Big Labor Is an Economic and Political Dead End

By Akash Chougule

Friday, October 20, 2023

 

From Amazon to Starbucks to Hollywood to the “Big Three” automakers — and now to health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente — 2023 has brought a raft of high-profile union-organizing efforts and collective-bargaining strikes.

 

These efforts have spurred some in the media and political circles to declare a “comeback” for labor unions. Subsequently, some Republican politicians, like Senator Josh Hawley, believe it is necessary to embrace organized labor. They’re trying their best to keep up with Democrats, who have long put the interests of unions above all else — including the union workers who are undeniably struggling under the Biden administration’s policies.

 

Senator Hawley recently flip-flopped and now opposes a right-to-work law in his state and at the federal level. Such laws allow workers to decide for themselves whether they wish to join and pay dues to a labor union. In the 23 states without a right-to-work law (including Missouri, whose voters rejected a right-to-work law the legislature had passed and the governor had signed), workers can be fired for refusing to pay union dues, even if they object to the hundreds of millions of dollars unions spend supporting Democratic candidates and causes. Hawley oddly believes this makes him a populist champion of American workers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

In reality, the latest examples of union agitation are more a result of President Joe Biden’s policies than of a resurgence of interest in unions on the part of American workers. Unions remain much more focused on progressive political activism than on actually representing workers.

 

Republicans shouldn’t be fooled into believing they need to court organized labor. Instead, they need to pursue reforms that empower workers, like the Employee Rights Act led by Representative Rick Allen.

 

The ongoing United Auto Workers strike of the so-called Big Three automakers is the perfect example of how bad policies mixed with emboldened union bosses can grind a major sector of our economy to a halt. Some look at the situation, which has cost nearly $6 billion, and see a political opportunity in supporting the union. After all, Michigan is an important political state, and the votes of workers like those represented by the UAW could be decisive.

 

But the UAW is not what many believe it is. Not a single employee of the Big Three represented by the UAW today ever actually voted for the UAW to represent them. The UAW organized the Big Three in the 1930s and 1940s, but has never stood for reelection since. Today, it has more retirees than workers and does more organizing of university graduate students than actual autoworkers.

 

The UAW also just came out of a yearslong scandal that saw more than a dozen senior executives, including two former presidents, charged with embezzlement, racketeering, and other crimes. Among the offenses: Union leaders were using workers’ hard-earned dues on costly golf trips and lavish parties with paid models handing out expensive cigars. Thus, the UAW is seeking reputation repair, desperately trying to prove its worth to its members.

 

Democrats, for their part, are doing their best to help their friends in organized labor by tilting the playing field in their favor at the expense of the rights of the workers the unions ostensibly represent. Michigan Democrats this spring repealed their state’s ten-year-old right-to-work law.

 

Because the Senate failed to pass House Democrats’ PRO Act in the last Congress despite Biden’s endorsement, the Biden administration is trying to do through agency action what Congress couldn’t. That means regulatory efforts to eliminate secret-ballot union elections, turn freelance workers into union-eligible employees, and reduce accountability for union leadership.

 

Consider a Biden-administration Labor Day giveaway to unions. In its Cemex decision, Biden’s National Labor Relations Board did its best to reinstate so-called card-check union certification. The decision’s goal was twofold: First, to absolve unions of the need to win a secret-ballot election — that is, the same way we vote for president and members of Congress (and, thanks to Democrats’ efforts in the USMCA, the same way union elections work in Mexico). And second, thereby to force workers to vote in front of union organizers, subjecting them to harassment and intimidation.

 

Former AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka testified to Congress in 2019 that unions need workers’ personal contact information for this exact purpose: to confront them “at their home” and “at the grocery store.”

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that some unions feel emboldened with an ally in the White House and find it necessary to picket for higher wages to keep up with the inflation that President Biden and the Democratic Congress helped spur in 2021 and 2022. Yet despite the push from Washington and the high-profile media coverage, the alleged labor resurgence still amounts to “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

 

According to NLRB data, unions still attempt to organize less than one-half of 1 percent of all eligible employees in the country each year. And despite unions’ rising overall approval rating, nearly 60 percent of Americans are still “not interested at all” in joining a union. All the while, the nation’s major unions, such as the AFL-CIO, spend many times more on progressive politics and lobbying than they do on actually organizing and representing workers.

 

While misguided faux populists like Senator Hawley adopt the policy positions of union leaders who want to force as many workers as possible to fund their self-interested political agenda, other Republicans should stand with workers and co-sponsor the Employee Rights Act. It would protect workers’ right to secret-ballot union elections, the right of freelancers to remain independent (as the vast majority prefer), and allow workers to decide for themselves whether they wish to share personal information with union organizers or support union political spending.

 

Too often, labor issues are inaccurately described as having two sides: “union” and “management.” But this populist moment is the perfect time for Congress to stand up for the oft-forgotten but most important third group: actual workers. The Employee Rights Act would be the perfect start. In the face of President Biden’s advancing radical agenda and some Republicans’ erroneously gravitating towards it, this pro-worker legislation can’t be enacted a moment too soon.