Unfortunately, their bad prior history is playing out again in modern America

As Vladimir Lenin is quoted as saying, “Trade unions are a school of communism.”

“The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model – so successful in the 20th century, is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.

The history of labor unions has been intimately entwined with the history of the global communism movement. As the influential Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist, Anton Pannekoek wrote in his 1908 treatise, “The Labor Movement and Socialism,” “The object of the labor movement is to increase the strength of the proletariat to the point at which it can conquer the organized force of the bourgeoisie and thus establish its own supremacy.”

Vladimir Lenin agreed and made unions an integral part of the “people’s republic” he founded in 1917. “Shakedown Socialism” author Oleg Atbashian, a propagandist for the Soviet Union before he migrated to the United States in 1994, wrote that in the Soviet Union, “organized labor was part of the official establishment and union membership was universal and mandatory” and “that system’s seemingly magnanimous goals of fairness, economic equality, and social justice in real life brought forth a rigged game of wholesale corruption, forced inequality and grotesque injustice.”

If you think about it, this sounds a lot like what unions have inflicted upon the United States:

• Wholesale corruption as many union chapters that have historically acted as fronts for organized crime
• Forced inequality as unionized public employees out-earn their counterparts in the private sector
• Grotesque injustice as greedy unions strong-armed lavish salaries and benefits for themselves that bust the budgets of entire states that force non-union employees to suffer higher taxes and fewer services.

The sad thing is, for a time in the 20th century, American unions turned from this seedy past to become defenders of economic freedom. As Ivan Osorio, a labor expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes, “During the Cold War, the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and most major U.S. labor unions were staunchly anti-communist. In fact, the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland worked closely with the Reagan administration to aid the Solidarity movement in Poland.”

Unfortunately, our 21st-century unions appear to be slipping back to their traditional socialist mores and tendencies as they decline in popularity here.

Unions today loathe freedom because unions require unfree markets in order to thrive. They love big government because unions require the government to guarantee their monopolies on labor.

Because of this, unions have contributed to their increasing unpopularity in the United States, where citizens are becoming wise to the corrupt conspiracy between unions and government to extinguish their liberties.