Unions

Conservative opinion on trade unions is divided in a way that surprises people who expect uniform hostility. The association itself is a conservative institution: workers combining voluntarily to bargain, insure one another and defend a trade is exactly the kind of intermediate body between the individual and the state that Burke, Tocqueville and Nisbet all wanted more of. The objection begins where voluntary association ends, at compulsory membership, at legal immunities granted to no other private body, and above all at public-sector unionism, where the union bargains against taxpayers with politicians it helped elect.

Key Takeaways

• Britain’s Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 criminalised worker association and were repealed in 1824; the Trade Union Act of 1871 gave unions legal standing.
• The American Wagner Act of 1935 established collective bargaining rights; the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 restricted secondary boycotts and permitted state right-to-work laws.
• Franklin Roosevelt opposed collective bargaining in the public service, writing in 1937 that it could not be transplanted into government.
• Hayek’s objection is specific: not to unions but to the legal privileges that let them coerce workers who have not joined.
• Catholic social teaching from Rerum Novarum in 1891 defends workers’ associations, and Christian democratic parties across Europe were built on that defence.

History And Context

British workers who combined were criminals until 1824. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, passed in the panic following the French Revolution, made association to raise wages a summary offence; Francis Place and Joseph Hume secured repeal a quarter-century later. In 1834 six Dorset labourers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were transported to Australia for administering an oath while forming a friendly society, a public campaign won them pardons in 1836, and they returned to Britain over the following three years. The Trade Union Act of 1871 finally settled that a union was not an unlawful restraint of trade.

The American sequence ran later and harder. The Knights of Labor formed in 1869, the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers in 1886. Courts treated strikes as conspiracies and issued injunctions freely until the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932. The Wagner Act of 1935 created the National Labor Relations Board and made refusal to bargain an unfair labour practice. Twelve years later Taft-Hartley, passed over Truman’s veto, banned closed shops and secondary boycotts and let individual states outlaw compulsory union membership.

Canada took a middle path. The Rand Formula, imposed by Justice Ivan Rand to settle the 1945 Ford strike in Windsor, required all workers in a bargaining unit to pay dues while leaving membership voluntary, and it remains the Canadian norm.

The confrontations that shaped modern conservative attitudes came in the 1980s. Reagan dismissed roughly eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers in August 1981 after they walked out in breach of federal law. Thatcher’s Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982 and the Trade Union Act of 1984 required secret ballots before industrial action and stripped immunity from secondary picketing, and the miners’ strike of 1984-85, called without a national ballot, ended in defeat for the National Union of Mineworkers after a year.

The Conservative Position

Hayek set out the argument most carefully in The Constitution of Liberty in 1960. His chapter on labour unions accepts the right to associate and to withdraw labour, then asks why unions alone enjoy immunities from tort liability and from ordinary rules against coercion. The union that pickets to stop non-members working is not exercising freedom of contract; it is preventing other workers from exercising theirs.⁴ Wage gains obtained this way, Hayek argued, come at the expense of workers outside the union rather than out of profits, so the sector is redistributive between workers rather than between labour and capital.¹

Freedom of association carries its negative form. If a person is free to join, the person is free to decline, and a legal regime that makes employment conditional on membership has converted a voluntary body into a licensing authority.

The sharpest conservative case concerns government employment, and its most-cited author is not a conservative. Writing to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees in August 1937, Franklin Roosevelt argued that collective bargaining as understood in industry had no place in the public service, because the employer is the whole people and no official has authority to bargain away what statute assigns.² George Meany of the AFL-CIO made a similar observation about the impossibility of bargaining with the government. The structural problem is circular: public-sector unions fund the campaigns of the officials who then sit across the table from them, and the taxpayer who pays for the settlement has no seat.

Conservatives also note what unions displaced. Before the welfare state, British friendly societies enrolled millions in mutual insurance against sickness and burial costs, run by their members without state involvement. That tradition of self-organisation is one conservatives want back.

Differing Positions

The case for unions rests on asymmetry of bargaining power. An individual worker negotiating with a large firm faces a counterparty that can replace him at low cost while he cannot replace his income; combination corrects the imbalance, and the eight-hour day, the weekend and workplace safety law were extracted rather than granted. Union density in the United States fell from roughly a third of the workforce in the mid-1950s to about a tenth by the 2020s, and the same period saw wage growth decouple from productivity growth, a correlation union advocates treat as causal.

Conservatives are not unanimous against this. Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 condemned both socialism and unrestrained capitalism and defended the right of workers to form associations, and Christian democratic parties in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands built durable centre-right coalitions on that foundation.³ Disraeli’s government legalised peaceful picketing in 1875. The dispute inside conservatism is about coercion and public-sector bargaining, not about whether working people should organise.

References

1. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), ch. 18, “Labor Unions and Employment.”
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Luther C. Steward, President, National Federation of Federal Employees, 16 August 1937.
3. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Encyclical on Capital and Labor, 1891), secs. 48-51.
4. W. H. Hutt, The Strike-Threat System (Arlington House, 1973).