Desperation forces unions to defend projects, such as the Keystone pipeline, that are unequivocally harmful and run counter to core values of the progressive movement. Guillaume Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this month, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. His justification was that it would create jobs — albeit 35 of them, according to the State Department — for his members in the building trades union. Trumka’s stance further widened the gap between organized labor and progressives who care about the environment, all because of widespread assumptions about the value of work. In a society where wages are stagnant and good work is hard to find, it’s logical for unions to grab what they can. But such desperation also forces them to defend projects, such as the Keystone pipeline, that are also unequivocally harmful, and that run counter to core values of the progressive movement. We can see a similar dynamic at work in a host of issues. California’s draconian policy of handing out life sentences for three-time felons is a result of the corrections’ officers union’s push to create more prison jobs. The United Mineworkers of America, where Trumka was once president, decried the Obama administration’s desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for fear of hurting coal industry revenue. Military Keynesianism — the use of economic stimulation through robust war and defense spending — is buttressed in part by the unions who win jobs when their defense industry employers profit from lucrative government contracts. This cleavage between labor and the larger progressive movement occurs when unions focus narrowly on increasing the number of jobs, rather than envisioning a larger alternative economic structure that would benefit union members, nonmembers and society as a whole. It also makes the country’s union leaders side with industry and the executives and shareholders who lead it, rather than with those who favor better pay and well-being for all. Trumka has said, for example, that we need to “value work.” Congressman and likely Republican presidential candidate Paul Ryan has also stressed the need to preserve the “dignity of work.” That’s not a coincidence: It is the legacy of America’s infamous Protestant work ethic, which still holds undue influence over organized labor’s rhetoric.

Unambitious slackers

Contrary to popular misconception, preaching the value of work hasn’t always been a central plank of the labor movement. The eight-hour workday, for example, became a core demand of labor, but only through the activism of revolutionary anarchists, not labor lobbyists. Some of these radicals were executed in Chicago after the 1886 Haymarket incident — in which a peacefully rally for the measure turned violent after an unknown assailant threw a bomb at police — because they dared declare that a worker’s life should not be based solely on toil. Labor’s focus on work has enabled contemporary odious rhetoric that holds that one’s paycheck should be relative to how much one personally suffers while earning it: Wall Street apologists have defended bankers on cable news because they work countless hours and sacrifice personal freedom and their families for their institutions, while teachers, who educate and care for our youth, are portrayed as comparatively unambitious slackers.

Economic demands shouldn’t take the form

of job creation, but of expanding health care reform

that goes beyond Obamacare, so as to decouple

health care from employment.