In June, we took a quick survey of recent union-related stories through the lens of the “Taft-Hartley Consensus” that has defined conservatives’ relationship with labor relations for nearly eight decades. The policy consensus affirms voluntarism in union membership and participation, demands government scrutiny of labor unions’ operations as the cost of government-granted powers, and seeks to protect the public from the consequences of labor disputes. Let’s go again, and make this a periodic survey.
Forced to fund the radical left
It will be no surprise to readers of Capital Research Center’s website that organized labor, shot through as it is with Everything Leftist ideology, is backing Palestinian nationalism and demanding Israel end its war on Hamas. For graduate students at Stanford University, this is causing direct and immediate crises of conscience. Doctoral student Jon Hartley writes:
Graduate students first formed a union at Stanford in July 2023, and the school signed a collective-bargaining agreement in October 2024 to avoid a strike. The agreement mandates financial support of the union as a condition of employment at the university. The national union supports progressive causes such as abortion, public subsidies for “gender-affirming care,” and defunding the police.
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the question of whether graduate students are properly considered “employees” subject to forced monopoly unionization under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is hotly contested. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Obama administration only ruled that the NLRA applied to certain graduate student workers in 2016, and challenges to that ruling have been brought in the years since.
But for now, the NLRB considers graduate students subject to forced unionism. So then enters California—Big Labor’s Golden State—and its absence of a right-to-work law, thanks to a failed ballot referendum in President Dwight Eisenhower’s “six-year itch” election. It is important to remember that collective bargaining in the United States is a dictatorship (an arguably elective dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless) — if the union says jump, the members must respond, “How high?”
So, if the union decides that it will spend member money on “abortion, public subsidies for ‘gender-affirming care,’ and defunding the police,” members fund it—and since California allows forced dues, so must dissenters like Hartley if they wish to keep their jobs. Those situated similar to Hartley can exercise a “Beck objection.” (Beck is a technical legal avenue to avoid specifically paying for specific non-representational expenses.) Workers may also attempt, as Hartley is, to invoke a religious objection to supporting the union at all and pay equivalent money to another organization.
However, the “Beck objection” requires silencing oneself in the workplace and paying for the privilege of being silenced. And the religious objection is, according to Hartley, recognized at the union’s discretion—and no points for guessing whether his was recognized as of his op-ed’s writing.
Countering racial discrimination in Minneapolis
In 2022, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers decided to put its arguably-elective dictatorship over Minneapolis teachers into the service of Everything Leftist “social justice unionism.” As part of its contract negotiations that ended a three-week strike, the union and the school district included a contract provision so mind-boggling in its effrontery against what most Americans consider fair treatment that surely it must be illegal. The contract specified that teachers from an “underrepresented population” (read: racial or ethnic minority) should be passed over when “excessing” (laying off) teachers.
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal advocacy group, sued in Minnesota state court on behalf of a taxpayer who objected to the provision. In early January 2025, the state Supreme Court threw the suit out on standing grounds.
But the new federal authorities staffing the second Trump administration have expressed substantial interest in countering unlawful racial discrimination enacted under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and other leftist shibboleths. So Judicial Watch is petitioning the Education Department and Labor Department (with the Justice Department presumably next in the queue), urging formal investigations of Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers for their racially discriminatory contract provisions.
The Education Department, Labor Department, or Justice Department should take Judicial Watch up on its request for an investigation. For too long, union status or leftist activism has been used as a “get out of laws free” card. Unions have a judiciary-created carve-out from some anti-intimidation laws, which some members of Congress are seeking to remove. Unions should not have special exemptions from laws of general applicability, no matter how purely Everything Leftist their motives.
At least Randi can’t strike over this
The Taft-Hartley Act disarms “The Left’s Ultimate Weapon,” the secondary boycott, at least for organized labor. A previous Capital Research Center report explained the secondary boycott:
A “secondary” boycott differs from a traditional boycott in which entity suffers the activists’ pain. A traditional “primary” boycott (or primary strike, primary picketing, or other primary action) targets the actor whose behavior the activist wishes to change. A labor union might boycott a business with which it has a contract dispute. A civil rights group might boycott a business that provides substandard service to ethnic minorities. […]
Secondary boycotts have different direct targets. The activist targets a victim with the intent of changing the behavior of a third party with whom the victim engages, usually in a commercial transaction. […] A liberal pressure group might target the advertisers of a conservative talk show to get them to withdraw sponsorships and force the network to cancel the show.
Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers, along with the extraordinarily controversial Stacey Davis Gates of the extraordinarily controversial Chicago Teachers Union (also known as AFT Local 1) recently demonstrated why the prohibition on labor union secondary boycotts is essential to the good order and functioning of society.
Target, perhaps noticing that the second Trump administration intends to enforce the letter of civil rights laws rather than the Everything Leftist emanations and penumbras that previous administrations have enforced, dropped its diversity, equity, and inclusion programming earlier this year. AFT and CTU aren’t having that, and have demanded boycotts of the retailer until Target restores DEI programs and contributes huge sums of money to Black-owned businesses and historically Black educational institutions.
The Taft-Hartley Act does not prohibit unions or union officials from calling for public boycotts of third-party businesses in this manner. It does forbid, at least in the private sector (for complicated legal reasons I won’t go into here), going on strike to force their employers to join the boycott.
And thank Senator Robert Alfonso Taft (R-OH) and Representative Fred Hartley (R-NJ) for that. After the extensive and effectively unopposed-by-political-leadership shutdown of schools for a year ostensibly because of COVID (but actually for an extensive Everything Leftist list of radical policy demands ranging from defunding the police to public benefits for illegal immigrants), the consequences of enabling unions to shut down the economy to coerce the public to surrender to progressive radicalism are obvious.
