The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Practical Case

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

The Practical Case

In 1947, one of the most important pieces of conservative domestic legislation of the 20th century was enacted: The Taft-Hartley Act. Best known for explicitly authorizing state-level “right to work” laws that prevent forcing non-union-members in a unionized workplace to pay union fees, the law made numerous reforms to the Wagner Act framework of labor relations that the New Deal Democrats had enacted at Big Labor’s urging in the 1930s. These reforms were practical, pragmatic, and moderate responses passed by a bipartisan congressional supermajority to address real problems that had developed in the Wagner Act framework.

Those reforms advanced three pillars that would come to define the Republican and conservative approaches to labor-management relations for the next eight decades. Conservatives and Republicans would promote policies that ensured union membership and political participation would be voluntary, most notably through state-level right-to-work laws. They would subject union operations to government scrutiny as the price of unions’ being given extensive powers by the government. And finally, union activities would be regulated to protect the public from extensive disruptions from strikes and other industrial actions like those the public endured in 1945 and 1946 before the law’s passage.

Sectoral bargaining explicitly opposes two of the conservative Taft-Hartley goals and likely fails to advance the 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 (most notably and stereotypically, France) suggests that, far from promoting labor peace, sectoral bargaining promotes disruptive “general” and explicitly political strike actions. 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.

Voluntary unionism is a longstanding and powerful tradition in American industrial life. Long ago labor leaders like Samuel Gompers professed it. The author of the Wagner Act had to insist that enforcing compulsory union membership was not his intention, even if it was a near-certain de facto outcome of his legislation. After shepherding Taft-Hartley to passage, then-Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-OH) saw off a union-funded challenger in his re-election campaign by 15 points. When Big Labor–backed Democratic supermajorities tried to override all state-level right-to-work laws in the 1960s, Republicans held the line with a filibuster that stopped the legislation. As of 2024, 26 states have private-sector right-to-work laws in force, and the U.S. Supreme Court protected all government workers’ rights not to fund union activities in its Janus v. AFSCME decision.

Sectoral bargaining would ditch all of that, which makes sense for an Everything Leftist who wants union commissars negotiating for every worker, but it makes much less sense for a supposed conservative. Instead of contracts giving unions a monopoly over a single plant’s workers or a single firm’s workers, sectoral bargaining would mandate government-backed contracts that apply to everyone, whether they want union “representation” or not. Sectoral bargaining is the exact opposite of voluntary unionism, and if these contracts can require forced dues, as some like Ranking Member of the House Education and Workforce Committee Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) have at least strongly implied­, it sets worker freedom back worse than the Wagner Act did or the PRO Act would.

The effect of sectoral bargaining on union corruption would be unclear. Scholars of union corruption have blamed enterprise bargaining combined with union monopoly representation for America’s unusually high levels of labor racketeering. There is truth to this, but it is also not the case that American unions involved in industries with more-sectoral-style approaches are “cleaner.” The New York City garment industry, which was exempted from various Taft-Hartley regulations on union conduct, was believed by the federal government to have been Mob influenced as recently as the 1990s. More recently, the United Auto Workers, which conducts a sort of pseudo-sectoral bargaining with the unionized Detroit Three automakers by “patterning” its contracts, was forced into a regime change after the largest union corruption scandal of the 21st century. Putting more power in the hands of America’s long-standing class of union officials, who are known for having their hands in the cookie jar, certainly is not an obvious approach to reducing or surveilling corruption in organized labor.

The final element of the Taft-Hartley approach is another that sectoral bargaining makes worse: protecting the economy from strikes and other industrial actions. This should be obvious to anyone who promotes sectoral bargaining, because disruptive national strikes are common in European countries (e.g., France) that authorize sectoral bargaining. Unions in these countries also back broader leftist causes with strikes. French unions frequently call national “general strikes” for political reasons, including an annual “General Feminist Strike” each March. These frequent mass disruptions enabled by sectoral bargaining have helped France earn its reputation for economic sclerosis and public disruptions, the exact opposite of the intention of conservative labor-relations policymakers since the 1940s.

In the next installment, organized labor in the United States serves as a functional adjunct to the Democratic Party and the left-wing advocacy movement.