Labor Day was never intended as an homage to the organized labor movement.
Unions, of course, vehemently disagree, and while the overwhelming majority of people have come to regard the holiday as nothing more meaningful than a three-day weekend commemorating the end of summer, labor leaders continue to delude themselves that the event somehow validates their dubious ideals and shady tactics.
This would come as a profound surprise to those instrumental in its founding.
For example, Rep. Lawrence McGann, an Illinois Democrat who sat on the House committee that approved the original Labor Day bill on May 15, 1894, had no doubt it was the workers, not the unions that purported to represent them, who were being feted.
He wrote:
A cynic might argue the gesture smacks more of political expedience than genuine regard, and indeed, historians speculate President Grover Cleveland was only persuaded to sign the measure in an unsuccessful attempt to curry favor with unions, which enthusiastically supported it.
Even so, it’s only fitting the same government that created Labor Day in the first place continues to disqualify unions from taking credit for it now.
Simply put, unions may once have played a laudable role in calling attention to appalling work conditions in the mills and factories of America’s industrial age. But over the ensuing decades, they were rendered effectively irrelevant by a combination of their own corruption and the steady encroachment of government regulators gifted the power to ban with the stroke of a pen workplace abuses that once prompted violent strikes.
Not surprisingly, few modern workers believe the benefits of union membership are worth the dues charged for them. In 2020, in fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the aggregate number of union members in this country decreased by 321,000 from the previous year.
Currently, only 10.8% of the workforce is unionized — a precipitous drop from the 20.1% membership rate unions enjoyed among workers in 1983.
But even that number is deceptive. In the private sector, the membership rate has plummeted to 6.3%.
Arguably, the only reason unions remain viable at all is because of government employment at the state, county, and local level, where union membership and dues were still mandatory in many states until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such requirements three years ago in Janus v. AFSCME.
Currently, 34.8% of the nation’s public workers are still unionized, and the unions argue they remain in the fold because they’re happy. But there’s no reason to believe government employees are any more eager than their private-sector peers to surrender a sizable portion of their salary every year to a powerful special interest that uses it to line the pockets of liberal political candidates and causes on their behalf.
More likely, it’s because unions moved aggressively in the wake of Janus and its 2014 predecessor, Harris v. Quinn, to protect labor’s last stronghold. Union leaders have adopted a variety of sketchy strategies since then to make canceling union dues deductions as difficult as possible for dissatisfied members.
The list includes:
- Unilaterally changing their own rules to permit departures only during arbitrary, union-determined annual two-week windows
- Simply ignoring opt-out requests, forcing workers to fight their own union in court
- Lying to workers considering opting out about what impact it will have on their benefits (short answer: none)
- When all else fails, forging workers’ signatures on new dues-authorization forms
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear Boardman v. Inslee, which concerns a 2016 Washington state ballot measure authored, sponsored, and financed solely by local unions.
Initiative 1501, as it was designated, tricked voters into believing they were cracking down on identity theft when, in reality, the measure exempted about 50,000 union-represented, taxpayer-compensated home-care aides and home-based childcare providers from the information-disclosure requirements to which public employees are normally subject.
By denying access to the workers’ contact information, the Service Employees International Union sought to prevent outsiders from informing its members about their newly affirmed rights not to associate with a union.
More specifically, I-1501 was a frontal assault on the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit think tank that has developed a comprehensive outreach program designed to educate public employees about their right to abstain from union dues payment. But in order for that to happen, the organization must first know who they are and how to contact them.
The initiative is clearly unconstitutional because it denies access to public information based purely on the political views of the requester. But when you’re fighting to preserve a multibillion-dollar monopoly, what’s a little thing like the Constitution?
As the court continues to deliberate over whether to hear Boardman and other potential landmark public-sector union cases in the years to come, it’s fair to ask whether the organized labor movement that made them necessary is worthy of a national holiday at all.
The nobility of work and those who perform it are certainly deserving of recognition. The unions that have justifiably lost all credibility with those they claim to represent emphatically are not.
Jeff Rhodes is vice president of news and information for the Freedom Foundation.
