Organized Labor Split

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.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.