The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Political and Advocacy Case

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

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The Political and Advocacy Case

Organized labor in the United States serves as a functional adjunct to the Democratic Party and the left-wing advocacy movement. Everyone who pays attention knows this, and the extensive ties of operative networks and funding demonstrate the truth of this axiom. Thus, expanding the power of union commissars by adopting sectoral bargaining would empower the adversaries of all forms of conservatism, but some who claim to be conservatives endorse it anyway. It is therefore worth exploring exactly how involved organized labor is in the Everything Leftism movement.

Unions’ best-known political advocacy is their contributions to political candidates at the state, federal, and local levels. These contributions are unsurprisingly highly partisan Democratic, and at the local level often support more radical candidates than “normal” Democratic machine politicians. Likewise, unions’ contributions to outside political spending groups at the federal level are also highly partisan Democratic.

In OpenSecrets’s reckoning of the “Top Organization Contributors” for the 2022 federal election cycle, seven labor unions made the top 51 groups. All seven contributed more than $19.5 million, and each made more than 98 percent of its tracked political contributions to Democratic politicians and liberal political committees. Four largely government worker unions—the NEA, AFT, SEIU, and AFSCME—unsurprisingly exceeded 99.9 percent in contributions to Democrats and liberal groups. But the three largely private-sector unions—the Carpenters and Joiners, the Laborers, and the hotel and casino workers’ Unite Here—also gave overwhelmingly to Democrats and leftist groups. And that does not include spending associated with Amalgamated Bank, an SEIU-tied financial institution that also made the top 51 and contributed almost exclusively—OpenSecrets rounded the percentage split to 100 percent—to Democrats and liberals.

Spending at the state level is not quite so partisan, but it is highly partisan nonetheless. The FollowtheMoney database on state and local political spending splits the roughly $500 million in contributions from the organized labor industry to major-party candidates and committees at 88 percent Democratic to 12 percent Republican for the 2020 through 2024 election years (catalogued through July 2024). Top major-party recipients over that period included three Illinois Democratic state legislators, most prominently disgraced former state House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago); Democratic governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Kathy Hochul of New York; and unsuccessful 2021 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Not included in the two-party figures is Brandon Johnson (D), the Chicago mayor, former Chicago Teachers Union lobbyist, and recipient of roughly $11.4 million in labor contributions. FollowtheMoney classifies him as a “nonpartisan” candidate since Chicago mayoral elections do not use party labels.

So, union campaign contributions and outside-group campaign spending are overwhelmingly Democratic. But that only scratches the surface of how deeply intertwined organized labor is with Everything Leftism. Consider the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has made news for making nominal overtures toward moderates in the Republican Party. The Center for Union Facts (CUF), a watchdog group tracking Big Labor’s political involvement and ethical misconduct, scrutinized the annual spending reports of the Teamsters and its affiliated local unions from 2019 through 2022 and identified $240 million in spending by the union on outside political and advocacy entities and vendors. Of that $240 million, CUF found a grand total of $7,877 sent “toward GOP-led initiatives and campaigns.” The Teamsters union did not send eight million dollars toward right-leaning groups and initiatives; it sent fewer than eight thousand dollars.

The CUF finding that the Teamsters sent over 99 percent of its advocacy funding to the political Left is consistent with an earlier CUF analysis that tracked outside contributions (not vendors in most cases) by all major Department of Labor–reporting unions. Of $530 million identified over the 2012–2015 period, 99 percent went to left-of-center groups.

The rest of organized labor’s response to Teamsters national president Sean O’Brien giving a speech to the 2024 Republican National Convention, in which he did not endorse the Republican ticket, is illustrative. A Teamsters vice president condemned O’Brien for giving the speech. Liz Shuler, the Everything Leftist leading the AFL-CIO union federation (of which the Teamsters union is not a member), said in a statement that the Republican ticket, which includes the American Compass favorite U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), was “on the bosses’ side.” If there were a need for more evidence Big Labor puts partisanship over policy, there it is.

Here one can introduce the potential effects of adopting a sectoral bargaining regime. In addition to the likelihood that an emboldened Everything Leftist labor movement would use its newfound power to conduct industrial actions for non-economic leftist goals, sectoral bargaining would place every American worker under control of Everything Leftist labor union commissars.

American Compass is explicit about this, arguing that “The United States should begin to foster broad-based bargaining models, in which representatives for all workers in a group defined by region, industry, and occupation negotiates with representatives for the counterpart employers.” Details matter, especially when 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. Who would decide the “representatives”? Would dissenters have any rights, or would the system follow the present “elective dictatorship” model? Details are not forthcoming.

What subjects would be bargainable? Recall that “workplace safety” was the justification for the jihad by the NewsGuild at the New York Times in response to a 2020 op-ed advocating a crackdown on rioting. It was authored by another Compass favorite, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). Again, details are not forthcoming.

The European experience of sectoral bargaining demonstrates clearly that such a system is not a path to the mythical “nonpolitical labor union.”  Germany’s DGB (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund), Germany’s analog to the AFL-CIO, is closely aligned with the country’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and is led by a former SPD Member of the Bundestag (national parliament). France has several union federations. While the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) is centrist by French standards, it is only slightly larger than the more prominent CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), which was historically aligned with the French Communist Party. Italy’s CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro), the largest of that country’s three major union confederations, was also historically Communist-influenced and aligns with the country’s left-of-center political movements.

In the next installment, the union movement rose alongside Marxism and other forms of socialism in the late 19th century.