Posts tagged Wagner Act
Big Labor’s Rise to Power, or Big Labor Never Lets a Tragedy Go to Waste
May 21, 2026 // It contrasts Samuel Gompers’ early emphasis on voluntarism (“No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion”) with later leaders, such as Owen Bieber, who embraced “the persuasion of power.” Compulsory unionism—forced membership or dues as a condition of keeping or having a job—began in the private sector in 1935, and with the federal government’s help, it spread like a “cancer” to government workers, and it has eroded worker rights, public services, and democratic processes while enriching labor union treasuries and many union officers.
You paid $181 million for union bosses to negotiate against you in 2024, but the Trump administration is doing something about it
February 19, 2026 // Even the “usual” topics of labor-relations negotiations are not part of federal bargaining. As Molly Conway, who served as Chief of Staff to the Department of Labor in the first Trump administration, wrote in a primer for the Institute for the American Worker: Management rights and any matters “specifically provided for by Federal statute” are not bargainable. This includes pay, health insurance, retirement, and certain workplace insurance (e.g., workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance), among others. [citations omitted]
Op-ed: Trump Is Right to Take On the Federal-Worker Unions
September 4, 2025 // Today, only 6 percent of private sector workers are union members. Virtually the only unions that are growing are public sector unions — such as the teachers’ unions. Today, more than one in three government workers in the U.S. belongs to a union. But over 85 percent of those work at the state and local level — not in the federal government. That makes it vital for states to follow President Trump’s lead — along with that of states like Wisconsin — and end collective bargaining for their public employees.
Commentary: Ivy Leaguers Aren’t Auto Workers
July 21, 2025 // In general, NLRB decisions are fake law made by fake judges who have to interpret a poorly written statute from 90 years ago that is based on assumptions about industrial organization that no longer obtain in the United States. But the NLRB remains powerful nonetheless, and its decisions matter. That’s why Russell Burgett, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, which is private, is asking the NLRB to overturn the 2016 Columbia ruling. He isn’t a member of the Cornell graduate students’ union, a UE affiliate, and he said in charges filed with the NLRB on Monday that his choice not to join makes it harder for him to complete his education.
A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: The Old Left and the Reds
March 10, 2025 // American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist. The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. Today, organized labor is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy.
COMMENTARY: You Can’t Support Trump and Government Unions
November 21, 2024 // Trump and his allies have talked endlessly about the need to take on the “deep state” or “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. Sometimes such talk veers into conspiracy-theorizing, but it’s certainly true that many federal bureaucrats are opposed to Trump and their obstruction can prevent him from governing as he was elected to govern. For years, conservatives have been raising the alarm about the constitutional problems that an entrenched, unelected administrative state presents when it hinders the elected leaders from making decisions. Government unions stand in the way of making many reforms to the civil service that Trump would like to see.
OPINION Why don’t unions have to stand for reelection?
September 16, 2024 // The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 7.4 million workers in the private sector belonged to labor unions in 2023. Yet according to a new study from the Institute for the American Worker, which promotes market-oriented labor reform, fewer than 400,000 of those unionized employees — about 5 percent — have ever voted in an election for the union that represents them. Like me, the vast majority of employees in unionized workplaces were hired after the union had already been voted in. Most unions have never been required to confirm that they have the support of current workers by winning a recertification election. In some workplaces, a lifetime has elapsed — that isn’t hyperbole — since the union was first certified. The United Auto Workers organized General Motors’ Michigan plants in 1937 and has represented the employees who work there ever since. Never once has it had to stand for reelection. What kind of “workplace democracy” is that?
The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions
August 30, 2024 // The Wagner Act was passed to promote labor peace. It aimed to keep commerce flowing by promoting collective bargaining, and thus unionism. Taft-Hartley reversed one part of that policy: it helped make unionism, and thus collective bargaining, less common. But by doing so, it finally achieved labor law’s original goal. The labor market today is more peaceful than at any time in the last century. And that peace owes in large part to the relative scarcity of unions. That lesson is worth keeping in mind in contemporary debates. Today, voices on both sides of the aisle laud the benefits of unionism. They speak of unions as vehicles of workplace democracy—a productive way for workers to express their collective discontent. But unions have not always funneled discontent through peaceful channels: when given too much power, they have disrupted the avenues of commerce.
The Cases Against Sectoral Bargaining: The Practical Case
August 11, 2024 // 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.
My job, my choice: The National Labor Relations Act does not require unionization
September 7, 2023 // “[A]mbiguities of language and the absence of enforcement powers [in the NIRA] have enabled a minority of employers to deviate from the clear intent of the law and to threaten our entire program with destruction,” Wagner said in a March 11, 1934, New York Times op-ed. He repeatedly stressed it had to be the individual worker’s decision to join a union, and bristled at the claim that the Recovery Act pushed workers into unions. “[T]his bill does not do anything of this kind except that it does make a worker a free man so he may decide whether he wants a union or not,” and, Wagner said during the Senate hearings on the legislation, “if he wants one, what particular union he wants to represent him, or whether he wants to remain unorganized.” The text of the NLRA does state that federal policy favors “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining,” but those words are almost always taken out of context. They follow a long preamble about “eliminat[ing] the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce.”