The consistent decline in union membership in the US over the last several decades has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion in capital held by labor organizations. These labor organizations are distinguished in the history of the US labor movement as state unions, which the NLP characterized as, “The state-sanctioned and state-promoted merger of the preceding trends of company unionism on the one hand, and the right-wing of the business union leadership, which advanced what the Trade Union Educational League called ‘trade union capitalism’, on the other.” This phenomenon has its origin in the New Deal. However, over the last several decades of state unionist domination of the labor movement, the practices of trade union capitalism have undergone their own development. It is necessary to understand contemporary trade union capitalism in order to defend and expand existing working-class concessions, which have been converted into fixed assets for the heavily corporatized establishment labor movement.

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