In previous essays, it has been discussed, but not expounded upon at length, that the labor union has been, and continues to be, a net positive on society, even from the distinctly liberal-capitalist perspective which I support.
The popular conception of the labor union has gone through many iterations over the last three hundred years: from the feudalist trade guild, to the revolutionary socialist industrial union, to the fascist national union, to the social democratic trade union, to the Anglo-American blue-collar political union, to the social corporatist tripartite craft union.
While the labor union has seen its trials and tribulations, and has been subjected to all sorts of scrutiny, fairly or not, it has remained a steadfast if declining element of the modern democratic state, despite the agitation of conservatives of both the liberal- and national- traditions against their formation and their power. These Tories have traditionally seen unionism as a two-sided evil: an impediment to the economic power of the free market, and an impediment to the political power of democracy.
For the sake of rehabilitating the image of the labor union in the eyes of the liberal ideology which I represent, let us now go and analyze, honestly and without prejudice, the social value of organized labor.
A Fourth Estate
The modern labor movement has traditionally been seen as an outgrowth of the proto-socialists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—being, as most things are, ultimately little more than a rephrasing of the politics of the French Revolution. However, it has recently been proposed that the First Republic-era workers’ associations are themselves based on the far more antiquated vehicle for organized labor (and employment): the artisan’s guild.
The ancient guild is one of the oldest and most storied institutions in human history, perhaps only junior to the concept of the Sovereign itself. Organizations of merchants responsible for setting trade regulation and measurement standards are old enough to be referenced by the laws of the Akkadians1 and the Code of Hammurabi.2 By the Roman Republic, the guild became known as a collegium, and were organized not along general class lines, but rather by trade.3 These collegia were similar to other groups of free citizens which were perceived—as chartered corporations are today—as possessing a sort of legal personhood distinct from that of its members.
By the Middle Ages, the guilds became a sort of egalitarian fourth power, apart from the King, the nobility, and the church. In some cities, especially in Germany and coastal England, free burghers bound themselves together into guilds and those guilds took enough power to be threatening to the status quo, not least because the Free City held neither the temporal legitimacy of the hereditary aristocracy nor the spiritual legitimacy of the Church. Instead, the merchant class took power and wealth merely because they could—a truly revolutionary idea in the medieval era.
As feudalism came to an end during the fifteenth century as a result of the labor shortages caused by the Black Death, these burgher guild-members, which would develop into the moyenne-, grande-, and haute-bourgeoisie in the terminology of the Marxists, gradually subsumed more and more of the powers of the blue-bloods. Many of the richest of the merchant class—especially in late Bourbon France—would buy their way into the old First Estate, whether by purchasing titles directly from down-on-their-luck nobles, climbing the ranks of the noblesse de robe, or simply bribing the gentleman at Versailles.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the guild-backed merchant middle classes had become powerful enough that they became able to press their concerns on the national scale—anti-colonial sentiments, the abolition of slavery and the vestiges of serfdom, the English Civil War, and most famously, the profound social upheaval of the greatest rebellion there ever was: the French Revolution. The bourgeoisie, who had become acutely aware since the High Middle Ages that power was not a function of bloodline, an innate quality that flowed from the King to the Sovereign and down to the noblesse d’épée, but rather something that anyone could attain—and therefore that the true question of political philosophy is not merely to determine the best strategies for the Sovereign to govern his country, but also to determine who ought to hold the scepter.
Anywhere Beneath the Sun
Not long after the French Revolution (and in some isolated cases, a few decades before), the lower classes of France and elsewhere, mostly removed by only a generation or two from serfdom and villeiny, realized in their own right that they had the means to attain power, but only by their own binding-together into organizations. The guilds, to which they had been at best passive members controlled by the increasingly wealthy and powerful bourgeoisie (the distinction between the independent arti maggiori upper-class members and the dependent arti minori lower-class)4, and at worst outright excluded, would no longer serve this purpose as a vehicle for political power.
The guilds, and the hereditary nobility before them, had long preferred a mercantilist economy to a free one, but as the bourgeoisie came to assert their power, and as agriculture declined during the early modern period, the masses of unemployed, poor former serfs flocked into the cities to partake in a new phenomenon which was, by the mid-eighteenth century, beginning to take shape: the Industrial Revolution. The transition from mercantilism to industrial capitalism also marked the transition from craft guilds to labor unions—with the first recorded strike occurring among Philadelphia printers in the aftermath of the American Revolution. While serfs and even free farmers had engaged in the manorial economy through a good-exchange—where he had to pay in corn or meat, the new “laborer” class engaged in the capitalist economy through a service-exchange, exchanging his time for capital. This was the innovation of “employment.”
These form of employment resulted commonly (in the opinion of the Marxists—universally) in an exploitative system of so-called “wage slavery.” Since these workers had less control over their jobs, less job security, and in many cases, worse pay and standards of living than their serf predecessors, they started to band together as the modern conception of the trade union, in order to bargain collectively and place more pressure upon their new bourgeois bosses for better pay and conditions. Some of them—the Luddites—perceived the technological advance of the Industrial Revolution itself as the primordial source of the social ills of the age and spent considerable effort in destroying looms, threshing machines, and all sorts of steam- and water-driven machinery. Others pursued more idealistic goals—inspired by the radical republican Jacobins of the French Revolution, the concept of a “general strike” to bring the flows of industrial capitalism to a halt became popular by the middle of the nineteenth century. These unions, which were often quite extremist, were often opposed by equally radical reactionary government forces, sometimes outsourced to mercenary groups like the Pinkertons.
The emergence of these spontaneous collectives, engaging in ephemeral direct action against what they perceived—often rightly—to be an abusive and exploitative system, was highly inspirational to the first great generation of socialist writers—Owen, Proudhon, Engels, Herzen, and especially Marx. To Marx and the other Left-Hegelians, the uprisings of the nineteenth century, most famously in 1848, represented a dialectical synthesis of anarchy and the state. His writings, and the writings of his contemporaries, would serve to coalesce and inspire the labor movements going forward, even until today.
So began the era of the revolutionary union: the labor collective determined not to merely improve their own lot, but also to overthrow the capitalist Hydra in its totality. These unions, grouped together first into various “national unions,” and then into “internationals” like the International Workingmen’s Association, and finally into broad coalitions allied with political parties, became dedicated to myriad and often contradictory sub-doctrines of the radical and not-so-radical left: social democracy, council communism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, Marxism-Leninism, and libertarian socialists. Some of them became successful, or at least reasonably so, by the early twentieth century—the revolutionary soviets of Tsarist Russia, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica and Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Spain, and so on in a hundred countries around the world.
Eventually, of course, as the Spanish Civil War was lost to the Nationalists, and as the Soviet Union and Communist China devolved into a newly horrific form of authoritarianism—themselves cracking down on labor unions that did not participate in the ruling doctrines of leftism—most labor unions in the West began to evolve. The revolutionary -isms, internationals, and insurrectionists of the Marxist era gave way to social democracy, political integration, and the modern spectacle of the auto worker strike.
The modern union is of course still political, but now they mostly seek political change from within the neoliberal status quo, rather than through violent revolution. Labor unions continue to fight for civil rights: the United Farm Workers for the rights of Hispanic Americans, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization for African-Americans, the San Francisco Teamsters for LGBT Americans, and so on. Labor unions have matured from their violent past to become an integral part of the political and economic system. The question then is whether or not such involvement is a net positive.
The Blair Mountain Lights
Union workers are no longer the radicals they once were—thanks to a century of normalization and the heavy hand of the federal government, the fights for fair pay and the right to bargain collectively happen these days in courthouses and corporate conference rooms, rather than Blair Mountain and Haymarket Square. The socialists call them “gravediggers of the revolution.” But who’s to say the impact of unions hasn’t been truly revolutionary, even if not, say, loud? After all, if the trade union didn’t help anybody, why would Amazon spend $14.2 million on anti-union specialists in 2022 alone?5
A century’s worth of academic literature has demonstrated as clear as the equatorial sun gleaming through a De Beers diamond the benefits of widespread unionization. The post-war decline in unionization in the United States has correlated strongly with an increase in income inequality.6 That decline in economic equality has also worsened the political divide, and perhaps contributed to the rise in fascist extremism in the United States.7
In contrast to the old conservative arguments about the thug union boss who impedes the glorious productivity of capitalism, unionization rates are linked to higher productivity rates, not lower.8 American House districts with higher unionization rates have representatives who are more likely to listen to the demands of their constituents.9 Union density also correlates with higher political knowledge and participation,10 better race relations,11 and fewer deaths from suicide and drug overdoses.12
Effectively, the purpose of unions in the age of the end of history is not to confront capitalism but rather to curtail its excesses. Even the hardest of hardline union bosses—except for perhaps the wobbliest of the True Believers, however few there may be left—will tell you that their goal is singular: better pay and treatment for the rank and file. The free market seeks the maximization of the profit margin by the “greatest squeezing” of the three factors of production. Capitalism is an empirical good—that is beyond question—but since it has its problems and excesses, we have our clearest solution for allowing the three factors a means of equal footing against them, not so much for direct confrontation, but rather for a push-and-pull, an immanent critique, of modernity. For capital—liberalism, for land—Georgism, and for labor—the union. This is the antithesis, which, standing opposed on the great pillars of history against the thesis of the free market, will create the synthesis—solidarity and peace in our time.
Teamster’s Local of Galt’s Gulch
And yet something has been left out; there is a unique advantage here to the trade union, seldom discussed in any circle. The socialists and social democrats see the union as they always have—as a vehicle for societal and economic change, and as a means to benefit not just their own workers, but all proletarians. The right has traditionally taken an oppositional view—that the union is but a means for political corruption and a burden on the economy. To that end, many conservatives have passed legislation designed to hinder the formation of labor unions, or at least minimize their collective bargaining power once formed; laws which they ironically call “right to work.” Even so-called libertarians paradoxically support these laws, despite the fact that they prohibit the entering-into of a certain template of contract between employers and unions—in other words, an intrusion of the State into the goings-on of private individuals.
Liberals, for their part, have usually wavered between agreement with their conservative counterparts and indifferent tolerance of the union as a fundamental component of the open, democratic society. Occasionally, they have praised the unions when they have stood up for civil rights—as in the case of Hugo Chávez and the UFW or the Florida Education Association and the anti-gay reprisals of Governor Ron DeSantis.
It seems that my liberal fellow travelers have failed to identify the hidden benefit of the unionized worker, apart from the economic and social benefits which are rather apparent—they have underestimated the Catholic view of unions as a means to reduce the invasive power of the Great Leviathan, mostly in terms of regulatory power. Centralized bureaucratic oversight is always lacking in comparison to direct oversight—no party apparatchik can crack down on an abusive employer quite as well as a union boss who represents an entire factory.
The cost of universal healthcare can be defrayed by powerful unions demanding insurance for their members, minimum wage laws can be rendered less economically harmful by union wage increases, and workplace safety regulations can be made irrelevant by union inspectors. The union offers us a path to the Great Society without the inefficiencies of top-down imposed socialist policy—checking the greed of capital with the coequal greed of labor. In short, it is the Catholic answer to the injustices of global capitalism. It is the liberal answer too, and one which we ought to promote. When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run—they can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
More power to the laborer and the peasant.
Solidarity forever.
“Metrology and Mathematics in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Marvin A. Powell, Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, 1995.
“Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon,” Hammurabi, translated by Otto Sommer, Washington, DC: Records of the Past Exploration Society, 1903.
Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, Steven Epstein, 1995.
The Wheels of Commerce, Fernand Braudel, 1982.
“‘War of attrition’: why union victories for US workers at Amazon have stalled,” Michael Sainato, The Guardian, 8 April 2023.
“Jake Rosenfeld explores the sharp decline of union membership, influence,” Doree Armstrong, Harvard University Press, 2014.
“Labor Unions and White Democratic Partisanship,” David MacDonald, Political Behavior, 2020.
“Union Density Effects on Productivity and Wages, Harald Dale-Olsen, Alex Bryson, and Erling Barth, The Economic Journal, 2020.
“Reducing Unequal Representation: The Impact of Labor Unions on Legislative Responsiveness in the U.S. Congress,” Michael Becher and Daniel Stegmueller, Perspectives on Politics, 2020.
“How Labor Unions Increase Political Knowledge: Evidence from the United States,” David MacDonald, Political Behavior, 2019.
“Labor Unions and White Racial Politics,” Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach, American Journal of Political Science, 2020.
“Solidarity and disparity: Declining labor union density and changing racial and educational mortality inequities in the United States,” Anjum Hajat, Wendy Barrington, Amy Hagopian, Stephen Mooney, Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2020.