What the Labor Movement Has Really Always Been About

Some great insights from Gary North:

The labor movement was never really about labor in general. It was about handpicking certain industries and certain unions. They got preferential treatment from the government. Trade union workers would never admit this, but that was always the economics of trade unionism. The broad mass of workers were discriminated against by the combined efforts of the National Labor Relations Board, the particular union, and the protected industries that had a working arrangement with the unions.... 

Trade unionism had been gutted by the combined forces of Ted Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by promoting the Immigration Act of 1965, which was signed into law in 1968. This made it possible for low-cost immigrants to compete against union members across the country. Nothing did more for the anti-union right-to-work movement than low tariffs and open borders. The Democrats promoted both policies. The Republicans did not have the votes in Congress. So, the trade union movement was sold out by the establishment Democrats at the national level. I always regarded this as fitting and proper. The feds giveth, and the feds taketh away. I saw what was happening at the time, but the leaders of the union movement, committed as they were to the Democratic Party, rarely talked about it in public. There was never any organized political opposition within the union movement to the Democrats in Congress who sold them out.