Commentary: What Unions Don’t Want You to Know This Labor Day

A male doing electrical work with a ball cap and safety glasses on

This Labor Day, the Biden administration and Big Labor will no doubt tout the alleged successes of President Joe Biden’s “whole of government” push to increase unionization in the workplace and unions’ modest successes in breaking into a few big corporations. But those stories will also leave a lot out. They’ll leave out the side of the story that unions don’t want workers to know.

That side of the story includes the fact that unionization reached an all-time low of 10.1 percent in 2022 (and only 6.0 percent among private sector workers) as worker satisfaction reached an all-time high of 62.3 percent (according to The Conference Board’s measure, which began in 1987). It also includes the fact that while non-union wages increased by 24 percent over the past five years, union wages rose by less than 17 percent.

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$700 Million in Pandemic-Era Loans Was Not Enough to Save Yellow Corp. Trucking

Trucking company Yellow filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday after receiving more than $700 million in COVID-19 pandemic program loans from the federal government, according to a press release from Yellow.

The 99-year-old company ceased operations of its more than 12,000 trucks on July 30, ending its less-than-truckload business, a shipping service that does not require a whole truck to be filled and was utilized by companies like Walmart, Amazon and small businesses that did not have enough freight to ship in a full truck. The bankruptcy follows a history of financial trouble, with the company receiving $729.2 million in pandemic-era loans from the Trump administration in 2020, and had a total debt of $1.5 billion, according to The Associated Press.

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Teamsters Officials Forced out of LA Trucking Company After 80 Percent of Workers Sign Petition to Remove Them

The union for a Los Angeles trucking company, Teamsters Local 986, was forced out after nearly 80% of workers signed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to remove it.

The National Labor Relations Act governs private sector workers, unionization and how workers can remove a union from their workplace. In 27 right-to-work states, union payments are voluntary. In California and other non right-to-work states, union payments are mandatory for all unionized and non-union employees.

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Commentary: Reviving The Conservative Heart of Organized Labor

It is no coincidence that what finally broke the Soviet Union was a Catholic trade union — a group of shipyard workers, led by an electrician and motivated by a faith that their oppressors deemed an opiate.

Christianity and its sweeping social vision enlivened the workers in Gdansk and their entire nation and, a decade later, a totalitarian superpower claiming to speak on behalf of all workers around the world had vanished. The forbidden revolution of workers bound together in solidarity around a shared vision of dignity, work, and the common good did what tanks and armed divisions had failed to do: it ended communism and gained freedom for millions.

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