented industry, but they do not function as single-interest groups. Across represented industries and economic sectors, with rare exceptions often involving police and other law-enforcement unions, labor unions align with not just the mainstream of the Democratic Party but the bleeding edge of the progressive movement.

In collective bargaining, unions frequently demand (and, because such programs are cheap compared to actual pay and benefits, often receive) mandatory left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings for staff. Some even demand that DEI considerations be taken in business-operations decisions; Minneapolis’s teachers union demanded and was given contract language that layoffs should be conducted on the basis of race, which drew a lawsuit by the second Trump administration against the school system.

Unions and Everything Leftism

…union members make up only six percent of the private workforce, and even those numbers are padded out by “para-statal” workers — workers whose employer is nominally not the government, but whose employer depends on Big Government…

There are a few reasons that explain organized labor’s commitment to “Everything Leftism,” the contemporary progressive issue-set and institutional structure that holds that all left-wing issue positions are mutually dependent on one another.

First, there is—as is often an explanation for labor unions acting oddly—the Long Decline in union membership. When union members were one-third of the workforce and largely in the private sector, their sheer numbers made organized labor an independent institutional force in American politics. Their power might best be demonstrated by the notation that accompanied the entry for Lane Kirkland, then number-two at the AFL-CIO, on Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies: “but we must deal with him.”

But today, union members make up only six percent of the private workforce, and even those numbers are padded out by “para-statal” workers — workers whose employer is nominally not the government, but whose employer depends on Big Government for its continued existence. See, for a clear example, New York state’s hospital system—while the hospitals are nominally privately operated, their revenues rely on Medicaid and other government programs, and the labor unions representing their workers know it. With smaller numbers padded out by legions of government workers, unions cannot stand independent of the rest of the liberal-left-progressive coalition.

The second principal reason for union Everything Leftism looks to leadership and staff cadres. Being a “union boss”—the derisive term for union officers and business managers (the de-facto CEOs of construction and other manual-labor unions) who get fat on big pay packages and domineer over the tradesmen they nominally represent—is a good job for a college-educated professional, not a lucrative one. Six-figure salaries for union leaders are fairly common; Department of Labor records show over 1,000 union officers and over 3,000 union employees made at least $100,000 in gross salary in unions’ 2025 fiscal years, with Brent Booker, general president of the Laborers International Union (LIUNA), topping the single-source-union table for ordinary labor unions (that is, excluding professional athletes’ unions) with a salary of $672,500.

Six hundred seventy-two thousand dollars is a lot of money. It is also not a lot of money compared to what a CEO could make in private industry, where seven-or-more-figure salaries are the province of more than professional athletes. (The grand champion salary-taker in 2025 among union employees was Tony Clark, a former Major League Baseball first baseman who took home over $3.5 million running the MLB players’ union.) That means that union leadership has functionally two “pots” of people who might be interested in rising to the very top of the union pyramid.

The first group are crooks, nepotists, and other purveyors of public sleaze. (Among whom we may allegedly count Tony Clark, who resigned his union office in early 2026 amid a wide-ranging investigation into the MLB players’ union’s administrative and financial practices.) Unions’ positions at critical nodes of the economy, especially transportation, warehousing, and shipping, create powerful stress points where a dishonest union officer can extract kickbacks, steal from members’ dues and pension contributions, or use the threat of labor disruption to collect protection money from businesses.

But not all—indeed, thanks to aggressive federal law enforcement against organized crime since the 1970s, almost assuredly not most—union officers are corrupt. So that leaves committed ideologues, those willing to take what amounts to a pay cut relative to selling out to high-flying consultancies like McKinsey, Big-Law firms like Boies Schiller, or political consultancies like BerlinRosen, to hoist the flag of the vanguard of the proletariat. There is a historical pattern of “bent unions” run by crooks or near-crooks being supplanted by “red unions” run by ideological leftists of a sometimes-outright-Communist alignment. In recent years, the rise of Shawn Fain to the leadership of the United Auto Workers followed this model; a leftist radical, he won election following a federally enforced regime change at the UAW that sent two former national union presidents to prison for taking kickbacks from employers.

The networks linking ideological progressivism and organized labor stretch down the ranks of union staff to line organizers and representational attorneys. In 2019, approaching the height of ESG-woke social liberal coercion by major businesses, a reader of Christian-conservative writer Rod Dreher said to be in a position to know responded to some unionism-curious mutterings on the right with a warning:

My perspective is very different than that of your conservative SEIU-member friend. The political departments of unions tend to be the ‘wokest’ spaces in left-of-center politics. There seems to be a pretty massive generational divide, as there is with anything these days, and the 20- and 30-somethings who staff these jobs tend to be further to the left than people who work for Democratic candidates and committees. There’s definitely a lot of cross pollination between the two worlds (after all, unions are effectively an auxiliary of the Democratic Party, perhaps now than ever before), but at D.C. headquarters of any union, you’ll find a subset of true-believers who want to smash capitalism and re-engineer society in a way that the average party hack generally does not.

…

When it comes to the type of protection your friend is looking for, I basically see unions coming to the same fork in the road that the ACLU has faced in recent years as younger activists challenge its free speech fundamentalism (see this memo that got a lot of attention last year). A healthy labor movement should see a place for someone like a religious civil servant who’s on the wrong side of a coercive, lefty manager, but I don’t think my old colleagues see it that way. The optimist’s retort is that things are much better in the locals than the D.C. milieu, but I’m not so sure that’s true, especially in public sector unions.

Major figures in social liberalism, not just economic liberalism, got their start in union-related activism. Cecile Richards, the late nepo baby (daughter of Texas’s most recent Democratic governor as of 2026) longtime former head of Planned Parenthood, was an organizer for the SEIU. Vicki Saporta, leader of the National Abortion Federation from 1995 through 2018, was a Teamsters Union alumna. Patrick Gaspard, former head of George Soros’s philanthropic empire and former head of the Democratic Party establishment think tank Center for American Progress, made his name in politics at the union representing New York’s para-statal hospital workers (1199SEIU).

These are merely the most prominent cases. Across left-of-center activism, union activity (and union-adjacent activity) is a resume builder and key source of activist employment. Government-sector unions, especially teachers’ unions, are intimately tied to state and local-level Democratic parties and liberal state and local governments; it is often the case that the state teachers’ union office is one of if not the closest interest group headquarters to the state capitol building.

Responding to labor unions as they are

In a forthcoming book-length project, I, other researchers from Capital Research Center, and allies from across the conservative movement will survey the causes and consequences of the alliance between organized labor and Everything Leftism.

Activists like Liz Shuler, April Verrett, and Becky Pringle who run America’s labor unions face a continued slide into irrelevance as a forcing mechanism for broad, Everything Leftist change. In response, they have sought to expand the powers the government at all levels gives them to compel workers to support their agendas both with money and with public action.

In this, they have support from a faction of supposed conservatives backed by a major institutional left-of-center funder. The Hewlett Foundation, which has a longstanding program to oppose capitalism and close ties to alumnae of the Biden administration, has funded a network of political operatives and think tankers through American Compass to support expanding Shuler, Verrett, and Pringle’s power. The Hewlett money men and money women have very good reason to do this: they are fully aware that empowering organized labor advances their entire agenda, which promotes radical environmentalism, expansive abortion access, and Black Lives Matter-style racial agitation.

To the extent these nominal conservatives are not simply pay-for-play cases or politicos looking for an angle for promotion, their errors derive from a desire to help American workers. Specifically, they derive from a desire to help the people whom they believe still make up organized labor: salt-of-the-earth, 9-to-5 men (as in males) hoping to raise their 2.2 kids while their wives work or don’t work as they prefer. They contend, based on decades of organized-labor propaganda ritually repeated by the media, that union-boss power made the 1950s America they remember (despite not having lived through it). And therefore they hope to, in the Roman-inscription misspelling, “RETVRN” to the political economy of rose-tinted memories of a past that was not as clean as the AI-slop postcards pretend.

But one need not follow the path of those who fail to know that they are serving their political adversaries. In a forthcoming book-length project, I, other researchers from Capital Research Center, and allies from across the conservative movement will survey the causes and consequences of the alliance between organized labor and Everything Leftism. I will survey the historical development of American labor unions and governmental policy toward them, demonstrating the consistency and thoroughness of unions’ allegiance to the progressive cause over the first two centuries of industrial America. We will examine how the labor movement is integrated into the broader Everything Leftist institutional structure, including its alumni networks, its connection to donor collectives like the Democracy Alliance and Arabella Advisors/Sunflower Services, its direct influence on elections, and the union-controlled official banker to the Democratic Party, Amalgamated Bank of New York. We will examine the effects these connections and integrated networks have on policies, including labor and employment, state budgets, health care finance and government control, education, energy and environmental regulation, social issues, and foreign relations including immigration.

At the conclusion of the survey, we will have demonstrated, as I hope I have begun to do here, that organized labor is, for long-standing and irreversible institutional reasons, left-progressive, even if the American working man (or woman) is not. Then we will look forward, to determine what policies might actually improve the situation of working Americans as they are today, not as mythology says they were a lifetime ago.

For eighty years since the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the best policies have followed a three-pronged approach. They have granted or protected workers’ rights to refrain from participating in unions’ highly politicized activities, subjected unions to public scrutiny as the price of the extensive powers governments have given them, and defended the public against economic fallout from labor disputes. Further actions might include protection of workers’ benefits and pensions from politicized organized labor-directed investing decisions, expanding employer-sponsored worker-feedback mechanisms outside the adversarial framework of collective bargaining, and clearing pathways for workers seeking more-independent arrangements like “gig work” contracting to arrange with clients or brokerage-style firms to obtain traditionally employer-provided fringe benefits.

Unions will oppose all these reforms because they allow workers to exercise political and social independence from what Democratic politicians and often-Marxist theoreticians have decided is “best” for them. They break what the theoreticians contend is a natural, logical, and morally just unity between the “working class” and Democratic politicians against decadent capitalist pigs and rats who serve the pigs over their fellow workers for a few crumbs more.

But as American workers have shown for the better part of seven decades, that unity is not natural. Working Americans have rarely seen themselves as a distinct class, with everyone from janitors to Wall Street traders aspiring to and sometimes believing that even if they will not get to live life on Easy Street, with hard work and a fair shot their children might. Politically, exit polls suggest the closest group America has to a “working class” (people with a high-school education) have picked the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, breaking the streak by voting for a losing Republican in 2020. For their part, while union leadership and leadership-directed political contributions make organized labor look as Democratic as Washington, D.C., exit poll results show that union-member families (union households) are only about as Democratic as Colorado or Maine.

Truly standing for workers requires standing with workers where they are, not where theoreticians and activists think they should be. This project will show that Big Labor is not where they are, and that pushing workers back into its arms would be a profound error.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/what-is-a-labor-union-and-why-does-that-question-matter/