An editorial in the New York Times raised a flutter last week in calling for expansion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “discrimination on the basis of union membership” a crime in the same way the Act criminalizes discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender and national origin. Such a move (were it ever in a million years able to make it through Congress) would allow for cases of “union discrimination” to live on beyond the NLRB process to be tried in Federal court where employers could be hit with both compensatory and punitive damages for “discriminating” against union supporters in discipline, promotion and hiring. However unlikely that nightmare scenario, the Times editorial does serve as a fine illustration of just how spectacularly dumb leftist academics can be. In making their case, authors Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit display what can only be willful naïveté as they fail to even acknowledge the rights-crushing two-ton tyrannical gorilla in the room that is contemporary American unionism. Instead the authors wax on about the Golden Union Days of Yore and organized labor as an “architect of democracy” without any concern for how real (not make-believe) labor unions actually operate. (Hint: kind of like the real vs. make-believe Communist Party) The authors then somehow conclude, “In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws.” Oh. Really. 
Never mind how little benefit contemporary unions actually provide for their customers, especially their new customers, or how undemocratic and stifling union power structures are, or how abhorrent most Americans find unions’ radical politic agendas. And never mind how American businesses have evolved in their employment practices just a bit since the days of Ebenezer Scrooge. Experience with the dark and crooked side of unionism (or faith in a direct relationship with one’s boss) can’t possibly be the reason informed workers routinely turn down union representation – at least not in the minds of Kahlenberg and Marvit – it must be the unpunished sins of dastardly black-hearted employers. The authors also wander off into the First Amendment weeds invoking the fundamental right of association, overlooking in their quest for social justice the rights of millions of Americans denied their freedom not to associate with a socialist organization (aka union) in order to gain or keep employment. Apparently, when it comes to unions, the right to associate is a one-way street paved by social engineers. The two scholars finish the Times editorial by drawing the following stunning and rather offensive conclusions: “The labor and civil rights movements have shared values (advancing human dignity), shared interests (people of color are disproportionately working-class), shared historic enemies (the Jim Crow South was also a bastion of right-to-work laws) and shared tactics (sit-ins, strikes and other forms of nonviolent protest).” Clearly the authors have never watched a video of a Teamsters convention (where human dignity is anything but advanced), nor have they looked too hard at union leadership (it’s absurdly white, male and stale especially when compared to the rank and file), nor are they up to speed on breaking union news (and the headlines coming out of old Jim Crow strongholds like Madison, Wisconsin and Trenton, New Jersey), nor do they understand the stark difference between a march led through Selma in 1965 by Martin Luther King and street theater paid for by SEIU in 2011. And shame on the editors of the New York Times for even allowing the comparison.
