I have been skeptical of the Hewlett Foundation’s investments in right-of-center groups suspiciously interested in advancing historically left-of-center policy, at times wondering if these groups are simply paid factotums in Hewlett’s efforts to divide and rule the right. Leading the line for the leftism-from-the-right effort is American Compass, the think tank richly rewarded by Hewlett for its efforts to torpedo the Taft-Hartley Consensus that has guided conservative labor-relations policy since 1945 and helped keep American economic policy distinct from Europe’s socialist sclerosis.
Regardless of how many leftists helped American Compass rise to influence, it has found an audience among a new prospective post-Trump-era Republican Establishment. So, it is worth treating the group’s ideas on labor relations with seriousness regardless of whence they derived. And they fail for a simple reason: Rather than provide the social-formation roles that Catholic intellectuals and national conservatives imagine for them, American labor unions would rather turn people into dinosaurs.
Wait, what?
Well, American labor unions would rather turn people into dinosaurs metaphorically. There is a panel from a comic book featuring Spider-Man that has become something of a meme:
Upon seeing the villain’s evil plan to turn all humanity into dinosaurs, Spider-Man asks with absolute incredulity why the villain does not use his powers to rewrite DNA for good. The villain simply does not care; he rejects the hero’s question because he wants “to turn people into dinosaurs” in keeping with his evil plan.
Big Labor’s behavior when asked by the would-be Spider-Men of the self-described New Right to lay off the partisan leftist ideology for the good of the social position of the working class might as well be modeled on the pterodactyl-ian villain of the meme. The point of a contemporary labor union is not to “furnish the best and most suitable means for attaining what is aimed at, that is to say, for helping each individual member to better his condition to the utmost in body, soul, and property”; it is to carry on the Everything Leftist Omnicause. It is to turn workers into soldiers of whatever institutional progressivism’s Eye of Sauron demands they fight for.
Pope fights
The quotation in archaic language in the previous paragraph is an 1891 declaration from Rerum Novarum, a Roman Catholic encyclical (a letter from the pope to bishops for instructional purposes) issued by Pope Leo XIII (not to be confused with the current Pope, Leo XIV).
Trade unionists, and especially their friends on the American Compass-aligned ostensible right, love the document. In a policy brief by Baron Public Affairs on the rising labor-unionist factions on the political right, the letter makes an appearance involving an event held by Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien and a speech given by then-U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), an American Compass favorite now elevated to a post in the Trump administration.
But the document isn’t what it’s often portrayed as, namely a radical endorsement of trade unionism and near-socialism under the color of divine authority. Notably, it is emphatic in its affirmation of the right to private property. This was radical, but from a conservative direction in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe, in which state ownership of the means of production was a live political movement. The document declared: “The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether.”
The document is first and foremost a product of its time, the developing Industrial Revolution, when European and American business law had not yet come to terms with how to handle massive increases in the number of industrial workers and declines in farmers. In keeping with Christian views of the dignity of work and workers, the late Pope Leo issued calls for employers to uphold dignified employment practices that today are largely mandated by law.
For example, he condemned excessive mandatory work hours (then typically 10-hour days, often six days per week), which are now regulated by the federal overtime law. (And those on salary expected to work more than the standard 40 hours per week are supposed to be compensated appropriately.) The Pope condemned child labor, also banned (or at least strictly regulated) under today’s laws.
Qualified praise
But the late Pope Leo did praise labor organizations, at least insofar as they carried out Christian purposes (remember, Rerum Novarum is a Catholic religious document, not an American public-policy brief). In paragraph 49, Leo asserts:
The most important of all are workingmen’s unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers’ guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age – an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life.
There is obviously much for O’Brien and his Republican stooges (notably Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)) to like here but note the paragraph does not end Leo’s written sermon. In paragraph 54, Leo takes note of a potential problem workingmen’s associations might present [emphasis added]:
Now, there is a good deal of evidence in favor of the opinion that many of these societies are in the hands of secret leaders, and are managed on principles ill – according with Christianity and the public well-being; and that they do their utmost to get within their grasp the whole field of labor, and force working men either to join them or to starve. Under these circumstances Christian working men must do one of two things: either join associations in which their religion will be exposed to peril, or form associations among themselves and unite their forces so as to shake off courageously the yoke of so unrighteous and intolerable an oppression. No one who does not wish to expose man’s chief good to extreme risk will for a moment hesitate to say that the second alternative should by all means be adopted.
It is clear that if it had its way, American labor unions would “do their utmost to get within their grasp the whole field of labor, and force working men either to join them or to starve.” From the Wagner Act to the proposed PRO Act, Big Labor has sought to compel the payment of union dues by as many workers as it can force to pay them, with past union bosses sometimes resorting to Mob tactics to get their way.
Ending with the dinosaurs
In recent years we have seen the AFL-CIO and its member unions operate as a functional adjunct to the Democratic Party and the woke Omnicause and the federation itself share outright Marxist propaganda encouraging workers to “seize the means of production.”
Here arrives American labor and its affinity for metaphorical dinosaur transformations. The American union movement, as demonstrated by its majority faction in the AFL-CIO federation, could focus on “furnish[ing] the best and most suitable means for attaining what is aimed at, that is to say, for helping each individual member to better his condition to the utmost in body, soul, and property.” But that’s not what it does.
And on matters especially dear to social conservatives (Catholics among them), Big Labor chooses Everything Leftism over the late Leo. Radical transgender activism gets the union label over the material benefit of at least one prominent union member. Union staffers freely rotate between union work and abortion-activist work. Union coffers fund campaigns to put Planned Parenthood propaganda in elementary schools. And that’s without even considering social issues where the Compass followers and the Roman Church may be at odds with each other, such as immigration, where labor has chosen to follow its political allies down the path to Everything Leftism.
As the Baron Public Affairs report (available for download here) makes clear, even the Compass followers acknowledge that union political and social-policy activities are a sticky wicket when trying to convince the right to adopt their left-wing economic program. Until the union movement decides that working for workers is more important than the left-wing social agendas union leaders seem to prioritize, unions’ positions should foreclose conservatives from following American Compass’s Hewlett-funded path.
