The Left and their Union Masters

If political rhetoric was subject to the same rigid labeling standards American manufacturers are expected to meet, liberals would have to call themselves something else.

The term was undoubtedly test-marketed to evoke the image of someone more broadminded and generally more tolerant of others’ points of view.

Does that describe any leftist you know?

When liberals claim to prize diversity above virtually any other commodity, they’re referring only to differences in things that don’t matter and, by their own admission, human beings are born to be. Things like race, gender and sexual orientation.

Opinions and actions, on the other hand, are fair game for the most soul-crushing forms of discrimination.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven’t ventured onto a college campus or spent time on social media platforms, whose sole purpose is to quash viewpoints with which those in power disagree.

Less obvious to the naked eye, unfortunately, is perhaps the single-largest funding source for this toxic ideology — organized labor in general and government employee unions in particular.

Because the whole idea of collective bargaining is based on excusing a relative handful of union members from the forces of supply and demand with which unorganized workers must contend, it only follows that union leaders would be suspicious, at best, of America’s market-driven economy. But at least those representing workers in the private sector understand their demands must be tempered by the employer’s need to earn profits.

Government employee unions, however, recognize no such constraints.

Members of groups like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and teachers’ unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are paid by tax dollars funneled through public employees’ paychecks. Consequently, leaders of their unions have a vested interest in growing the size and scope of government, regardless of how that impacts the rest of us.

Unlike their peers in the real world, government union leaders know they aren’t dependent on the goodwill of millions of consumers, so they generally don’t care about whether their membership agrees with their stances. And if they don’t agree, they rely on bullying strategies to stop them from leaving and the overall size of government growing. So they focus on working with greedy politicians who can raise the taxes needed to advance a liberal agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with workers’ pay or working conditions.

For example:

• At the height of the COVID pandemic, leaders of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) demanded the defunding of law enforcement and universal Medicare in return for returning to the classroom;
• The NEA used its 2020-21 annual conference to debate a pair of resolutions expressing the group’s public support for Palestinian statehood and condemn Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians;
• AFT President Randi Weingarten has used her union to wage a massive assault on the Second Amendment — including outright weapon confiscation — saying the U.S. must follow “what other great democracies” have done to ban guns;
• Under President Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU in 2022 partnered with the Green New Deal Network for a series of protests to present a united front on climate legislation as they urged Congress to pass President Biden’s bloated “Build Back Better” proposal before the midterms; and,
• Declaring that “racial, social and economic equality are top priorities for AFSCME,” the union in 2018 adopted Resolution 51, calling for, among many things, “bias training, which helps identify built-in prejudices.”

The Left has long accused conservative political candidates and causes of being funded by huge, faceless corporate interests — a notion thoroughly invalidated, incidentally, via such companies Anheuser-Busch, Target and Disney, whose recent missteps had nothing to do with profits and everything to do with the far-Left ideologies of their leaders.

But even if it were true that Wall Street uniformly skewed right while unions backed the Left, there’s an important distinction: However much the Kochs or the Waltons have spent on conservative legislation, at least it’s their money. Unions, meanwhile, confiscate billions of dues dollars every year from the paychecks of millions of government employees who think it’s being spent on representation and use it to underwrite a radical, leftist ideology perhaps half their members don’t even share. 

In theory, this should no longer be the case. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that union membership and dues and/or agency fees could no longer be made mandatory, as they had been for public employees in nearly half the country for generations. But unions responded by adopting a laundry list of strategies intended to blunt the court’s unambiguous intent — everything from suppressing information about the ruling to filing lawsuits against members seeking to opt out of union affiliation and even forging workers’ names on membership documents.

Since Janus, government employee unions have lost nearly 800,000 members, taking with them billions in dues revenue that can never again be used to fund a machine that suppresses the rights of its own members in order to advance policies that rob the rest of us our God-given freedoms.

But they’re still kicking.

The struggle to expose labor’s unsavory role in the process is being waged battle by battle, but the war isn’t yet won.

Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a national public policy watchdog focusing on government employee unions. His first book, “Freedom is the Foundation,” was released this month.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.