Do Labor Leaders Not Know What Workers Want, or Do They Just Not Care?

On Thursday night I found myself deep in conversation with the communications director for the UAW, Jonah Furman, which isn’t the sort of thing I’d ordinarily write about. But it happened on Twitter so, well, you can see for yourself. As a microcosm of everything wrong with the American labor movement, his comments are a helpful starting place this Labor Day.

Our conversation began after I highlighted a call from the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades for a “ceasefire in Gaza” and for “the federal government to stop funding the genocide.”  and an end to the genocide that’s going on right now in Palestine.” When I suggest unions should focus on representing workers and stay out of politics, I get lectured that a labor movement must exercise political power to advance economic interests. But I’m still not entirely clear, I said, on how painters benefit from accusing Israel of genocide?

Such a comment, said Furman, was “the ‘shut up and dribble’ of the labor movement.”

But that’s not right. Indeed, its mistake is the fundamental flaw at the modern American labor movement’s foundation. “Shut up and dribble” was a comment made by Fox News host Laura Ingraham in response to political comments by NBA superstar LeBron James. The message was that an individual athlete should keep his personal opinions to himself. Many people understandably disagreed.

As Furman’s comment suggests, union leaders see themselves as the NBA superstars of the labor movement, entitled to use their platforms to disseminate their personal opinions. But they are not. A union exists to represent the members; it is in their interests that the leaders must act. Furman insisted that union leaders “make collective decisions so as to represent their members views,” but of course that’s not actually true. When I asked him whether he had any survey data about his members’ views on political issues, he responded, “does your thinktank direct poll every billionaire who funds it on what tweets you should do?”

And there again is the category error. This time, his analogy positions union leadership as proudly and rightfully developing a point of view independent of its members’ preferences, just as an effective think tank acts independently of its donors’ views. Think tanks don’t poll donors on what to say, therefore union leaders shouldn’t poll their members on what to say?! It speaks to a sickness in the Big Labor mindset and helps explain the institution’s deep rot.

Many others then joined the discussion but, remarkably, no one could point to any empirical data supporting the idea that workers want their unions engaging on national political issues at all, let alone taking the uniformly—and often radically—progressive positions their leaders always seem to adopt. Deploying a variation on I’m-rubber-you’re-glue, Hamilton Nolan, a prominent labor activist and writer, suggested, “American Compass should use its money to hire union organizers and organize workers into unions that are run as direct democracies. We would all support you in this.”

But the funny thing is, unlike the unions whose fundamental obligation is to represent workers effectively, we have taken the time at American Compass to survey thousands of workers on their views of what unions should do. And what we have found is that the political activism pursued by union leaders directly contradicts the preferences of most workers. And, importantly, that activism makes harder the basic task of organizing unions and building worker power in the first place.

By nearly two-to-one, and nearly three-to-one amongst potential union members, workers say they would prefer to be a member of an organization that focused on “workplace issues only,” not “national politics and workplace issues.”

Among workers who say they would vote against a union in their workplace, “union political involvement” is the reason most often cited.

Asked which activities are most and least important for a worker organization, workers assign politics and social activism by far the least weight. For more than three-quarters of respondents, the ideal weight assigned to politics was zero. Most assigned zero weight to social activism.

I shared this data on Twitter as well, genuinely curious whether anyone in the labor movement either had broad public opinion surveys contradicting the findings or knew of efforts within particular unions to elicit a genuine sense of member preferences. Apparently not. Of course, I suspect plenty of internal survey data exists—it would be malpractice for the leadership in any large organization not to take solicit such input—but unions are not eager to share anything in public. If they had evidence that they do indeed speak for their members, it would be entirely in their interest to share it, as it would bolster their credibility and influence. The silence speaks volumes.