The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: Sectoral Bargaining

The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining (full series)
Sectoral Bargaining | The Practical Case | The Political and Advocacy Case
The Ideological Case | The Economic Case

Leftists and their fellow travelers on the ostensible right like Oren Cass and his American Compass think tank look to Europe for their ideal of labor relations: “sectoral bargaining”—the negotiation of labor contracts for entire industries and all workers, not for single firms or union members, whether they want union representation or not. For liberals like U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), the ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, support for such socialist policies makes perfect sense. Organized labor is closely aligned with all factions of the Everything Leftist progressive movement, and sectoral bargaining would empower them to control entire sectors of the economy for both socialist-economic and woke-liberal ends.

For the conservatives, there are at least four cases to be made against adopting sectoral bargaining. The first case relies on the “Taft-Hartley Consensus” of ends to which conservatives have guided their labor-relations policies since the law passed in 1947; sectoral bargaining would make them worse. The second case is that sectoral bargaining would empower already-existing labor organizations, the political and policy adversaries of all conservatism. The third is an ideological case focused on the historical Republican and conservative approach to working people and how it conflicts with the approach used by organized labor. The fourth case is economic: If the European experience is any indication of how its labor organizing model would transfer to the United States, it is a recipe for even more consistent stagnation, not economic recovery.

Sectoral Bargaining

The worst proposal for revising American labor-relations is something called “sectoral bargaining.” Most concerningly, prominent supposedly conservative (rather than merely moderate-Republican) figures have expressed openness to moving toward a sectoral-bargaining system.

As hard as it is to believe, sectoral bargaining would be worse in many ways than the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which is little more than an attempt to increase unions’ coercive powers to force workers to pay them their hard-earned American dollars. But even the PRO Act’s offense against voluntarism in union membership and participation contains at least one (infinitesimally small) form of voluntarism: A worker unable to work under unionized conditions can quit and find a new, non-union job.

Sectoral bargaining is designed to prevent this “right of exit” for workers who do not want their work conditions subject to the whims of a Big Labor ideological commissar—indeed, that is precisely the point of sectoral bargaining. Under the present American system (and the system that would be maintained by the PRO Act), workers negotiate with their bosses at the firm or individual-shop level (known in the trade as “enterprise bargaining”). If a union is established, that union has the power to insist (and in practice unions always exercise the power to insist) that a single contract apply to all the workers in the relevant work situation. Sectoral bargaining changes that: It empowers a union or group of unions to negotiate contracts that apply to all workers in an industry with many employers simultaneously. If a worker does not favor the contract negotiated, too bad; he would have to change professions, not merely employers, to get out from under union boss power. And in all likelihood, even that would not work. 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.

There is a warning in the desire for some conservatives and supposed conservatives for social solidarity enforced by organized labor. Today, and (one presumes) in a future sectoral bargaining regime, collective solidarity in worker organizing is a simple elective dictatorship of 50 percent plus one, sometimes under a de facto regime of one worker, one vote, one time.

I make four separate but interrelated cases against sectoral bargaining. The first is practical, based on the impact of sectoral bargaining on three goals I call the “Taft-Hartley Consensus” of conservative labor-relations policy:

• Voluntarism in union membership and participation,
• Government scrutiny of union operations as the price of their extensive government-secured powers, and
• Protection of the economy and society from fallout from other people’s workplace disputes.

Compared with the present, sectoral bargaining would unequivocally make union participation less voluntary and would expose the country to French-style strike waves, including strikes and “general strikes” for non-workplace-related reasons.

The second case traces unions’ political activities and alignment with the Democratic Party and ideological Everything Leftism. Advocates for sectoral bargaining, whether on the left or the ostensible right, explicitly declare that the purpose of moving to a sectoral bargaining system is to empower organized labor. Those on the right should be extremely averse to doing so, if only because organized labor is a pillar of the Left. Sectoral bargaining would strengthen openly socialist, anti-anti-Hamas, radical environmentalist, ESG-aligned, socially progressive-vanguardist, pro–gun control, and generally Everything Leftist elements in American life. Conservatives should not go along with them.

The third presents an ideological case, demonstrating how the traditional American Republican and conservative approach to workers as workers deviates from that of union organizers and the leftist community organizers who are in many cases the exact same people. Likewise, some have argued that organized labor can be a counter to the compulsory social coordination of “woke capitalism” and the WEIRD Elite formal institutions. But that is not the case; if anything, labor organizing is a vehicle to increase the coordination of the WEIRD Elite formal institutions, and through ESG investing of pension funds organized labor is a perpetrator of woke capitalism, not an opponent.

Finally, one would be remiss not to at least consider the economic case against adopting sectoral bargaining, which is strong. By whatever standard one measures economic success, no evidence shows that France or the other sectoral-bargaining countries of Continental Western Europe have had greater economic success than the United States. There is no reason to believe that sectoral bargaining would propel the United States or communities within the United States to higher economic heights. More likely, the stagnation would continue, much as France experienced after the end of its “Thirty Glorious Years.” Neither socialist left nor conservative right nor technocratic center have been able to resuscitate the French economy, empowering political extremists on the neo-Communist left and populist right.

American Compass has promoted sectoral bargaining as an alternative to the welfare state and as a method to promote mutually beneficial labor-management deviation from top-down federal labor mandates. The cases presented here show those expressed hopes to be misguided at best.

In the next installment, sectoral bargaining threatens the three pillars of the Taft-Hartley consensus.