Organized Labor Split

Today the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union announced their
decision to leave the parent AFL-CIO, reports
The New York Times.

Their action symbolizes the split in approach to the deployment of union power. The
AFL-CIO wants to spend money on politics. The breakaway unions want to focus on
organizing.

The breakup also illustrates the split personality of labor unions ever since their
modern emergence in the nineteenth century. Were they to be activist organizations
agitating for social gains in the political realm or were they self-help organizations
dedicated to helping people on the ground.

The truth is that unions are mostly about politics. The Anglosphere entered the
industrial era with a common law tradition that disapproved of “combinations”
in restraint of trade. It took sympathetic public opinion and positive law to
change this and to award organizations of working men the legal privilege
to do what employers were forbidden to do: conspire in a cartel against the
consumer.

Still, the American labor movement remained mostly a working-class movement
right through most of the twentieth century under the leadership of men like cigar maker
Samuel Gompers and plumber George Meany. Unlike the union movement in Europe,
American union leaders kept the middle-class socialists out of their movement
and thus kept a certain distance from politics.

Today, of course, as private sector union membership has declined to 8 percent
of the labor force, the character of unions has changed. They are mainly
associations of government workers that work with Democratic politicians to
increase government spending in return for votes, wages, tenure, and pensions. The breakaway
unions are private sector unions; they have a different agenda.

From the conservative perspective it is probably a good idea for the public
sector and private sector unions to separate. It makes it easier to attack the
AFL-CIO unions as greedy tax-eaters.