In our fifth installment of The Cato Journal’s January 2010 “Are unions good for America?” issue, we cover the fifth myth. Here is The Homeland Stupidity web site’s synopsis of this myth, and a link to each of the 12 Cato articles. Myth Number Five: Organized labor has worked to promote racial equality. 
Fact: Unions have used racial discrimination as a tool to enrich themselves, and continue to do so today. In 2008, Richard Trumka, who is now the president of the AFL-CIO, said, “We know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people.” He should, because the unions have been doing it for their entire existence, and still are, as Paul Moreno, history professor at Hillsdale College, illustrates. It isn’t — and probably never was — the employers oppressing the black, or the Chinese, or the Hispanic people. Most employers, as it turns out, really are color blind, as Martin Luther King, Jr., noted in 1957: “With the growth of industry the folkways of white supremacy will necessarily pass away. Moreover, southerners are learning to be good businessmen, and as such realize that bigotry is costly and bad for business.” As racism goes, unions made the KKK look like amateurs. Big Labor lobbied for, and got, special laws to make them completely immune for whatever they did — all the way up to outright murder. In United States v. Enmons, in 1973, the Supreme Court held that unions were immune from prosecution under the Hobbs Act if their violent acts were in furtherance of a “valid union objective.” Download the PDF here. Check out the Cato Journal and access all 12 PDFs here.
