Big Labor’s bid for a red workplace

American labor union leaders, with rare exceptions like turn-of-the-20th century radical Big Bill Haywood, mostly aren’t revolutionary communists. But the iron law of union leadership is that the two largest pools of prospective leaders are leftist ideologues and crooks, so hard-left visions shape almost everything organized labor does. If policymakers take bad advice from activists on both left and right, Big Labor will once again join with Big Government to make work worse, turning the workplace into another blast furnace to forge woke conscripts for leftist ideology.

Organized labor’s leadership and especially staff cadres fundamentally view work through a class-conflict model derived from the writings of Karl Marx (an ideological characteristic called Marxian to distinguish it from explicitly revolutionary communist Marxists and Marxism), even if individual union officials don’t consider themselves Marxists or capital-C Communists. Behind rhetoric about “fairness” lies a core, Marxian view that if every worker knew his, her, or singular-their true interests as a member of a unified working class led by a properly politically educated vanguard, then they would be able to overcome the forces of capitalism and reactionism to bring forth the progressive, democratic socialist (emphasis on socialist, not democratic) future.

From those Marxian premises follows that American workers are deeply afflicted by false consciousness, as evidenced by their histories of voting for Republican political candidates or opposing radical progressive social policies. It further follows that those positions must be a consequence of one of two things: right-wing ideological indoctrination by the culture, the state, or the “nuclear family” (which some of organized labor’s activist allies have called to abolish); or employer interference and threats.

These nefarious right-wing influences must be countered by “organizing,” activation and drawing workers into a group led by the progressive vanguard, and by “political education,” propagandizing workers with Everything Leftism and drafting their resources into supporting Everything Leftist political campaigning. Once this is recognized, the through-line—and unmovable leftism—of organized labor’s workplace and employment policy takes shape:

• Forced dues, in addition to filling Big Labor’s fundamentally political war chest, removes a material impediment to workers recognizing their “proper” class interests and gives material power to the “political education” that will turn them from members of the proletariat class who remain recalcitrant in their false consciousness into woke conscripts.
• Prohibiting independent contracting, a form of work organization that makes workers more like capitalists, keeps the classes and their interests separate; limiting franchising and similar contracted-business-ownership arrangements functions similarly, keeping the numbers of proletarians high and capitalists low.
• Social justice unionism—noneconomic leftism carried out in the name of organized labor—overcomes the ideological indoctrination of small-c conservatism.
• Expand the strike power to the point it can coerce not just employers but also consumers; with this the leftist union organizer builds supposed “working class solidarity,” and in the fulness of time brings about the “general strike,” the revolution that ends capitalism and social reactionism itself.

The culmination of these policies to make the workplace red is sectoral bargaining, which structurally forces all workers in an industry under the control of union cadres in the name of class consciousness. It would be a decisive Trojan Horse, entering the American workplace blessed by certain figures on the right disillusioned by the consequences of contemporary American labor relations. Those right-side figures, like their left-wing Marxian comrades, mourn especially the lack of working-class solidarity, or what they might call class consciousness if they thought no reactionary capitalist kulaks and saboteurs might be listening.

In contrast, the Whig-Republican tradition in American political-economic thinking has focused on giving American workers the greatest potential to make their own way, with all workers as entrepreneurs of a sort, from the highest captains of industry to the lowest farm or factory laborer. It is easy to see why businesspeople and employers would favor this model; if all are entrepreneurs, and one has been one of the most successful, one has “built that” and has moral title to one’s property and lifestyle. But large numbers of American workers have also favored ownership of themselves and their consciences over class consciousness, especially class consciousness as interpreted by the post-1968 professional left.

To the Marxian and communitarian “postliberal” social-conservative alike, this is a problem. To both, class solidarity must prevail over self-ownership and individual interest. The workplace must be painted red by the power of vanguard policies. We will now study these issues in detail, focusing on where policy should go, where Big Labor would prefer it go in the name of class identity, and why it must not go there.

Forced dues against the right to work

As of 2026, twenty-six states — 25 of which voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — had a right-to-work law in force.

Federal labor law gives certified unions a powerful privilege: the authority to compel the employer to negotiate with the union as the sole representative for all the relevant employees. This is known as “exclusive monopoly bargaining.”

What happens to the workers who don’t want to be in the union? Originally, they were completely and utterly out of luck, forced by the “closed shop” to join the union before they were hired. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, legislation that prohibited this formal “closed shop.”

But, in part because that legislation needed to garner a bipartisan supermajority to overcome President Harry Truman’s veto, Taft-Hartley continued to allow exclusive monopoly bargaining and the so-called “union shop,” under which workers could be forced to join the union and pay dues upon being hired. This government-granted power is almost uniquely strong among nominally private organizations in this country. But it did come with a price: the “duty of fair representation” under which the union must provide representational services to all workers covered by a contract without differentiation—including differentiation by union membership status as long as the worker satisfied any contract clause requirements.

Later Supreme Court decisions narrowed the extent of the “union shop.” In the 1960s, the Court held that a union shop clause could not compel formal union membership and submission to union discipline, most importantly the power to levy occasionally substantial fines against members who fail to support industrial actions and other union activities. Instead, compulsory membership was limited to its “financial core”; namely, the payment of periodic dues and induction fees.

In 1988, the Court further restricted the “financial core” to a worker’s pro-rata share of expenses directly related to collective bargaining in a case titled Communications Workers of America v. Beck. From the case title comes the name of the right to object and receive partial exemption from forced dues: “Beck rights.”

But the 1947 law that ended the closed shop also created a state-level power to end the whole business about union shops and the financial core. The Taft-Hartley Act gave states the explicit authority to enact “right to work” laws, which prohibit conditioning employment on the payment of union fees at all. As of 2026, twenty-six states — 25 of which voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — had a right to work law in force.

Unions despise right to work laws and Beck-style restrictions on the uses of forced dues, for material and ideological reasons. The material reasons are quite easy to explain: a labor union given the power to levy de-facto taxes on workers has a guaranteed source of funds to pay its staff and leadership cadre and to fund its political and ideological-advocacy work. Organized labor justifies its power to tax by arguing that it must represent all workers in a workplace; supporters of the right to work counter that the compensation to a labor union for representing non-paying nonmembers comes in the form of the substantial power of monopoly representation, which excludes any other workers’ associations or independent representatives from the workplace.

For ideological justification, consider John Marshall’s maxim that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” The power to coerce fee payments is often indistinguishable from the power to compel membership. Beck rights often reduce mandatory dues by a small amount and Beck objectors usually must forswear any say over the contract under which they work. So with this immense power, unionist cadres can destroy whatever independence workers retain and the “political education” into class consciousness can begin.

For these reasons, repealing the provisions of federal law that authorize right to work laws and repealing right to work laws themselves are, and can be expected to remain indefinitely, a flagship political goal of labor unions.

Separating the classes

A capitalist class that includes large numbers of local people with names and faces rather than caricature-villain billionaires is harder for labor and community organizers to demonize.

To have class conflict, the working class must not only be activated but also separated from the capitalist-employer class. Following separation, demonization can begin. Following demonization, anything from expropriative taxation to the gulag can follow.

In Marx’s day and in union organizers’ faculty-lounge worldview, employment relations were and are simple. Decadent capitalist pigs, who produce nothing with their own labor, leech off the proletariat by extracting surplus value from control of the means of production. Meanwhile the proletariat scrapes a bare existence by selling its labor to capitalists for exploitation. It is a simple and tempting story with a class of villains for their heroes (union organizers) to fight.

But American employment relations and business-ownership regulation are not designed with simplifying organizing the working class into a single collective in mind. Thus, there are at least two major forms of business organization that blur the line between the “working class” and the “capitalist class,” and once again for both ideological and material reasons organized labor hates them both.

The first is franchising. Big companies in industries such as restaurants, dry-cleaning services, senior care, hardware retail, residential services, and child and senior care largely do not operate the local stores that carry their branding and retail their products. Instead, a local entrepreneur licenses the branding materials and other organizational structure from the big national chain.

This structure expands business ownership, and with it the capitalist class. The International Franchise Association, the representative association of franchised businesses, estimates that without franchising opportunities roughly one-third of franchised business owners would otherwise not be entrepreneurs. In simple small-d democratic math, a larger capitalist class is likelier to be more successful than a smaller one, and a capitalist class that includes large numbers of local people with names and faces rather than caricature-villain billionaires is harder for labor and community organizers to demonize.

There’s also a practical issue for organized labor. If McDonald’s Corporation (“big McDonald’s”) owned all the McDonald’s restaurants in the country, a union could force the workers to unionize by conducting a so-called “neutrality” agreement with big McDonald’s and winning one single organizing campaign. Unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are very good at badgering businesses, often with assistance from friendly politicians, into agreeing not to present workers with negative information about unionizing and not to test worker support for the union with a government-supervised secret-ballot election.

But big McDonald’s doesn’t own or operate all the McDonald’s restaurants in the country. Instead, a bunch of independent entrepreneurs (corporate data firm DataLane identified 1,641 as of July 2026) operate most of the restaurants. In order to unionize those workers, the SEIU would have to either secure some double-bank-shot agreement with big McDonald’s rather than a straightforward one (say, conditioning a franchise agreement on workers unionizing) or go franchise-by-franchise organizing workers restaurant by restaurant. That is far, far more difficult.

But the SEIU and its allies in government have at various times tried a short-cut: “joint employment” liability. Using regulatory powers, unions’ allies in Big Government simply deem the franchising brand jointly liable for its franchisees’ labor actions. Organizers can then threaten big McDonald’s with endless litigation unless it agrees to compel its franchisees to ease unionization.

As a side ideological benefit, under such an agreement the franchisee is much less of an independent entrepreneur than he was before—more a manager than an owner. And managers, as the rhetoric of leftist politicians such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sometimes lets slip, can be part of the “working class” since they sell their labor to another.

But even more offensive to union organizers is freelancing, also known as “gig work.” Formally known (alongside some other work arrangements) as “independent contracting,” workers in these arrangements are self-employed, selling their labor and production not to an employer but to a customer.

The union rhetoric holds that these workers are exploited by their customers or by brokerage firms, especially those that use internet-based application technology such as rideshare or grocery-delivery services. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that more than 80 percent of contractor-workers prefer their working arrangement to the union-preferred traditional employment that union-backed governments seek to mandate. And this population of workers is not small at all: in 2023, the BLS found that there were more than four million more workers on their sole or main jobs who were independent contractors (11.9 million) than private-sector union members (7.4 million).

The practical reason unions hate these arrangements is very similar to the reason they hate right to work. Under existing national labor law freelancers and gig workers cannot be forced to bargain collectively or pay union dues. The reason for this is obvious: with whom would such a worker, who is in business for himself, bargain?

Therefore, to compel workers to join up and pay up, unions seek legislation turning freelancers into purported employees of brokerage platforms such as Uber or DoorDash or of government-sponsored but nominally private, representative entities. The latter is a legal workaround that allows the collection of forced dues otherwise prohibited to government-worker unions by the Supreme Court.

Once the faux employer is designated, the “proper” class relations, with the oppressed proletariat in opposition to oppressor capitalists, are restored, and the union organizers’ salaries are paid. It’s the big win-win, for everyone except the workers conscripted into Big Labor’s woke army.

Marching together for the “Omnicause”

Everything Leftism, the ideology that underpins the “Omnicause” style of progressive activism and advocacy, holds that all left-of-center policies and identities are linked in compounding, intersectional dimensions. This is why seemingly every advocacy group on the left aligns with a left-wing “hive mind” on all other issues.

Conservatives who favor increasing the power of organized labor frequently assert something like what Marco Rubio, then a U.S. Senator, proposed in 2021:

It is no fault of Amazon’s workers if they feel the only option available to protect themselves against bad faith is to form a union. Today it might be workplace conditions, but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest “woke” human resources fad.

Summarized and translated: since Big Business is socially progressive and Big Labor is inherently opposed to Big Business, Big Labor can be a friend to conservatives and counter Big Business on behalf of workers who aren’t socially progressive.

But that model often collides violently with reality when tested because Big Labor itself is socially progressive—and its officer, organizer, and staff cadres are typically socially progressive out of conviction. Everything Leftism, the ideology that underpins the “Omnicause” style of progressive activism and advocacy, holds that all left-of-center policies and identities are linked in compounding, intersectional dimensions. This, even more than traditional coalitional back scratching, is why seemingly every advocacy group on the left aligns with a left-wing “hive mind” on all other issues. And for important institutional reasons, the degree of radicalism can be very high, with Marxism and its communist derivatives making too many appearances to be mere coincidence.

But socially progressive businessmen and corporate managers tend to be so for one of two reasons. The first is a sincere, personal belief in social liberalism. Sometimes this leads business leaders to aggressively promote social liberalism within their businesses, but that is not the usual motivation for business social liberalism. Instead, business interests often focus on loud social-liberal actions when the left appears to be in the ascendancy (as it did from Barack Obama’s election in 2008 through the mid-2020s, the era of The Emerging Democratic Majority) because business figures believe appeasing the social progressives will give them a tactical advantage against hard-core economic leftism when the left is in government.

And this can lead Big Business and Big Labor to collude on compelling workers to support (or at least not publicly oppose) “management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.” Take for example the case of two flight attendants terminated by Alaska Airlines after they questioned LGBT-interest legislation that the company endorsed during the Biden administration—a time of liberal-left ascendancy. Instead of protecting the workers as then-Sen. Rubio predicted, union leadership proved such ineffective defenders of their rights that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—not some right-wing outfit—allowed the workers to sue the union for allegedly enabling the woke reprisals. Union officials allegedly put in writing that they agreed with the airline that expressing political views opposed to those the company, union, and ruling presidency shared was a punishable offense and that maybe violence should be done to the workers they were obligated to represent, at least hypothetically.

This is the reality of American organized labor, summarized as “Big Labor is the Omnicause.” This “social justice unionism,” to use labor union activists’ term for unions’ left-of-center social agenda, is part and parcel of the Marxian “political education” that Big Labor imposes on the workplaces it dominates. It farms resources from workers to engage on public policies that have nothing to do with hours of work, wages, workplace safety, or protection from unjust dismissal, the classical offerings that unions make to recruit American workers. They promote Everything Leftism all the way down.

There’s an ideological reason for this: indoctrinating workers in broad-spectrum left-wing ideologies, especially those based in critical theory, prepares workers for their roles as Marxian woke conscripts in union officials’ political army. Julie Su, the Acting Secretary of Labor for the second half of the Biden administration, made this clear in an academic article early in her career. With a law professor, she wrote, “We build critical coalitions not only because of the enhanced potential for favorable outcomes, but also because the process of coalition-building itself sometimes changes each of us [emphasis added].”

If organized labor could engage in “coalition building” on a mass scale, it could recruit countless woke conscripts. And those woke conscripts could then change each of us in turn.

Striking against the people

The general strike, taken to its fulfillment, overthrows representative democracy and replaces it with a “people’s government”

American labor law codifies a substantial union power in the form of a “right to strike,” at least for private-sector workers. But because it is a creation of government legislation and not a natural right, the right to strike is strictly limited. Unions, for reasons both ideological and practical, would vitiate those limits and allow leftist agitators to hold the consumer economy hostage to their demands.

The first limit is the limit on striker reinstatement. Contrary to popular belief, a striker is not universally guaranteed his old job back at the conclusion of a strike, though he is protected from discharge during a properly authorized strike when no contractual provision barring strikes is in force. An employer is entitled to hire replacement workers to keep the workplace open during the strike; if the strikers’ aims are deemed economic by regulators (rather than deemed to be in protest of an employer violation of labor law), the replacement workers may be kept on even if that means some strikers cannot be reinstated.

Unions naturally want that power to go away because it makes replacing workers and keeping businesses (or, in the case of a government worker strike like the PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, essential government operations) open nearly impossible. In their minds, this would force the capitalist pigs to kneel to the united power of the working class. In practice, this power is often as not used for extortion of forms legal and illegal. For the illegal, see the career of the man the Teamsters Union still calls “a worker’s hero,” Jimmy Hoffa; for a more recent example of the legal, consider longshoremen’s union president Harold Daggett claiming in 2024 that he could “cripple” the U.S. economy if he and his members were not paid off.

But there is another power that Big Labor needs before it can make Marxism great again: The power to strike for any objective whatsoever. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts, Congress’s mid-20th-century responses to Big Labor’s extortions both legal and illegal, placed limits on unions’ strike targets. Essentially—the technical law is complicated—anyone who strikes to coerce actions by an employer except one’s own employer is not likely to be protected against penalties under law or by that employer. Or as the National Labor Relations Board puts it: “It is unlawful for a union to coerce a neutral employer to force it to cease doing business with a primary employer.”

This restriction effectively prohibits a Marxist—a revolutionary communist, not merely leftist intellectual—dream shared by organized labor: The “general strike.” In a general strike, the entire body of the organized working class lays down its tools. And if a little “mostly peaceful” protesting occurs and maybe some things get broken, well what do you expect from the Oppressed?

The goal of a general strike is not to make an employer or business change his behavior. Instead, it is to use social disorder to force the bourgeois government to yield to the properly organized, educated, and led working class—a Summer of Love where the rioters win. The political end of the general strike —the Omnicause made manifest—is precisely the point. There is no separation of the economic and the non-economic; there is no division between the demands “germane to collective bargaining” or not. The general strike, taken to its fulfillment, overthrows representative democracy and replaces it with a “people’s government” — “people’s,” as in the People’s Republics of the 20th century.

The “general strike” cannot be effective if Americans act like they normally act when faced with coercive unionism: by directing their outrage at the perpetrators of disruptions to economic, social, and political life. For this reason, union leaders frequently hesitate to call upon it, at least until the magical day when they have instilled sufficient Marxist consciousness to overcome decades of American practice. The United Auto Workers expects that day to come on May 1, 2028.

The Trojan Horse to the general strike

Sectoral bargaining would instill Marxian class dynamics, economic sclerosis, and leftist political education in the American workplace [. . .] This is not a policy with a conservative heart.

Organizing the general strike — the mass movement to replace representative democracy with mob rule from the properly organized street — in America’s current labor-relations regime is extremely difficult and would remain so even if the legal proscriptions Congress has wisely placed on them were lifted. Unions are largely organized and workers interact with them at the shop floor level.

But what if the nexus of union organizing and union activities could be moved from the firm to entire blocs of the economy, if not the entire working class itself? Marxian class division would come more naturally, and kulaks and saboteurs who resist their proper political education could be fully isolated rather than seek work elsewhere. Europe—with its often explicitly Communist Party-affiliated or Communist-allied labor movements—already does this through a system known as “sectoral bargaining.” In this system, labor unions negotiate contracts covering all workers in an industry with cartels of employers, and workers who do not want their workplaces administered by agreements made with ideologically motivated union commissars are left with little option; even leaving their professions leaves them the choice of other workplaces administered under such agreements.

And some supposed “conservatives” think this is a model worth importing, as the Trojans imported the Wooden Horse.

In France, while a smaller proportion of the workforce is union members than in America, nearly all jobs are subject to union-negotiated sectoral contracts. The result is seen periodically throughout the country: major “general strikes,” bordering on riots, endorsed by the country’s labor union federations (at least one of which, the Confédération Générale du Travail or CGT, has historically aligned with the Communist Party), seeking political ends including the fall of elected governments.

European law has one tepid concession for union voluntarism: typically, workers are not obligated to provide financial support to the union commissars in the way that America’s non-right-to-work states compel financial support for agency-shop unions. Since the United States does not accede to the European Court of Human Rights, legal precedents under which are generally taken to foreclose “closed shop” agreements, there is no reason to believe that such a concession to dissenting workers would be permitted under an imported sectoral regime.

And some conservatives, like the Trojans hearing the priest Laocoon warning of Greeks bearing gifts, ignore these precedents. Those like the staff of the Hewlett Foundation-funded American Compass have argued that sectoral bargaining could serve as an alternative to the welfare state and as a method to promote mutually beneficial labor-management deviation from top-down federal labor mandates. But there is no reason to believe that this would occur, and much reason to believe that a sectoral bargaining regime would promote the Marxian remaking of the American people that New Left activists in organized labor have sought since the late 1960s.

Sectoral bargaining explicitly opposes two traditional conservative goals and likely fails to advance a third. Sectoral bargaining is explicitly designed to end the right of ultimate exit from a union-controlled working relationship in the name of collective “solidarity” (in practice, an elective dictatorship of 50 percent plus one). The experience of countries that employ sectoral bargaining like France suggests that, far from promoting labor peace, sectoral bargaining promotes disruptive “general” and explicitly political strike actions that disrupt the economy and civil society. The practice’s effect on union corruption is not clear; American-style enterprise bargaining seems to induce corrupt actors into labor-management relations, but it is hard to see how expanding union power will discourage corrupt actors from jumping into labor-related rackets.

Organized labor in the United States serves as a functional adjunct to the Democratic Party and the left-wing advocacy movement. Everyone who pays attention knows this, and the extensive ties of operative networks and funding demonstrate the truth of this axiom. Thus, expanding the power of union commissars by adopting sectoral bargaining would empower the adversaries of all forms of conservatism.

Expanding union power through sectoral bargaining, whether or not that comes with bigger union budgets filled with forced dues, will further empower these left-wing ideologues. It is these ideologues, not the union membership at large and certainly not a minority (however substantial) of that membership, who decide how unions operate. Some have argued that organized labor can be a counter to the coordination of “woke capitalism” and the elite-class formal institutions. If anything, organized labor is a vehicle to increase the coordination of the elite formal institutions, and through environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) pension-fund investment strategies, organized labor is a perpetrator, not an opponent, of woke capitalism.

Sectoral bargaining would instill Marxian class dynamics, economic sclerosis, and leftist political education in the American workplace—potentially, because the details of how sectoral bargaining in America is supposed to work are never laid out, by levying a new, private tax on up to 94 percent of the private-sector workforce. This is not a policy with a conservative heart.

The new unionists

. . . the most prominent unions in today’s “labor movement” might be the teachers unions under Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle, both of which consist largely of college-educated women who work for the government.

American organized labor, after more than a half-century of Long Decline, is the social institution of the future, and always will be. It is an annual ritual for the metropolitan press, ideologically sympathetic to Big Labor and often unionized itself, to proclaim that ‘this is the year’ that unions have finally broken the Long Decline and restored their centrality to American economic and social life.

That has largely proven false. Union density (the proportion of the workforce that is unionized) fell from 10.8 percent in 2020 to 10.0 percent in 2025.

But there is one way in which you cannot fault the leftist cosplayers in newsrooms for believing, like fans of the New York Jets, that this really will be ‘their year.’ The biggest labor issue of all is the changed, and still changing, composition of Big Labor’s membership. And the people the metropolitan press live and work around—journalists, government workers, and liberal nonprofit staffs—are represented well in that changed composition.

The cultural left-tint of new unionists goes beyond journalists. The United Auto Workers might be called the “united non-auto non-workers” after years of organizing among politically radical highly educated graduate students and years of retirements among its old membership among actual automotive-industry workers. Left-wing groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Greenpeace have endorsed Starbucks Workers United, the SEIU-backed campaign to organize workers at the coffee chain. Radical journalists at Conde Nast became a brief cause celebre. And the most prominent unions in today’s “labor movement” might be the teachers unions under Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle, both of which consist largely of college-educated women who work for the government.

There is a wide dissention among American workers from the labor movement, which today represents a highly ideological, largely (over-) educated, and largely government-worker-biased faction of the actual body of American workers. And that is granting that dubious classes of union members, like Harvard graduate students, count as “workers.” It makes sense for Marxian and critical-theory influenced activists on the left, who have spent 60 years wondering why the American worker would not answer his true calling to class solidarity, to seek to force those saboteurs and wreckers to get in line and into the streets. Why ostensible conservatives would agree with this is another matter entirely.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/big-labors-bid-for-a-red-workplace/