Playing the Race Canard

Race Canard Playing the

While unions portray themselves as defenders of equality and civil rights, their checkered history — and the very nature of how they operate — tell a different story.

The nation’s largest public employee union, the Service Employees international Union (SEIU) includes a section on its website trumpeting creation of what it calls a “Racial Justice Center.”

“There can be no economic justice without racial justice,” the accompanying text

informs By JEFF RHODES us, noting VP for News & Information

that, “The Racial Justice Center was established in January of 2017 to support our commitment to all working families whether black, white or brown. It serves as a hub and resource for our work to create a world where everyone, no matter the color of their skin, can participate, prosper and reach their full potential.”

Lofty rhetoric indeed. But like most pronouncements from organized labor, SEIU’s attempt to position unions as the champion of civil rights

has to be swallowed with an entire shaker of salt, in this case because it reflects both a whitewashing of history and ignorance of the basic laws of economics.

“At SEIU,” the website wording continues, “we are coming together to reject the politics of hate and division. We are fighting back against self-interested politicians and greedy corporations who try to divide us while they hijack our economy, our democracy and our government.”

For government employee unions — which are effectively in the business of seizing as much control as possible over government by corrupting politicians with confiscated dues money — to accuse anyone else of hijacking the process is hypocrisy of the most brazen sort.

But when you have as much to hide as unions do when it comes to racism, no lie is too audacious.

Truth be told, the entire labor movement in the U.S. is based on bigotry and discrimination.

Unions, in fact, can trace their history in this country back to the years immediately following the Civil War, when newly freed black slaves migrated North and flooded the burgeoning Industrial Revolution with cheap workers.

No less a luminary in the civil rights pantheon than Abraham Lincoln recognized the “problem,” although his preferred solution, rather than simply allowing the free market to work as it was intended, was to deport the former slaves to some other country.

“With deportation, even to a limited extent,” the Great Emancipator wrote, “enhanced wages to white labor are mathematically certain. Labor is like any other commodity in the market — increase the demand for it and you increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and, by precisely so much, you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor.”

When the ex-slaves, following Lincoln’s death, stubbornly refused to be expatriated, white workers resorted to Plan B — organizing into unions employers could be bullied into dealing with exclusively.

Needless to say, job-needy blacks who might be less motivated to drive a hard bargain were strictly excluded from the club, and the racial tension fueled by the unions’ discriminatory policies boiled over with horrendous consequences. Among the worst was the so-called Illinois Coal Strike of 1898. When an agreement between the United Mine Workers and the mine owners expired, the union went on strike and violently prevented black “Shall the labor unions workers from takuse their influence to deprive the black man of his opportunity ing their former jobs. The UMW had to labor… [or] unite with those who the full support of want to give every man, regardless of color, race or creed, what Col. Roosevelt Illinois Gov. John R. Tanner, who swore he would use the calls the ‘square deal’ in the matters of labor?” state militia to “… shoot to pieces with — BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Gatling guns” any train bringing in black workers. The militia captain in Pana, Ill., was equally adamant, vowing, “If any Negroes are brought into Pana while I am in charge, and they refuse to retreat when ordered to do so, I will order my men to fire. If I lose every man under my command, no Negroes shall land in Pana.” Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor and served as the organization’s president from 1886 to 1894, and again from 1895 until his death in 1924, is widely considered one of the labor movement’s most respected figures. Yet he once famously thundered, “The Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any

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other … If the colored man continues to lend himself to the work of tearing down what the white man has built up, a race hatred worse than any ever known before will result. Caucasian civilization will serve notice that its uplifting process is not to be interfered with in any such way.”

Labor apologists, of course, will insist any unflattering differences between unions and African-American workers are ancient history, and even a superficial glance through Google will turn up a treasure trove of clumsy leftist efforts to airbrush the factual record.

Just to cite a few:

n “Unions are essential to racial justice,” Progressive.org; May 21, 2021; n “Unions are essential to eliminating racism,” Jacobin; July 7, 2020; n “How unions promote racial solidarity in the United States.” EquitableGrowth.org; Sept. 2, 2021; and, n “Why labor and the movement for social justice should work together,” PopularDemocracy.org.

Even more cringeworthy, however, are the multitude of unionproduced missives assigning racist motives to right-to-work legislation.

n “The racist roots of right-towork,” AFSCME.org; n “The racist history of right-towork,” LaborNotes.org; n “The ugly racial history of right-to-work,” DissentMagazine.org; and, n “Racist history of right-towork shows threat to black, Latino workers,” ChicagoReporter.com.

But just like opponents of voter ID laws, who assume black voters are less likely than other to possess a drivers’ license or other identification documents, right-to-work critics only expose their own biases by suggesting black workers need to be compelled to join a union because they can’t be trusted to decide for themselves whether doing so is worth the cost in dues money.

The point is, why should anyone be surprised to discover the racist skeletons in organized labor’s closet when the entire movement is based on principles that, whether intentional or not, feed discrimination as oxygen does a flame?

As Lincoln correctly observed, reducing the supply of any commodity will increase the cost to obtain it. Unions exist to raise the wages of their members by erecting barriers to entry into the labor pool and artificially suppressing the supply of workers.

Unhappily for the union narrative, this dynamic plays right into the hands of employers predisposed to discriminate against minority workers by reducing the cost of doing so.

Acclaimed economist Thomas Sowell, in “The Economics of Discrimination,” explains:

“To the extent that organized labor succeeds in raising pay levels above where they would be under supply and demand in a free market, (it) provides incentives for employers to hire fewer workers because labor is more costly — both absolutely and relative to the cost of capital that can be substituted for labor. At the same time, wage rates raised above the level that would prevail under supply and demand attract more workers, who apply for jobs that have higher pay. The net effect is that organized labor tends to create a chronic surplus of job applicants. Given that surplus, the cost to the employer of turning away qualified applicants from the

‘wrong group’ is less that than it would be if the employer had to be concerned about finding enough similarly qualified replacements for those who have been arbitrarily rejected.”

In simple terms, this means employers forced to pay inflated union wages will, logically enough, hire fewer workers, putting jobs at a premium.

Gifted this arbitrarily created “buyer’s market,” an employer will suffer little or no financial penalty for indulging in the luxury of hiring a worker on the basis of skin color rather than actual qualifications.

Thus, for all their preening when it comes to racial justice, union leaders are either consciously promoting — or willfully ignorant of the logical consequences of — an economic system that makes racism more likely rather than less.

And why not? The union model is nothing more or less than the physical manifestation of the sort of collectivist ideologies that have stifled freedom and opportunity for more than a century while benefiting only the anointed few wherever they’ve been adopted.

By contrast, no form of government has ever come close to capitalism when it comes to ensuring racial equality.

Again, quoting Thomas Sowell, “Free market capitalism provides information and opportunity that creates incentives for us to serve each other — regardless of how we look or what we believe. In other words, free markets destroy racism.”

None of which is to suggest that union leaders are closet bigots keeping their true feelings under wraps. Given the level of support — and their unwitting members’ dues money — funneled by unions to the Black Lives Matter movement, to say nothing of the irrational attachment of the nation’s teachers’ unions to the Critical Race Theory curriculum, there is little doubt organized labor does indeed see itself as a champion of civil rights.

The reality, however, is much different. First and foremost, unions care about preserving and growing their wealth and influence.

Writing for the CATO Institute in 2010, Peter Moreno rightly noted, “The claim that organized labor has been a force for racial egalitarianism can only be called a myth. It is one of the many myths that pro-union historians have perpetuated … (but) perhaps the greatest myth of all is that organized labor is good for workers generally. In fact, unions transfer income from the unorganized to the organized, and depress total income to such a degree that even organized workers are poorer.”

No matter what color they may be.

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