A voyage through Europe’s electoral general strikes

The ostensibly right-leaning American Compass and its allies, not all of whom I’m sure are funded extensively by the socialist and socially liberal William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, have proposed adopting European-style “sectoral bargaining.” This is a policy whereby entire industries, rather than individual firms within the industries, are subjected to the same collective bargaining contract; one monster labor union that unites them all! Right-leaning advocates of this change have claimed that with this power to negotiate economy-wide contracts, unions would become politically responsible. Advocates also argue these supercharged Big Labor bosses might agree to ease regulations on certain employment practices in exchange for employer concessions on other, more important employment practices (think easing a work hour limit in exchange for a predictable scheduling mandate or protection from layoffs).

There is no reason to think any of this would happen. Why would a left-wing political faction become more centrist and more concessionary after being given obscene amounts of private political power? Instead, there is plenty of reason to think organized labor would use additional power to advance Everything Leftism at ludicrous speed.

Into evidence, I have entered the experience of Continental Europe, which uses sectoral bargaining schemes to ensure that nearly all workers are “covered”—subject to, whether they want to be or not—contracts agreed between employer cartels and union commissars. We now have two more pieces of evidence that sectoral bargaining leads not to responsible negotiation but instead to political radicalism (perhaps in the hope of a red workplace).

Get your passports ready, because we’re on a trip to France (again) and Spain.

Arriving at De Gaulle

First stop France, which I have held up as the totemic example of “why not to do sectoral bargaining” since American Compass and its allies began proposing inviting that policy Trojan Horse into American political-economic life. If you had plans to visit Paris over the past couple of weeks, a combination of organized labor, literally unionized students, and the general “Everything Leftist” Omnicause groups probably wrecked it. As my newly-minted colleague Sean Durns wrote in National Review:

Riots have engulfed French streets in recent weeks. Thousands have been arrested, and hundreds of businesses and schools have been burned down or forced to close their doors. Mere days before the violence erupted, when French President Emmanuel Macron took the dais at the United Nations, he didn’t rail against the burdensome regulations or the nihilism that has left his nation and others on the continent fractured and lagging in economic growth and political freedom. Instead, Macron spent an inordinate amount of time condemning Israel.

Sean has written extensively on the connections between the riots and France’s post-colonial and immigration histories; I commend his writing. But the roots of the latest Omnicause riots are not what we’re interested in: we’re interested in the labor angle.

And quelle horreur, France’s militant labor movement is providing institutional support to the so-called “student demonstrators.” France24, a French government-funded English-language media outlet, reported:

University students were prominent in Tuesday’s demonstrations, alongside teachers and union leaders.

They were also backed by far-left opposition France Unbowed (LFI) party, whose chief, presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Melenchon, was seen among crowds in Paris.

In short, the student demonstrators have the support of the unions (including an official Union of High School Students), Greta Thunberg, and a left-wing opposition party. How left-wing? Well, Melenchon’s party (La France Insoumise) is considered to the left of the Parti Socialiste, the main party of the European social-democratic left in France. In the European Parliament, LFI sits alongside the openly Marxist Workers’ Party of Belgium, Cyprus’s Progressive Party of Working People, and the Portuguese Communist Party, among others. This isn’t the “conservative heart” of organized labor American Compass told me existed.

On to Barajas

The French demonstrations are being conducted in the shadow of the country’s 2027 open-seat presidential election, in which Melenchon is among the leading candidates. (Public opinion polls show Melenchon in a multi-way race with centrist, center-right, and Parti Socialiste candidates for the second place in a runoff election with controversial nationalist member of parliament Marine Le Pen.) But Spain is also convulsing with union-directed demonstrations in the shadow of a forthcoming election, so now we hop over to Madrid.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s wafer-thin left-wing parliamentary coalition fell earlier this month after Junts per Catalunya, a Catalan separatist party that supported the coalition, voted against a bill that would have banned evictions amid left-wing demonstrations; this was in response to the eviction of an 87-year-old Madrid resident who subsequently died in hospital.

Junts per Catalunya defended its defection by quite correctly predicting an eviction prohibition would “reduce the supply of rental housing and increase prices.” Clearly more concerned with separatism than socialist housing policies, Junts per Catalunya had initially supported Sanchez’s coalition because the alternative, a right-of-center opposition, militantly opposes Catalan independence.

After the vote, Sanchez called a snap general election. A vote that would have occurred sometime next year will now take place in late November. Opinion polls show the Sanchez coalition trailing the combined strength of the center-right Partido Popular (PP) and the Euroskeptic-conservative Vox parties.

But Spain’s parliamentary seat allocation rules are fiendishly complicated and numerous regionalist parties such as Junts will win seats. This could make it possible for Sanchez to form a minority cabinet while losing the “popular vote,” as he did following the 2023 elections. (Critics of the Electoral College should note that it isn’t that alien to contemporary world democratic practice.)

With the PP in pole position to retake power for the first time since 2018 and the “far right” Vox potentially set to enter a government coalition for the first time since the party’s 2013 foundation, Spain’s labor unions are now rushing to Sanchez’s defense. And they plan to use sectoral bargaining’s ultimate weapon: the political strike.

Reuters reports:

Trade unions in Spain on Wednesday announced a ‌nationwide general strike over housing issues for November 11, a protest that will take place a few weeks before a snap election in which rising rents and evictions have become campaign topics.

The country’s two largest unions, ​UGT and CCOO, said they had agreed on the date, although it still ​needs to be formally ratified by other unions in a meeting later ⁠on Wednesday. It will be the first general strike jointly backed by Spain’s two ​largest unions in 14 years.

The “general strike” is the leftist dream—using strong, politically educated and leftist-vanguard-directed labor unions to force the bourgeois regime (or in this case, the bourgeois opposition coalition) to collapse. Once again, the myth of the nonpolitical labor union so dearly desired by American Compass’s rhetoric reveals itself.

For its part, the UGT (Union General de Trabajadores), a major labor union involved in sectoral bargaining in the Spanish economy, is directly tied to Sanchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español or PSOE), so its participation in fundamentally electoral political activity using its role in the economy is hardly unexpected.

The CCOO (Workers’ Commissions or Comisiones Obreras) union is marginally larger than the UGT and also profoundly partisan. It has historical ties to the Communist Party of Spain and is aligned with radical-left factions allied with Sanchez’s government. CCOO’s secretary-general at the time of Spain’s transition from the Franco regime was elected to the first democratic Spanish parliament of the modern era as a member of the Communist Parliamentary Group. The current leader of CCOO was rumored as a potential parliamentary candidate—if not party-list leader—for the radical-left coalition, though he disavowed interest in running so he could focus his political advocacy through the CCOO union. The nonpolitical interests of rank-and-file workers are clearly not at the top of the agenda for this labor boss.

Home at Reagan

The experiences of France and Spain once again make clear that sectoral bargaining on the European model is a path to a more political and more radically leftist labor union movement, not a responsible and apolitical one. If you are a leftist, the sort of person who is still sore about the 1990s renaming of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, then giving organized labor the powers it has in France and Spain to shut down wide expanses of the economy and civic life to paint the country socialist red makes perfect sense. For those who aren’t leftists, the uses of the expansive powers Big Labor enjoys in Europe should be a warning not to go where American Compass and its leftist funders point.