The Supreme Court is expected to rule, any minute now, against public sector unions collecting mandatory fees from non-members in Janus v. AFSCME, and labor advocates are gearing up for the apocalypse. It recalls a scene from Bonfire of the Vanities where Kramer thinks of his father’s latent devotion to organized labor. “Yet one night Senator Barry Goldwater had been on TV promoting a right-to-work bill, and his father had started growling and cursing in a way that would have made Joe Hill and the Wobblies look like labor mediators.” The labor movement, Wolfe writes, is “truly religious” in that it’s “one of those things you believed in for all mankind and didn’t care about for a second in your own life.”
The labor-religion comparison also rings true in the literal format of their meetings, I learned last year at the Women’s Convention in Detroit, where at one point various union members and representatives joined in a rousing solidarity chant. The fervor of union members I met in Detroit did have a religious quality, too, such that I felt apostatic in asking how their unions were getting ready for the coming Janus decision. Kate Luscombe, an AFSCME member from Albany in her mid-50s, told me gravely about the unions’ coming reckoning: “We’ll just need to reinvest in personal power,” she said, unsure how that might work but resolute. “What makes you think we’re going to lose?” snapped a younger woman.
Janus v. AFSCME is the court’s second chance to overturn the 1977 decision that let public unions require dues, called “fair share” fees, from non-members: The unions were expected to lose a 2015 case, but that ended in a 4-4 tie shortly after Justice Scalia’s death. Now, though, Justice Gorsuch seems likely to side with the four who found against the unions last time. Political activities, funded by mandatory dues from non-members constitute coerced speech, according to the plaintiff Mark Janus’s case: His Illinois union made him pay, as a condition of his continued employment, for the operations of a political body he does not support.
If the court finds in his favor national unions will lose a major source of funding in the 22 states that still allow them to charge “fair share” fees. In anticipation,the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, cut its budget by $50 million. The union will be left with an impossible choice between curbing the political involvements that give them national power and actually attracting and retaining the members they nominally work for. “National unions could face a Catch-22 after Janus,” as AEI’s Nat Malkus recently noted, “by focusing on either retaining membership or maintaining national political influence. Complicating the choice is that a significant portion of members do not share the unions’ political leanings.”
A religious-seeming devotion to labor’s cause surfaces now and again in our secular age. There’s residual evidence of the pious strains that characterized the movement at its heyday: The roots of the labor movement and American religious history are actually inseparable. The nation’s first powerful labor unions were prayerful groups, per late-19th century union leader Terence Powderly’s contemporary reports. Catholic priests defended collective bargaining, following Pope Leo XIII’s pro-labor lead, while Protestants preached the worker-friendly social Gospel. Christian devotion knit them together—a win for religious freedom—with a higher purpose than that of the politicians who pandered to their members.
A New Republic piece three years ago, amid pro-labor protests in Wisconsin, recalled the movement’s actual origins in an effort to paint Scott Walker as a bad Christian: “Evangelicals played pivotal roles in launching the American labor movement. Andrew Cameron—a Scottish immigrant, accomplished printer, and devout believer—helped to found the National Labor Union in 1866.” While Cameron and countless other advocates made fundamentally Christian arguments for an eight- hour work day, public-sector unions today steer clear of religion. They do so at their peril, according to social welfare and religion scholar Lew Daly, who charges unions and all society with a suicidally aggressive secularism.
Secular political activities do dominate unions now, driving away members who disagree—and, as the court may soon decide, violating the First Amendment with the “fair share” fees required of workers who opt out of membership. But political activities and progressive causes in particular do tend to stir up in secular liberals the same devotional intensivity people of faith muster for matters of sacred doctrine. The precedential history of “compelled speech” arguments under the First Amendment, like the one Janus makes, tend to defend the very pious from what they considered excessive secular fealty. Since then, the power of compulsion has flipped to the secular side—and plaintiffs like Janus ask not for the freedom to believe in their faith undisturbed, but for the freedom not to believe in the union.
Union membership’s decline over the last several decades in our secularizing country makes even more sense when you consider that its rise, at the turn of the last century, was on track with the growing popularity of bible-thumping itinerant preachers, evangelical churches, and the Temperance movement. Industrializing America discovered a new passion for spiritual solidarity, and the unions beckoned them with scriptural invocations and the doctrine of everyone’s equal right to a work-life balance—as that era defined it, anyway.
The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor’s rule against Sunday meetings and the prominent biblical allusions in their bylaws seem quaint and arcane today. The lost religious life of the latter day labor movement is all but forgotten. The wisps that remain of it are best captured with a knowing wink from Wolfe—or by union carpenter Bruce Conroy whom I met in Hartford about a month ago. Wearing the Dayglo green t-shirt of the carpenters union and long gray braid down his wide back, he made light of the dark days that lay ahead. “They’ve set themselves up for this,” he said, of labor’s unsustainable political entanglements with the establishment Democrats whom he grudgingly votes for. “And Judgment Day’s a-comin!” Conroy roared and flashed a mordant grin.
