Few organizations in North America sold out during the COVID-19 pandemic as much as labor unions. This was their time to shine, and they blew it. Some unions had bright spots during the pandemic, but many unions proved to be controlled opposition. They’ve essentially become establishment shock troops. This is especially gnawing because I was a longtime union supporter and attended many rallies against union-busting “right-to-work” laws in the 2010s. During past crises—even pandemics—unions were at the forefront of economic justice, racial equality, and civil liberties. All of these values were shattered during COVID.
Instead of trying to protect jobs, workplace safety, and policies supported by workers, some unions did the precise opposite. There’s a reason somebody on Reddit’s “LockdownCriticalLeft” forum said, “Unions more like poo-nions.”
Unions that supported the “new normal” are company unions or yellow unions. Those are terms for a union that is disproportionately influenced by an employer and is not truly independent. Company unions violate international law and U.S. federal law. They’re illegal, yes, but also widespread and powerful. Even the AFL-CIO itself has become one large company union. The AFL-CIO fought harder to keep America closed than it did against “right-to-work” laws. There is no mistaking that. The AFL-CIO has a rule disallowing member unions that promote authoritarianism, but this rule is ignored.
Lockdowns unambiguously killed jobs. Yet many unions took positions that were identical to chamber of commerce groups or corporations where their workers worked, which often meant a stance supporting lockdowns or policies generally opposed by workers. I read on a website that one of America’s biggest unions was taking payoffs from a major corporation where its workers were employed even before the pandemic. I truly believe this.
America’s major teachers’ unions were an unchecked disaster. The degree to which they failed America’s children during the pandemic is absolutely breathtaking—and frankly inexcusable. But even teachers’ unions can’t be painted with a broad brush. A Reddit user posted that their school district had its own small union that supported fully reopening schools and offering children a completely normal school experience. Unfortunately, that stance was not reflected by larger teachers’ unions—who preferred instead to let teachers get Zoomed right out of their job.
Online posts suggested that British teachers’ unions may have been generally better than American teachers’ unions. Some Canadian teachers’ unions may have also been at least somewhat respectable. CTV reported that teachers’ unions in Ontario slammed Doug Ford’s government for trying to permanently replace in-person education with online schooling. Union officials said that the lack of in-person options had already driven many students to drop out of school.
Canadian unions in many other industries also seem to have done better than U.S. unions. The Ontario Federation of Labour issued a press release in May 2021 blasting expansion of lockdown powers as “a power grab by Ford’s Conservatives.” But it was a different story in Alberta. The labor movement in Alberta was dominated by one corrupt union, which demanded new lockdowns and other tyranny.
In part of Texas, the labor movement seemed to consist entirely of a handful of corrupt unions. Yet their brand of corruption wasn’t completely new to the area during the pandemic.
Internet posts indicated that some unions representing amusement park workers supported reopening the parks like normal. However, other such unions opposed it even when reopening was safe—thereby turning their backs on their workers.
One of the biggest tragedies is that America’s economic standards had declined so much in the first place. The media had spent 30 years boasting about all the manufacturing jobs going away, and about how everyone should be satisfied with service jobs that had dangerous conditions, lower pay, more sexual harassment, less union representation, and less opportunity for advancement. If we didn’t get the jobs we were promised growing up, our faces were laughed in. We were called lazy and told it was our problem. During the pandemic, however, even these service jobs were lost. We had to be thankful for employment that was considered inadequate not long before!
This type of condescension was also on display in Canada in December 2021. In a CBC appearance, Dr. Peter Jüni, scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, scolded restaurant workers to “stop moaning” about lockdowns threatening their jobs. This was after a report by the Canadian Medical Association attributed numerous deaths to COVID restrictions.
As the pandemic slogged along in 2020, Gavin Newsom cut California state workers’ pay by more than nine percent. In 2021, Newsom faced a recall drive because of his botched pandemic response. The incompetent Democrat blamed the recall on Republicans, but many Democrats who once backed Newsom signed the recall petition and voted to recall him. There was even a “Democrats Against Newsom” page on Facebook that lambasted his lockdowns. Despite Newsom instituting pay cuts and lockdowns, a chapter of the Service Employees International Union that represented state workers donated $1 million to his fight against the recall. Newsweek reported that SEIU leaders feared that Newsom’s defeat “could leave the state with a Republican governor who would take anti-worker positions.” As opposed to a Democratic governor who takes anti-worker positions? However, many SEIU members—including the union’s incoming president—opposed the donation.
SEIU support of Newsom was another occasion in which a union mimicked the stance of big corporations during the pandemic. The campaign against Newsom’s recall received a $40,000 donation from Paramount Pictures. A Paramount spokesperson said the contribution actually came from Paramount’s parent company, ViacomCBS. A media company that had a major news operation donating to a political campaign was a red flag. Before the pandemic, my writings had dinged CBS repeatedly for coverage favoring Republicans and right-wing policy stances. But during the pandemic, CBS managed to pick the very worst Democrats to donate to.
Union corruption became so bad that it helped prompt the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) to release an article in April 2021 titled “Down With the Lockdowns!” The piece said lockdowns were “a reactionary public measure” imposed by “parasitic bourgeoisies.” The article said, “Around the world, the pro-capitalist leaders of both trade unions and workers parties have loyally collaborated with the ruling class in its offensive.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot made inexcusable missteps at dealing with COVID—which caused her to come in third place in her 2023 reelection bid—but even she criticized the Chicago Teachers Union for hamstringing the reopening of schools. One of the union’s most aggravating episodes was when one of its leaders who fought tooth and nail against reopening posted a photo of herself vacationing in Puerto Rico. If it was unsafe to reopen schools, how was it safe to go on vacation? Lightfoot admitted, “When you have unions that have other aspirations beyond being a union, and maybe being something akin to a political party, then there’s always going to be conflict.” Lightfoot even feared that the union’s main goal was to “take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government.”
Lightfoot later linked a wave of carjackings with remote learning. The Chicago Teachers Union condemned this statement like the big crybabies they were.
Perhaps the unions’ corruption shouldn’t be too surprising. In 2021, unions and the Democrats connived with Republicans and Big Business to defeat an affordable housing referendum in Cincinnati. Some of the unions’ excuses for opposing the measure sounded like they were straight out of the pages of the Tea Party. In 2016, the despicable Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers said she wanted to “go after” another union because it endorsed Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. In 2020, actors sued their union, SAG-AFTRA, because the union made changes to its health plan that robbed longtime members of coverage. In 2022, the main teachers’ union in New York state supported a bill to shift billions of dollars in retirees’ savings to private equity firms where rich investors could gamble it away. All of this is in addition to police unions defending bad cops. Some unions are pitting different fields of work against each other instead of showing solidarity.
In 2020, Nevada’s influential culinary union bashed Sanders for supporting universal healthcare. This corrupt union went on to be at the forefront of lockdown totalitarianism in Nevada.
COVID has also been used as an excuse to bust unions. When workers at an Amazon hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport tried to unionize, Amazon said an organizer of this effort was fired from the company’s Staten Island facility for breaking social distancing rules. We can’t paint every union drive with the same brush. Much as some schools and commentators didn’t fall to the pressures of COVID maximalism, not every union was as bad as the AFT and its ilk.
Lockdown culture has helped separate the wheat from the chaff. Now it’s easier to see which unions are valuable and which are company unions. As company unions are already banned by international law, there needs to be a legal crackdown against company unions—including those that have promoted the “new normal” instead of representing workers, and that includes even the AFL-CIO. Workers in the U.S. may also file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.