Sean O’Brien is just Randi Weingarten in a hard hat

Conservatives in Congress have started to separate government-worker unions, such as Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, from “private-sector” unions, such as Sean O’Brien’s Teamsters. They know Weingarten and her friends are irredeemably liberal in their social policy and destructively socialist in their economic policy, so they’re treated as adversaries.But since almost 60% of O’Brien’s Teamsters voted for President Donald Trump, conservatives think they could possibly be allies. Some populists on the Right even argue that O’Brien’s leftist policies should be adopted.But this division is based on a myth, and making policy rooted in fiction is unhelpful and won’t help conservatives manage a new, working-class coalition. Organized labor leadership is united in its leftism, and appearances otherwise are just window dressing. For one thing, the labor movement is changing, and few unions are purely “government employee unions” or “private sector unions.” Many contain both. Take the United Auto Workers, best known for having represented workers at the Detroit Three automakers for the better part of a century. That union is typically thought of as “private sector.”But while it is primarily a private-sector union, in recent years, as its core industrial membership has declined, the group has gone on an organizing spree outside the manufacturing industries. It has added members in higher education, other government services, and casino operations. As of 2023, the UAW represented as many workers in the University of California system — a government enterprise — as it did at General Motors.And while its Harvard graduate-student members and casino dealers might not be government workers, their daily bread relies on the good favor of Big Government, which subsidizes and licenses their employers.So, if the “private-sector” UAW is also a government union, what about the “government union” SEIU, widely known as activist and left-wing? In addition to its government-sector members, the SEIU also represents nominally private-sector workers, including its old base constituency of building-services workers and a good chunk of its new base constituency in healthcare support services.Empowering private sector unions, therefore, directly empowers a group that contributed $35.5 million to Democrats and liberals against a paltry $4,531 to Republicans and conservatives in 2024, according to OpenSecrets data.Given how the distinction between government unions and private unions is quickly eroding, it shouldn’t surprise anybody to see private unions rush to the defense of government union privileges. When Iowa compelled its local authorities to comply with state rules requiring government unions to be periodically reauthorized, the Teamsters union, which has made overtures to the Right, led protests against the legislature.When the Supreme Court considered Janus v. AFSCME, in which it ruled that government unions could not compel nonmembers to pay union fees, private-sector unions came to their defense. The Teamsters, the Laborers, and the Machinists filed briefs supporting compulsory government-union fees.The left-wing advocacy goes beyond the economic realm. Liberal-to-open-borders immigration policies have been endorsed by the primarily private-sector Unite Here and UFCW alongside largely government unions.HOW TRUMP CAN STOP BIG LABOR FROM STEALING $100 MILLION FROM DISABLED CAREGIVERSUnions across sectors, including the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, and largely private-sector Communications Workers of America, want contracts to cover sex change procedures and abortions, while other unions demand workers submit to diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.Conservatives should not expect organized labor, whose members are now nearly half directly employed by governments, to be anything other than fully committed to Big Government and other entities that support Everything Leftism. There’s no clean way to divide organized labor against itself, so any conservative who wants to empower union bosses needs to know they are empowering all of them, including the ones they know better than to help.Michael Watson is research director for Capital Research Center and is the managing editor for InfluenceWatch.org and the Who Funds That podcast.