The American Interest offers what might be termed a labor thought for today if it hadn’t been sitting in my bookmarks for a week:

It’s significant that ground zero for public sector union reform is the upper-Midwest, once the capital of organized labor. Democrats try to cast such reforms as a betrayal of workers, but in a post-industrial age when half of union members are public employees whose demands for fatter benefits packages come at direct expense of the taxpayers, many voters don’t see it that way. As James Sherk noted in our pages last year, “A movement formed to defend blue-collar laborers now fights primarily to help white-collar workers expand government.”

That point cannot be sufficiently emphasized:  labor unions, overall, are now dominated by the public-sector subsegment, which has a very different model.

In the private sector, the union negotiates with management for the share of profits from sales to customers that goes to the workers.  In the public sector, the union helps elect management with whom it can conspire to take more money from taxpayers, who must either leave the area or pay up once the unions achieve political dominance, as they have in Rhode Island.  That is, in the public sector, it’s a process more resembling theft than negotiation.

Of course, one should note that the strength of unions in the private sector, such as it is, often comes with their ability to manipulate the law to force clients — mainly governments — to use union labor or to box competitors out of big markets — like government projects.  In that regard, even more of organized labor should properly be seen as existing in the public sector.