Gorsuch, Janus, Judas, and Jimmy Hoffa

My lefty friends tend to question our friendship when they hear me opine on Hoffa being the last great labour leader in American labour movement history.

What? He was mobbed-up out the ying yang! He was a thug! He was a crook!

Well, even if that’s all true, so what? In his era, he was up against mobbed-up politicians, mobbed-up employers, private thug armies in the pay of the above, and a system that was designed from its inception to represent capital rather than labour.

He met that system on its own terms; with violence on the picket line. More often than not in the Hoffa era, the Teamsters prevailed. That’s why being a Teamster meant living the American dream back in the fifties and sixties.

That’s why Hoffa had to go.

Almost 45 years after that Lincoln dropped off Hoffa’s corpse at the loading dock of a salami factory two hundred miles from Detroit, American labour awaits with baited breath the outcome of the Janus case. Every day we see multiple opinion pieces at Fox and elsewhere about how the greedy fingers of the corrupt unions are about to be pried from the wallets of America’s working class.

Every day we see multiple opinion pieces in what’s left of the lefty press. OMG, this is the final nail in the coffin for unions… the working class is screwed!

Here’s my take, and I’m speaking as a life-long union guy who was at various times a member of the Steelworkers, the UAW, the IWA, the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Ironworkers, among others. I say, let Gorsuch give Janus his day.

If this kills Big Labour, good riddance.

Why do I say this? Because Big Labour long ago hitched their wagon to the Democratic Party. That may have meant something at one time, but as the Dems have moved ever to the right over the past two generations, Big Labour has failed to un-hitch. They have become accomplices of and stake-holders in a status quo that has immiserated the majority of American workers.

Getting rid of the status quo will allow American workers to start over.