Journalists are hyping up a supposed golden age for unions while ignoring their corruption and declining popularity.
Journalists are hyping up a supposed golden age for unions while ignoring their corruption and declining popularity.
M ainstream media have the nation convinced that organized labor is the best thing that has ever happened to the American workforce.
But considering that just 10 percent of America’s workers are active dues-payers, record public support for unions is attributable to the media’s idolization of Big Labor rather than to the benefits of signing up for workplace representation.
According to a new report from the union watchdog Freedom Foundation (where I work), Big Labor’s return to the spotlight coincides with unionization efforts that have taken newsrooms by storm, securing one in six American journalists as dues-paying members.
With journalists “more knowledgeable and sympathetic to labor issues” than ever before, recent union reporting insists that Big Labor is making a comeback; “that unions are good not only for individual workers but also for America itself”; and that legislation meant to ensure union accountability is a threat to democracy.
Despite the labor “renaissance” touted by unionized reporters writing for the New York Times and Huffington Post, just 6 percent of private-sector workers are members of a labor union, fewer “than at any time since the early 1900s.”
While emphasizing the benefits of unionization, Big Labor’s favorite reporters fail to mention widespread corruption plus misuse of membership dues.
In March 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce identified a slew of private-sector unions involved in more than “$3.2 million in embezzlement and $220,000 in bribery.”
This adds insult to injury for unionized workers unaware of the fact that Big Labor spends billions of dollars’ worth of membership dues paid under the guise of workplace representation to back left-wing candidates and causes during election season.
Likewise, in the public sector, the four major government unions spent $2.79 billion of member dues on progressive political advocacy from 2021 to 2022, leaving just $554 million, less than 20 percent of total spending, for “representational activities.”
Nor were public servants spared from Big Labor’s corruption. As of February 2022, the Freedom Foundation had filed 13 federal lawsuits implicating government unions in schemes to forge public-employee signatures on union-membership forms, forcing workers to pay dues against their will.
As a result, less than one-third of public workers are members of a union, the lowest on record since government-union membership peaked in the 1970s.
Finally, though reporters claim that measures to hold unions accountable in the federal and state governments “attack” workers’ rights, 87 percent of Americans, a huge majority, support legislation to this effect.
The mainstream media’s coverage of Big Labor clearly misses the mark. Beyond recent labor reporting centering on hot-button events such as organization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon amid 2023’s “hot labor summer,” coverage of unions creates a false sense of reality.
Headlines such as “Unions targeting Big Business: Disney, Mercedes-Benz, CVS face organizing campaigns,” for example, suggest sweeping unionization efforts across the private sector. But in the pharmacy industry, just 30 CVS pharmacists in Rhode Island and Las Vegas voted to join the Pharmacy Guild, a fraction of the 30,000 employed by the drugstore giant.
Luckily, Americans are taking note of the gap between glowing headlines and the reality of joining Big Labor’s rank and file. Though most express support for organized labor in theory, six in ten U.S. workers are uninterested in paying union dues themselves.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media are losing credibility, too. Polls indicate that half of Americans express doubt regarding the traditional media’s commitment to truth, leading many to seek out local, independent alternatives.
As workers continue to leave union membership behind, it’s looking like Big Labor has an expiration date. And as more Americans pursue alternate news sources, let’s hope that rampant ideological bias within the mainstream media has an expiration date, too.