A History of Everything Leftist Unionism (full series)
The Old Left and the Reds | Labor and the New Left
The Rise of the SEIU | Labor’s New Coalition
Labor’s New Coalition
Sweeney’s tenure at the AFL-CIO ended with his retirement in 2009. He was succeeded by Richard Trumka, his number two at the AFL-CIO. Trumka was a former militant leader of the United Mine Workers union and the man whose legal difficulties led the AFL-CIO to drop a Jimmy Hoffa–era rule requiring any AFL-CIO officer who pleaded the Fifth to resign his office. Like his would-be rival Stern, Trumka was an ally and backer of President Obama, and like Stern, Trumka pushed the unsuccessful EFCA “card check” bill but had to settle for Obamacare instead.
Facing continued decline in Big Labor’s ranks, Trumka and the AFL-CIO looked to change strategy. By 2013, Trumka had essentially thrown up his hands, and proposed making the Everything Leftism–Big Labor alliance formal. Telling USA Today that “we are in crisis,” Trumka teased formal partnerships up to and perhaps including formal membership in the AFL-CIO federation for a number of left-wing advocacy groups.
Formal links between Big Labor and the contemporary left-wing activist network would be nothing new. Stern’s SEIU had helped incubate the Democracy Alliance liberal donor network and was its first institutional member, even hosting the group’s offices within SEIU headquarters in Washington, DC, for a time. (The AFL-CIO was also an early member of the Democracy Alliance.) Amalgamated Bank, the SEIU-affiliated financial institution that was the focus of the Unite Here divorce proceedings, became the banker to major Democratic Party campaigns and committees, including the Democratic National Committee.
But Trumka’s proposal was something different, as media reports from the time made clear. The New York Times reporting on the move, bylined by the paper’s longtime, union-sympathizing labor-issues reporter Steven Greenhouse, described:
Mr. Trumka says he believes that if unions are having a hard time increasing their ranks, they can at least restore their clout by building a broad coalition to advance a worker-friendly political and economic agenda. He has called for inviting millions of nonunion workers into the labor movement even if their own workplaces are not unionized. Not stopping there, he has proposed making progressive groups — like the NAACP; the Sierra Club; the National Council of La Raza [later renamed UnidosUS], a Hispanic civil rights group; and MomsRising, an advocacy group for women’s and family issues — either formal partners or affiliates of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
The formal marriage did not come to pass. But while some building trades unions balked at formal linkages with environmentalists like the Sierra Club, ideology and policy were not the principal reasons that the marriage was called off: The Wall Street Journal reported that it was power within the House of Labor that derailed it before the altar.
The objections emerged after AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said last month that he wanted to “create full partnerships with other progressive groups” that would be “part of the structure” of the federation. That triggered concern that groups Mr. Trumka mentioned, such as the NAACP, the Sierra Club and the Hispanic civil-rights group National Council of La Raza, would receive full membership and governing power, according to labor officials familiar with negotiations on the issue.
That Trumka would even propose such an entanglement shows the power of a new coalition that upholds what remains of Big Labor. The union movement today is no longer a movement of factory workers, construction men, and transportation drivers working in private industry, at least by numbers. Instead, it is increasingly a movement of education workers, public administrators, and health and social care workers, who are far more likely to be employed by governments and more likely to be liberal in their social views than the Teamsters and longshoremen of old. According to the UnionStats database compiled by academics Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and William E. Even, the economic sectors with the highest union membership numbers in 2023 were elementary and secondary education; “justice, public order, and safety activities”; and hospitals.
White-collar workers with less money than prestige is a tell for aggressive leftist sentiment in America’s WEIRD elite. So it should not be surprising that as the United Auto Workers’ membership profile shifts from car-factory laborers to broke graduate students who fancy themselves the smartest people in the world, radicalism once again rises in the union. That is why the UAW was among the first unions to demand Israel agree to an armistice with Hamas following the attacks on October 7, 2023. The UAW is a creature of Everything Leftism and a radical, graduate-student-bull-session form of Everything Leftism at that, more than its old head Walter Reuther’s materialist socialism.
Conclusion
American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist.
The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. But the effect is clear: Organized labor will not align with conservatives. It has never done so. It would not do so.
This fact holds internationally, where most major union federations, regardless of collective bargaining system or national political spectrum, align with the Left or the radical Left. In this, there is no evidence of American exceptionalism. Big Labor is what it has always been: an engine of the progressive movement and left-wing activism.
