Some on the right will try very hard to see daylight between organized labor and the progressive movement. Despite decades of decline in union membership, culminating in a record-low membership rate last year, some still see political opportunity in rejecting conservatives’ traditional approach to organized labor in favor of a more conciliatory approach.
Organized labor doesn’t see it that way, and it continues to fund the panoply of progressive institutions. Organized labor is progressivism, and progressivism is organized labor.
Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center provides more evidence of this from his survey of the latest spending disclosures unions file with the Department of Labor each year. The reason unions have to file these disclosures is the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, which was passed in accordance with one of the tenets of the conservative approach to organized labor: transparency. Unions opposed the bill, but union corruption had become so obvious that it passed Congress with near unanimous support and was signed into law by President Eisenhower anyway.
Because of that law, we can see how unions spend their money. It’s to be expected that public-sector unions and famously progressive unions, such as the SEIU, will be giving to progressive causes and organizations. Watson substantiates that with this year’s reports. But it’s important to note that the supposedly less political, “blue-collar” unions are also giving big bucks to progressive causes.
Watson reports:
After he flip-flopped on right-to-work and posted Teamsters talking points on X, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) received $5,000 from the Teamsters. Nationally, in the 2022 election cycle, the Teamsters PAC donated $1.28 million to Democrats. It donated $30,000 to Republicans.
The Teamsters also gave $150,000 to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “a ballot-measure research and advocacy nonprofit that strategizes ballot campaigns for left-of-center interests,” Watson writes. “It and its charitable arm are funded by Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice, the Arabella Advisors–managed North Fund, the JPB Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, among other left-wing institutions.”
These findings “confirm the vast majority of the available evidence holding that labor unions, regardless of their sector represented or the social class of their members, align with the Everything Leftist ideology that dominates the liberal movement and the Democratic Party,” Watson writes. If you understand labor unions to be groups that represent workers in contract negotiations, this might seem confusing. If you understand labor unions to be just another part of the progressive movement, this seems natural and obvious.