The nominal conservatives at American Compass have argued that Big Labor has a “conservative heart,” and that strengthening unions would allow social policy to pursue the “common good,” in the manner proposed by Pope Leo XIII more than a century ago. Noting the power of woke activists in the business world, some conservatives have similarly speculated that perhaps labor unions could provide a counter-balance to what then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) called “management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”
But while it’s tempting to buy what American Compass is selling, it’s more compelling to suspect that they are just doing the bidding of their principal leftist funder, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Big Labor has already showed what its view of the “common good” is, and it looks not conservative at all.
Bargaining for the Common Good
As an example, there is “Bargaining for the Common Good,” a project of the left-wing-to-radical-left Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE).
ACRE campaigns on left-wing economic policies such as “rent cancellation,” student debt forgiveness, and banning mergers. It also has campaigned for social-media censorship to control allegedly racist content. The Bargaining for the Common Good website adds two more allied groups, both labor centers within major universities.
The “advisory committee” of activists affiliated with Bargaining for the Common Good is representative of Big Labor as it is, not as one presumes American Compass (if not its Hewlett funders) wish it would be. Sitting on the committee are representatives of the AFL-CIO labor federation and the Communications Workers of America; local union officials from the SEIU, AFSCME, AFT, and NEA; and activists with various labor-union-related advocacy groups.
Two members of the advisory committee are the leaders of America’s two worst teachers’ unions: Cecily Myart-Cruz of United Teachers Los Angeles (infamous for telling a journalist, on the record: “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival.”) and Stacy Davis Gates of the Chicago Teachers Union (which has been the subject of not just one but two InfluenceWatch Podcasts for its terribleness).
Bargaining for the Common Good’s “Concrete Examples of Bargaining for the Common Good” contains dozens of examples of ridiculous union demands for non-economic leftist dreck. Defunding or refusing to cooperate with the police is repeatedly demanded. Unions demand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings and mandatory diversity training. Resistance to immigration enforcement is also demanded.
But all that is pretty much par for the course with contemporary Big Labor. Other demands are even more outlandish, and show just how Everything Leftist the Big Labor vision of “common good” is.
The group helpfully lays out model negotiating demands that various unions have made. They are—no prizes for guessing—totally aligned with Everything Leftism on issue areas including race, education, immigration, housing, “climate justice,” finance, “public services,” and privatization.
Other Big Labor demands
Bargaining for the Common Good’s agenda isn’t theoretical. It is put into practice by government worker unions.
In Maryland, the Prince George’s County Education Association (PGCEA) demanded that the Washington, D.C. suburb “endorse and encourage teachers and students to participate in the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools.” It affirmed, “The thirteen guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement highlighted during this week are a means of challenging the insidious legacy of institutionalized racism and oppression that has plagued the United States since its founding.” The “thirteen guiding principles” are firmly leftist, and direct “fostering a queer‐affirming network,” “embracing and making space for trans siblings,” and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” among other acts.
SEIU Florida Public Services Union (Local 8) is active in numerous Florida localities. Despite the relative hostility of its state to leftism and government worker unionism, Local 8 demands the socialist workers’ paradise. It has demanded “that the city and state stop providing subsidies to companies that rely on fossil fuels as a core component of their business model,” which is just the classic watermelon-environmentalism that most American unions endorse.
More ironic is this Local 8 demand: “We demand that the municipality creates its own micro-currency, which can only be spent at local businesses. This currency would comprise a small portion of every public employee’s paycheck.” Yes, you read that right: Big Labor here endorses payment in scrip, though it stops just shy of endorsing the “company store.”
SEIU Local 26 in Minnesota demanded that US Bank “restart remittances to Somalia,” which is ironic given recent revelations of massive frauds against the Minnesota government by members of the state’s large Somali diaspora.
Health Professionals and Allied Employees, a health-care-sector union in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, demanded that its hospital employer “not sell any of its patients’ medical debt to third-party debt-collection agencies.”
American Federation of Teachers Local 59 in Minneapolis demanded its district employer “no longer purchase products made by companies owned by Koch Industries,” an act of naked partisan discrimination by a municipality.
This list is not exhaustive.
Lessons
The repeated lesson of these examinations of unions’ behavior is clear: Big Labor does not want to be a (small-c) conservative countervailing force against the wild social whims of the professional managerial class in business and government. Instead, as Biden administration Acting Labor Secretary and now-Century Foundation scholar Julie Su wrote long before becoming a de facto labor union organizer inside the federal government, “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.”
The critical race theory, the radical environmentalism, the Marxist socialism: That is the point of labor organizing “for the common good.” Conservatives should recognize that (as they once did), because Big Labor’s supposedly “conservative heart” isn’t beating.
