Labor Dying a Slow Death by Its Own Hand : The high salaries, plush offices and its commitment to peripheral issues betray its roots.

Organized labor attempted to flex its muscles in the great NAFTA debate. It huffed and puffed and struck the pose. It looked in the mirror and saw Sylvester Stallone. What the rest of us saw was Woody Allen. Even the Democrats weren’t spooked. More than 100 Democrats, many of them supported routinely by labor, said adios on this one.

Many of my fellow conservatives will delight in seeing labor’s slow exit. I watch this spectacle with less pleasure. My grandfather, a Lithuanian immigrant, sold rags from a cart and helped to organize a workers’ circle that was a precursor to the modern labor movement. An uncle was a union activist in Los Angeles. As a child I wore the buttons of the CIO and the old AF of L. I am a believer in free enterprise, capitalism, the enrichment of the workers through the profit of the investors. But without the intervention of the labor movement, many of today’s workers would still be putting in 80 hours a week in hot and dirty sweatshops. Organized labor enabled the workers to fight the ruthless and the greedy. That is why I grieve as I watch labor strangle on its own excess.

Membership in labor unions has declined precipitously through the years. Thanks to the efforts of the unions, few workers suffer the indignities that led them into the unions in the first place. For the most part, wages are decent, benefits are generous, workplaces are clean and safe. Class warfare, the unions’ specialty, is as out of date as the buggy whip. Labor, nonetheless, hangs on, justifying its marble buildings, plush offices and high salaries with a commitment to increasingly peripheral issues. “Solidarity”--a politically correct form of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”--puts the unions on the line in causes that are irrelevant to the concerns of most union members. Thus, labor’s leaders follow the Carters and Mondales over the cliff, while their followers follow Ronald Reagan instead.

The result, of course, is that when labor threatens, as it did in the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, it gets trapped coming and going. The people it threatens do not take kindly to threats; they don’t like the idea of appearing to be intimidated, and they don’t like the idea of setting a precedent. Cave in now, and invite more threats next time. Labor also had this disadvantage: Members of Congress know their districts, and in most districts, labor is noisy but toothless. Most American workers don’t belong to unions, and many believed NAFTA would lead to new job opportunities for them or their children. Labor’s threats merely encouraged the threatened to say “stick it.”

What’s more, labor is quickly losing what public support it once had. The labor movement goes out of its way to create enemies. It is not enough that the memory of Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis is debased by labor’s lock-step support of strikes by baseball’s millionaires; the same unions that support the petulant demands of the whining wealthy are quite willing to harm the masses when they get in the way.

It is one thing to strike against a local shop that is paying inadequate wages; it is something else to strike at innocent victims. Because it gave them an advantage, flight attendants for American Airlines chose to take a walk at Thanksgiving. Working men and women, looking forward to vacations and family reunions or to visit dying relatives saw their plans destroyed. Was this a blow at the ruthless rich? Nonsense: the corporate jets weren’t grounded.

In Boston, union members stopped rush-hour traffic at the Callahan Tunnel, which links the city with the airport, as part of a dispute with a refueling company. The company’s executives were presumably in their offices or their homes; the people who suffered were working men and women.

In nearby Brockton, teachers continued a strike, disobeying a court order, denying education to 14,000 students. This is a poor area, an area of working people. There are no English nannies at home. Brockton’s children were left to wander the streets or stay home alone. For those parents who manage to find child care, or who stay home from work, the added cost is oppressive. The union’s treasurer says: “We have to stand up for what we believe.” My grandfather would cringe.

Labor has crossed the line: It strikes out not at those with whom it contends, but at the innocent. This, the unions believe, makes a point and raises the visibility of the grievance. This is the argument of the terrorist.

Labor’s solidarity is not with the masses but with the few. It is not success that is destroying labor; it is excess.