When a worker becomes convinced of the need to organize, the first question they usually ask themselves is, “What organization should I work with?” In the US, there are numerous establishment state unions, and generally, each state union has at least two major caucuses within it that are responsible for the bulk of union literature, organizing campaigns, etc. Not only this, but large firms are frequently divided into multiple unions, sometimes with competing organizing campaigns. And then within those unions, the leadership may be from diverse professions or even simply career bureaucrats with no professional experience outside the nonprofit sector. The labor movement in the US, at least superficially, appears to be a colossal mess of jurisdictional warfare that the average worker simply cannot navigate.

In fact, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) system was created this way on purpose. A similar situation predominated in the 1920s, where the overwhelming majority of American workers were unorganized and the labor movement was a loose conglomeration of gangsters, careerist hacks, and reform-minded idealists. But when the Great Depression hit, the American workers were rapidly awakened to the facts of imperialism and more and more were organized by the Communist Party. The capitalists who formerly were thrilled by the ineptitude of the union leaders realized this ineptitude made them equally inept at maintaining their reactionary control over the workers. The struggle between the reactionary factions in the labor movement weakened the ability of each faction to keep the rank and file under control. Thus, the need arose to manage the factional warfare in the labor movement to a certain extent, and for the state itself to formally encourage and promote the domination of “trade union capitalism” which had been developed by the original business unionists. This need was met by the state unionization of the trade unions, which allowed the state to directly manage “union democracy”, by restricting which unions/offices would be up for election, who would be eligible to run in those elections, controlling how the elections would be carried out, and being the ultimate arbiter and mediator when it came to union recognition and so-called “labor disputes”. This system continues today, although it has developed to a much greater extent thanks to the invention of intra-union caucuses which also hold their own elections, and the intervention of nonprofit organizations (which aren’t beholden to anyone but their funders) in union activities.

Thus, the apparent diversity of organizations in the American labor movement is in fact an illusion. The numerous state unions and caucuses taken together create the illusion of choice, but in actual fact they all practice the same nonsense of filling out government forms and working with the employers to standardize/raise the rate of exploitation. The closest thing to “freedom of choice” in the labor movement in the US is whether one joins the CIA-backed Democrat-supporting AFL-CIO or law-enforcement-infiltrated Republican-supporting unions like IBT or UBC.
Even though each union claims to be for unity, not a single one of them has been able to unite a significant chunk of the working-class for a major strike in decades, and they cannot even manage to unite themselves into a single national union center. It is objectively in the interest of the working-class that as many workers as possible be as united as possible, and for the labor movement this means raising the proportion of organized workers and straightening out the line of their organizations until they are able to merge into a single union center that is based on industrial unionism. However, the preponderance of factionalism throughout the labor movement ensures the vast majority of workers remain unorganized and ideologically, politically, and organizationally backwards.

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