Some may see it as a chicken and egg thing, but it is not so.

There is no question as to which came first when it involves the union or the company?

During the Industrial Revolution, the owners of factories needed workers, and as society changed and private property ownership displaced them, needing work, the peasants were there to be brought into those factories and the factory owners knew that these people were desperate, uneducated, and, therefore, easy to mislead and unwillingly willing to accept the conditions as they were in the workplace.

With many workers coming from foreign countries for the promise of America who were easy to dupe because of language differences and the fantasy idea they had of the American dream, any worker could be immediately replaced by someone desperate for a job.

This allowed the owners to take any action to promote their profits even if the workers who produced those profits labored in conditions that killed them, and, although they did get paid, did not get an income that would allow the workers to live above the poverty line.

They were the working poor without any government assistance programs.

Workingmen getting together to raise wages, shorten hours or ensure employment, was illegal in the United States until the Hunt v Commonwealth (Massachusetts)decision in 1842, which ruled that labor groups were legal provided that they were organized for a legal purpose and used legal means to achieve their goals.

Prior to that, organizing and not accepting the conditions as is, was illegal.

This was a first good move, but in subsequent years the organized workers faced mass firing and, in some famous extreme cases, though not rare, death at the hands of local and national law enforcement who, favoring the rich owners who donated to the politicians in charge, shot striking workers and, in one famous case, their families at home.

From the 1920s on, the Republican Party has opposed unionizing, mainly because its members were the ones abusing the workers and getting rich off of that, and as a party it has done whatever it thought would effectively eliminate unions and return the welfare of the workers up to the largess of the factory owners.

The Republican Party has consistently supported efforts to weaken unions by eliminating or weakening legal protections for the right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

They came up with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 because workers had had to resort to labor actions like wild-cat strikes and stoppages in order to weaken unions by prohibiting many of the legal tactics that made unions strong.

Reagan attacked unions when he fired members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, and legitimized the use of non-union “permanent replacements”, commonly referred to as “scabs”, to replace striking union members. 

From 1990 to 2020, big business has given $20.1 billion in federal campaign contributions with 57% going to Republican candidates. Organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce gave 84% of their campaign contributions to Republicans, and of the top 1,500 publicly traded companies from 2000-2017, 57.7% of donations went to them as well.

During that same period, Unions invested just $1.6 billion in total campaign contributions with 91% going to Democrats.

When it comes to the way things work in the U.S., money wins out.

Unions represented 16.4 million workers (11.6% of the employed workforce) in 2019, and continue to advocate for the eight-hour day, the five-day workweek, overtime, minimum wages, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, occupational safety and health regulations, paid family leave, and the expansion of governmental programs aiding lower income workers, policies opposed by Big Business

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median weekly earnings of $1,095 in 2019, while those who were not represented by unions had median weekly earnings of $892, meaning that union workers make almost $10,600 more a year than non-union workers and have greater access to healthcare, pension (beyond Social Security), paid time off, decent working conditions, and, often, required respectful treatment from the employer.

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Since higher wages and the other benefits cut into profits, despite the numbers and studies showing that union represented workers are more productive than non-union workers, corporations oppose unions because of reduced management power over the workplace, especially when it comes to profits and making sure they go to the corporate heads and shareholders but none to those who made them possible. 

Unions reduce income inequality. Teachers’ unions, for example, ensure that all teachers, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. are paid the same in accordance with degrees, ongoing course work, and time on the job.

Often, to avoid having their workers organize, many employers get as close as they can to what the nearby unions make at similar work sites when it comes to hours, wages, and conditions of employment while still retaining certain individual actions and decisions a union contract would prevent as they are usually for the advantage of the employer and not in any way the employee, which often results in reduced wage inequality for those workers too.

I taught at a non-union Catholic high school, and then in school districts with teacher unions, and have seen this firsthand.

Ted Cruz, who again boorishly pontificated at a senate hearing, in attempting to play the guardian of union members when questioning Peter Buttigieg about Biden’s halting of the XL Pipeline, claimed this action would eliminate good union jobs, intoning with the appropriate shrugs and head shakes,

“It was disconcerting to see yesterday, the first day of the Biden administration, straight out of the gate, President Biden announced that he was canceling the Keystone Pipeline. That is a major infrastructure project. That is a project that right now today has 1,200 good-paying union jobs and in 2021, the Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs for contracts worth $1.6 billion dollars, and with the stroke of a pen, President Biden has told those 11,000 workers — those union workers — your jobs are gone.”

It might have made for good TV, but the reality is that Ted Cruz’s opposition to unions is well established, so his tactic is transparent.

From a performance point of view it was over-emoted, too didactically delivered, and transparently more of the performance it was rather than a convincing portrayal of a concern of the heart being openly and honestly expressed which should have blurred the line between acting and sincerity, so it came across as the shallow and insincere act it was..

Ted Cruz supports the cleverly misnamed “Right to Work” laws which do not guarantee good hours, wages, and conditions of employment, or even jobs, but are an attempt to prevent unions from organizing to better those things, and subjecting the workers to conditions that harken back to the days when workers were the low wage serfs of corporations, so that you have the right to a job that will remain a low wage job in spite of productivity and profit, while the employer reserves to right to pay you as little as possible and not offer benefits.

Cruz, like the Republican Party, sees unions and their supporters as enemies to be politically and economically destroyed.

In 2012 when running for the senate, Cruz wrote,

“Currently, the National Labor Relations Board is trying to force Boeing to fire thousands of workers from its factory in Charleston because South Carolina is a right-to-work state. Incredibly, the NLRB’s position is that, if Boeing closed the plant and moved all the jobs overseas, that would be fine, but it cannot employ U.S. workers in manufacturing jobs unless they are subject to union bosses and pay mandatory union dues. This makes no sense and must stop.”

A year later he co-sponsored S 204, the National Right-to-Work Act, which proposed having right-to-work at the national level, and, when running for president in 2016 Cruz said that he supported national “right-to-work” legislation because such right-to-work laws are a “fundamental right” and such laws will show that government “sides with the working men and women of this country.”

The reality is that workers, regardless of whether or not they belong to a union, lose an average of $1,500 a year in wages as a result of Right to work laws, and are less likely to have benefits with workers seeing less upward mobility than in those places without such a law.

You might have a right to get a job, but you lose any guarantee of decent hours, wages, or conditions of employment when you cannot speak in a united voice and must accept conditions as is, or its buh-bye.

Ted Cruz may want union support now as his being a cheerleader for the January 6 attempted insurrection has somewhat reduced his standing among those he already had, but his true disdain for unions was shown by his assumption they can be easily fooled by his act.