It's Time to Examine the Union Mythology

That was then.

The problem is what happens when an organization built to counter concentrated power becomes a concentration of power itself. That problem isn't unique to unions, either. Give enough authority to corporate executives, government bureaucrats, politicians, union officials, or the HOA board's resident Karen, and eventually somebody discovers that power is addictive. The abuse of it almost always starts with the same pitch: "We're doing this for your own good." That's the favorite line of people who've acquired more authority than they should have. The stated purpose stays noble on paper, while the practical result is that the people running the organization become increasingly interested in preserving their own authority — and, frankly, their own paycheck, which is usually a good deal larger than the paychecks of the people they claim to represent. "Parasite" seems like the word we're groping for.

Our nation's Founders understood this. They didn't assume officials would stay virtuous simply because they held office; they assumed the opposite, and built restraints on power accordingly. That principle applies to a union hall as readily as it does to the Capitol, and yet we routinely hear about labor disputes without much discussion of what the labor being demanded actually costs. With no real check on union power — and governments seemingly committed to propping that power up — this is a long-term problem, not a passing one.

So let's talk about the money.

Only 10% of American wage and salary workers belong to unions today, down from 12.1% in 2007. That headline number hides an important split, though: private-sector unionization has fallen to just 5.9%, while government workers remain unionized at 32.9% — more than five times the private-sector rate, and higher still in local government, at roughly 37.8%. That number, unsurprisingly, tends to run higher in the bluer parts of the map.

The American labor movement, in other words, increasingly isn't about the factory floor. It's about government. And because the private workforce is so much larger, the raw membership totals stay close despite that gap: 7.3 million public-sector union members in 2025 against 7.4 million in the private sector. Government work, in short, is the only place unions are actually thriving.

That arrangement creates its own problem. Government employees bargain with government officials for compensation ultimately paid by taxpayers, who almost never get a seat at that table until it's time to cover the tab. The people negotiating on one side aren't spending their own money, the people on the other side are often politically dependent on the people across from them, and the people footing the bill aren't invited into the room. What could possibly go wrong?

It's also worth noting that union bosses don't appear to be suffering from the oppressive conditions their unions claim to be fighting. According to 2025 union financial filings, Teamsters President Sean O'Brien took home $443,539, SEIU President April Verrett made $322,045, and UAW President Shawn Fain made roughly $276,378. None of that is an indictment by itself — running a large organization is real work, and a big salary isn't proof of wrongdoing. But let's at least enjoy the irony: the people telling workers that corporate executives are grotesquely overpaid are running organizations where the people at the top make several times what the workers they represent take home. Fighting the man pays pretty well, it turns out, provided you're the one now wearing the suit. The union has become an industry, and industries have an annoying habit of developing an interest in their own survival.

Which is where the American manufacturing argument gets interesting. For decades, automakers operated under contracts that set wages, benefits, work rules, job classifications, overtime provisions, and other contractual restrictions their nonunion competitors didn't necessarily face. That doesn't mean unions single-handedly destroyed Detroit — they didn't. Bad management and government policy both played a role. But pretending labor costs and restrictive work rules were irrelevant, which the unions do as a matter of routine, is equally absurd. When you're competing against Japan, Korea, Germany, and increasingly China, you don't get to treat every dollar of production cost as somebody else's problem, and if your competitor builds the same product more efficiently, the market eventually notices.

A March 2011 piece on Detroit's collapse, published via RealClearMarkets, put it about as bluntly as it gets:

Census data released Tuesday show Detroit's population has plunged 25% since 2000 to just 713,777 souls — the same as 100 years ago, before the auto industry's heyday. As recently as the 1970s, Detroit had 1.8 million people. What's happening is no secret: Detroiters are fleeing an economic disaster, the irreversible decline of the Big Three automakers. In his now-famous Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, rapper Eminem drives up to a theater in a sleek new 200 model and says, "This is the Motor City. And this is what we do." But, sadly, that's no longer the case.

Detroit's decline has been shocking. Sure, a lot of the blame goes to a generation of bad management. But the main reason for Detroit's decline is the greed of the industry's main union, the UAW, which priced the Big Three out of the market. As recently as 2008, GM, Ford and Chrysler paid their employees on average more than $73 an hour in total compensation.

Behind this is the gold-plated benefits package once guaranteed to UAW workers. We're not against workers getting what they deserve, but total pay and benefits for a full-time worker for the Big Three until recently averaged about $140,000 a year. The transplants? Just $80,000.

Add in an estimated $2,000-plus per car for retiree health care and pensions for the Big Three, and the cost gap is huge. Two years ago, the Center for Automotive Research estimated that for every job created by a foreign transplant, 6.1 jobs were lost by the Big Three — many of them in Detroit. No city can take that much economic abuse.

Much is being said of late regarding the cost of a new vehicle, with car payments running higher these days than some house payments. How much lower would the cost of those new vehicles be, absent such high operating costs for manufacturers?

That's the part of the union argument that gets lost in the slogans. A worker can absolutely benefit, in the short term, from a union contract — higher wages, better benefits, more job protections, more favorable work rules. Nobody disputes that those things have value. The questions are: who pays for them, and what happens once the cost outruns the value an employer can get from the worker? That's when the factory closes, the production moves, the investment goes elsewhere, and the building that once employed thousands sits vacant and surrounded by weeds. Detroit is the obvious example of an industrial economy losing its footing; Lordstown, Ohio, is the reminder that a town can become dependent on a single employer and then discover that the employer was never obligated to stay.

Another angle: I've made the case before that unions and government together are also what killed off America's passenger rail industry, and it's a stranger parallel than it sounds. We once had a large, modestly profitable passenger railroad business in this country. Unionization and heavy-handed regulation piled an unsustainable cost burden onto the railroads — so unsustainable that the railroads started asking permission to drop unprofitable routes. The government, in its wisdom, said no; too many people depended on those routes, so the railroads would just have to keep eating the losses. Union-imposed costs plus government-imposed costs equaled no profits and eventually no railroads. When the government and the unions finally strangled the golden goose, the government stepped in with Amtrak — which has never turned a profit in its entire existence and has been a permanent drain on the taxpayer ever since. Every year, like clockwork, Amtrak shows up in Washington with its hand out.

Amtrak's own FY2026 Legislative Grant Request, released in mid-2025, asked Congress for $2.427 billion in annual appropriations, split between the Northeast Corridor ($850 million) and the National Network ($1.58 billion). That's on top of $4.4 billion a year already locked in through 2021's infrastructure law. Add the two together and you get $6.8 billion a year in federal money — and that's before state and local subsidies even enter the picture. Ticket sales, by comparison, brought in roughly $2.5 billion in FY24, nowhere near what it costs to run the system.

And about those ticket prices: ride the train from my neck of the woods — say, Rochester to Sanford, Fla. — and you're out roughly $800, give or take, depending on timing and some other factors. Fly the same trip and it's under $200. Drive it and you're looking at about $210 in fuel. At those prices, Amtrak ought to be serving filet mignon and a complimentary shoulder massage, not a $12 hot dog from the café car.

And that's for a route they still bother running. Fifty years later, Amtrak still isn't operating the unprofitable routes the railroads begged permission to drop back in the pre-Amtrak days. The unions and the government walked away from that whole affair with their halos intact, and the taxpayer walked away holding the bill. There's no more generous way to describe this than an unmitigated disaster. Nobody in Washington is being straight with us about what's actually driving the costs, but it's a safe bet the unions are carrying a good share of it: Amtrak's own financials show that roughly 83% to 86% of its 17,000 to 20,000 employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements, spread across more than a dozen separate contracts.

And that's just one item on a longer list.

This is where I part ways completely with the romantic mythology around organized labor. A union doesn't create wealth — it negotiates over the distribution of wealth somebody else already created. There's nothing wrong with that in principle; both sides have legitimate interests at the table. But when one side gains enough political power to force the other into economically unsustainable terms, as invariably happens, the result isn't prosperity. It's destruction. And union leadership rarely goes down with the ship: the building closes, the jobs disappear, the town withers, the membership shrinks, and somehow the people collecting the dues keep collecting them.

Which may explain why organized labor has grown so dependent on government, legislation, and political allies to maintain its influence — because if workers still wanted unions in the numbers they once did, unions wouldn't need nearly as much political machinery to hold their position.

Consider release time: the practice of paying government employees their full salary to work for their union instead of the job taxpayers actually hired them for. The Goldwater Institute has tracked this for years, and it isn't pocket change — federal employees alone logged 3.6 million hours of "official time" in 2016 at a cost of $177.2 million, before counting what states, cities, and school districts kick in on their own. The Supreme Court already ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that government workers can't be forced to fund union speech through their own dues; it's hard to see why taxpayers who aren't even union members should be picking up that tab either.

California, naturally, offers a bigger live example. Los Angeles County's 2025 agreement with SEIU added bonuses that could cost close to $2 billion, much of it expected to come from state and federal reimbursements — meaning taxpayers well outside the county are underwriting a deal they never had a seat at. If unions are such a great deal, it's worth asking why taxpayers keep getting compelled to finance them, and why California cities are perpetually broke despite it.

Which brings me back to Labor Day. I've always found it a little funny that the holiday supposedly celebrating American labor is, in practice, a day when an enormous share of unionized and government workers aren't working. I can't say the same — I spent most of my working life actually working on Labor Day, and that's one of the real differences between celebrating labor and performing it. I'm retired now, so at least that argument's behind me.

I’ll give you one more irony: A 2009 article run by the Washington Post reported:

The Service Employees International Union, considered the most influential union in the nation, has notified the union that represents about 220 of the SEIU's national field staff members and organizers that it is laying off 75 of the employees.

In return, the workers union, which goes by the somewhat postmodern name of the Union of Union Representatives, has filed charges of unfair labor practices against the SEIU with the National Labor Relations Board. The workers union's leaders say that the SEIU is engaging in the same kind of practices that some businesses use: laying off workers without proper notice, contracting out work to temporary-staffing firms, banning union activities and reclassifying workers to reduce union numbers.

And lest we get too far away from the unions’ collective push for left-wing politics:

SEIU officials say the layoffs are part of a long-running plan to reallocate resources. Its national office will devote more of its resources to lobbying and communications in Washington to take advantage of Democrats' ascendance. Most organizing would be left to local chapters, where officials say they have identified dozens of openings for the laid-off staff.

"This is not a financial issue," said SEIU President Andy Stern. "We need to respond to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity our members created by helping elect President Obama."

The irony is so thick here that even the left-leaning Washington Post can't hide it. 

I suspect that by now you understand why I've grown skeptical of the pro-union mythology. The union movement began as a way to give ordinary workers leverage against concentrated economic power, but concentrated power doesn't become virtuous just because it's wearing a different shirt. Eventually, the organization built to protect the worker becomes an organization primarily interested in protecting itself — and the language never changes. We're doing it for the workers. We're fighting for your future. We're protecting your livelihood.

Yeah, maybe. Just maybe.

But whenever somebody with enormous power tells you that everything they do with it is for your own good, keep one hand on your wallet. Because at the end of the day, the union's most fundamental leverage is still the same line it's always been: "Nice business you've got here. Be a shame if something happened to it."

That's not collective bargaining. That's thuggish extortion, with a payroll department.