Labor Unions vs. Working People

After the disastrous 2016 presidential campaign, which saw Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign nearly derailed by identity politics fanatics, before being finished off by Hillary Clinton’s globalist post-liberalism, I participated in a call with a prominent union leader and a senior official of the Working Families Party, to discuss bringing the Working Families Party to Michigan. I raised the issue of a county, Monroe, that has one of the highest rates of union membership in the country. This union stronghold, which went for Obama twice, has been solidly Republican since President Trump’s first victory. Trump carried Monroe by 22 percentage points in 2016. In 2024, the margin was 27 points.

On the call, I argued that our focus should be running conservative social democrats in Monroe. There are many working-class voters in the area, which also has strong ties to the Catholic Church. The Working Families Party, I argued, could and should facilitate such an option. The official seemed baffled by my suggestion. “What would that even look like,” they scoffed.

From the standpoint of traditional working-class politics and political organizing, as practiced in America for the past 150 years or so, my suggestion was an obvious one. Win the votes of working people by focusing on bread-and-butter economics and candidates who can relate to their constituents’ own heartfelt and entirely reasonable attachments to family, faith, and American traditions. No dice.

The refusal to grapple with on-the-ground realities and acknowledge limits as well as new possibilities has long been characteristic of the political myopia of the far left, which is why working-class voters—including those who religiously vote for Democrats—have long preferred the political mainstream. Since Nov. 5, a growing consensus has emerged about the need to extirpate the far left from Democratic circles. The question becomes how do labor moderates return our movement to reality when a significant proportion of its members and staff, drawn from the hothouses of factional politics, nurtured on out-of-touch campuses where the far left can impose its own orthodoxies from the top down, continue to march us toward their imaginary utopias, and over the cliff.

This disjuncture between workers, the Democratic Party, and the party’s left flank has been growing ever wider since 2008, which is why—after eight years of Obama’s version of Ivy League campus liberalism—Sen. Sanders’ insurgent run nearly toppled Hillary Clinton. If Donald Trump was the insurgent candidate who won the 2016 election, in part by reflecting working-class concerns over jobs and immigration, Bernie Sanders could have equally been that candidate—and won nearly the same share of Democratic primary votes as Trump won Republican votes. Sanders’ failure and Trump’s success marked a significant transfer of working-class voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party—a pattern that held true again in 2024.

Biden’s administration proved to be a partial interlude for the failing relationship between the Democratic Party and labor, at least on core union issues. President Biden delivered for sections of organized labor and yet a disjuncture continues, fueled by the prioritization of party management above a recognition of reality and the party’s capture by academics and their culture at the expense of American workers’ priorities. Today, Biden’s connection to older Democratic Party traditions—an iteration of the party that fostered and included many people who benefited from broad social mobility and diverse paths to power—is very much at odds with the party’s academic tilt. The values of the majority who want to be rooted in family, community, and the familiar are at odds with a more secular, global elite who see transgression of older societal values and the imposition of new, inflexible norms of behavior as essential ingredients of their project. They claim to be prophets of progress. The election results say different. In reality, they are the beleaguered priests of a new and faltering religion.

Union leadership has been caught in the middle of this disconnect, with its ears plugged and eyes safely closed. For not only do Democrats, and their analogs in the labor movement, need to be concerned about unease with their corporate wing, they must contend with far-left ideologues who vacillate between pissing on the tent from the inside or pissing on it from the outside, depending on their mood and the issue, while indulging in the cosplay of being “working class” and “revolutionaries.” Meanwhile, their purity tests smack of the worst forms of Protestantism. Think the hysteria of Salem or the millenarianism of the Münster rebellion. It hides the material struggle between an elite dependent on academic credentials and those they wish to shut out of power.

As more and more higher education locals form, and as white collar “knowledge workers” increasingly supplant the traditional industrial worker cores of unions like the UAW, this conflict between town and gown has become ingrained in the labor movement—alienating workers from their ostensible leadership. People understand when their leaders, in culture or in politics, construct a world that they neither recognize nor relate to. Afraid to stand up to the purveyors of campus identity politics, the establishment in labor and the party may prefer to pretend that the culture clash does not exist. Rank-and-file union members know better.

Labor must deal directly with the far-left activist class inside its house either by continuing to accommodate them, a grave mistake, or purging them, an unlikely outcome. Maintaining the pretense that there is no conflict will be difficult and further alienate the very people labor needs to maintain a broad appeal. Pursuing the aims and interests of identity-politics bureaucracy is not an effective substitute for meaningful action on questions of worker pay, leave, job training, and medical and pension benefits.

As a union representative, I frequently advised faculty members and medical practitioners who found themselves caught in the DEI bureaucracy. Their crimes? Using colloquialisms or speaking too openly about their personal thoughts on a vaguely political matter. Everyone knew how absurd these cases were—including, I suspect, the staff who investigated them—nevertheless they had to jump through the hoops. The stress and fear generated by such events was all too real for those involved. I often heard, the person who reported me “wants me fired.” Often, it was true.

In addition to basic just-cause protections from workplace politics, unions can be a force to rebalance the economy toward family and community. Soon-to-be Secretary of State Marco Rubio was right to trumpet unions as the solution to a society gone astray. “Today,” Rubio wrote about the effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, “it might be workplace conditions, but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”

Rubio is right on both counts. Unions, though, are only as good as their leadership. Too many union leaders self-select. The left and the far left are overrepresented. Too many elections are uncontested. Too often there is no opposition to hold leadership to account. That must change.

Labor must again become a serious and independent political player in the grim future that looks to be emerging out of the ashes of a failed liberal project. When members and potential members join, participate, and demand democratization in an easy and accessible way, this will happen. There is no nonpolitical excuse to limit the scope of the membership’s control of major, controversial decisions.

Though labor—at least those unions with higher education locals—knows it has a problem with its left flank, they maintain the pretense of a unified movement. That may change. The far left has and will demand “solidarity,” and use the Democrats’ defeat to try to position itself at the center of a “resistance.” A higher profile for the far left would do more damage to both labor and the Democratic Party. The latter will also feel pressure to engage in “resistance” on issues popular only with a segment of its supposed base while boycotting avenues for the improvement of the lives of union members who are looking to feed and care for their families. These union members are not interested in having their livelihoods held hostage in order to promote far-left identitarian crusades.

The forces of moderation must organize—think of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists or broad anti-communist coalitions of the 1940s and 1950s—and quickly. The Teamsters, too, must consider rejoining the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and advancing an agenda that can unite the vast majority of American workers—even and especially if it means alienating the loudest, most privileged voices in the movement, those emanating from often-troubled campuses where trashing the whole of American history as an “imperial project” and promoting pro-Hamas propaganda to demonize the State of Israel are paramount values.

By maintaining the pretense that nothing is wrong inside labor and that the far left poses no threat, the established players in the labor movement have disadvantaged themselves. In September I wrote in my journal, “it isn’t the mistake that alienates people from institutions that are supposed to protect them. It’s the pretense that nothing went wrong.” While this could apply to many issues within the labor movement, I was referring to a particularly troubling refusal to grapple with reality.

In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was made aware of serious allegations concerning the undemocratic operations, antisemitism, and more of one of its local unions. Despite the fact that this local union also owed AFT money, AFT failed to investigate the allegations. The hope, presumably, being that the far left would go away, burn itself out, and be replaced by a “normal” administration. I heard this argument directly from two labor staffers. Other insiders who spoke with me were more circumspect when making judgments about the desirability of moving against a far-left leadership that some saw as running their union into the ground. Alternatives were likely weighed at the highest level and, again presumably, it was decided that provocation was too risky. Any national union with significant higher education membership must be wary of the extremist left. Even K-12 locals are susceptible.

The far left is organized through Labor Notes and the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization filled with and now governed by Leninists. They are aggressive and hungry for power. Power means jobs. The forces of moderation are disorganized, siloed, and vulnerable. Outside of key sectors, they seem as exhausted as Biden’s presidency, and they know it. AFT’s Randi Weingarten may have been afraid to act on complaints because AFT could fall to the far left if the left were provoked. Any effort to move against a local under far-left control, so the thinking may go, could trigger a wider revolt. Yet until labor excises its far left, they will continue to serve as a brake on labor’s broader appeal, particularly as the fiction of labor unity becomes difficult to maintain.

A direct conflict with the far left has the benefit of situating mainstream labor leaders in the camp with the majority of American workers and with a majority of their own members. Even in higher education, some extremist locals, while claiming to speak on behalf of the entire working class, are minority unions. As left-led unions continue to partner with more and more extreme groups, including the U.S. Communist Party and affiliates of U.S. Treasury-designated terrorist organizations like Samidoun, the pretense of labor movement unity will come into direct conflict with the possibility of broader union appeal.

Extremists at American universities are free to pursue whatever legal forms of politics they wish, however fantastical, immoral, and destructive. However, their priorities are not ours. Allowing them to continue to pretend that they represent the working class, for fear of splitting the labor movement, is a surefire way to continue to alienate prospective members and condemn ourselves to the political margins, at a time when our people want and deserve results.