This summer’s City Journal exposes Union U, the latest bogus discipline masquerading as a university department, as if appending the word “studies” to a political advocacy program makes it an subject worthy of academic study. These programs, funded either by state universities or labor unions, give students credit for union organizing and teach classes with a blatantly political bias.
Today, many labor programs state plainly that they exist primarily to promote unions and create a generation of advocates and activists. Their mission statements read like political manifestos rather than educational credos. Wayne State University’s labor center declares its main goal is “strengthening the capacity of organized labor to represent the needs and interests of workers” in a world of “corporate elites or state power.” The labor program at the University of California at Berkeley aims “to support the labor movement by providing research and education.” UMass Amherst says it trains students for a life in “organizations advocating for workers’ rights.”
This emphasis on advocacy has turned the classroom into a soapbox, from which professors rail against what labor considers its biggest threats. Enemy Number One is privatization, the practice by which governments contract with private companies to perform services—from running school cafeterias to picking up trash—usually done by unionized government employees. Though many urban reformers view privatization as an important way for government to spur efficiencies and save taxpayers money, a course in the University of Illinois at Urbana’s labor studies program demonizes privatization as nothing more than the “efforts of market-oriented forces to auction off public services to the highest bidder” (though usually such contracts go to the lowest bidder). According to the course description, students will learn that privatization’s nefarious purpose is to “dispense political patronage and to destroy public sector unions.”
The story exposes the labor studies programs as one of the means by which government money is used to create a demand for more government, both directly by funding lobbying and indirectly by funding the propogation of anti-market ideologies:
This elevation of activism as central to the educational experience has provided labor studies programs with a rationale for establishing numerous internship programs that send students out to battle for labor against the interests of businesses and taxpayers. Interns at UCLA’s labor program, attracted by the slogan, “If you are passionate about social and economic change, apply for the Summer Internship Program,” have helped unionize janitorial workers and have campaigned for controversial legislation to force Santa Monica businesses, including many small retailers, to raise the salaries of some employees. Interns from Berkeley’s labor center have worked on similar living-wage campaigns in Oakland and San Francisco. On the East Coast, UMass Amherst’s intern program has supplied student organizers for campaigns to unionize Georgia garment workers and Bay State nurses.
[...] And businessman Marvin Zeidler, co-owner of the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica and one of the business owners who campaigned against the local living-wage law, was shocked to learn that those out on street corners agitating in favor of the law were fulfilling university requirements. “I had no idea they used students,” he says. “As a taxpayer in California, I am funding the UC system. This is not the kind of activity I want to fund.”
