Caesars having just reached a labor deal with the Culinary Workers Union (CWU), it’s a good time to talk about labor unions and how irrelevant they have become. Unions have been a dying breed since the 1950’s, when the percentage of unionized labor in the United States reached a high of 35%. We’re now at around 10.7%. Most union workers get their salaries from taxpayers. 34.4% of unionized workers are government bureaucrats.

Only 6.5% of the private economy is unionized, and it’s only that high because unions are protected by the federal government. They are actually allowed to commit violence against employers on a federal level, like when they strike and threaten or engage in violence against scabs and strike breakers, damage or destroy the employer’s property or even, in some cases, actually, literally, kill people. The 1973 Supreme Court decision U.S. v Enmons established that union violence against employers, including homicide, is not punishable by federal law if committed for the sake of wages or benefits. It’s still punishable by state law, but not all states actually go after instigators because it is politically unpopular. The Freedom from Union Violence Act proposed in 2007 to criminalize union violence on a federal level failed to pass. It would have prohibited obstruction of commerce, in other words picketing. Unions did not like that idea and lobbied successfully against it.

One of the last great bastions of unionized labor in the private sector in the US is on the Las Vegas Strip. “Great bastion” though is a misnomer, because while the Culinary Workers Union is the largest private sector union in the country in a Right to Work state with 60,000 members, it doesn’t have much that much power anymore.

The strike that the CWU is threatening the strip with is largely irrelevant. It will cause minor disruptions at worst if it happens, but that’s about it. No union, at least no private sector union, has the power to raise wages above market rates. They pretend that they can because that’s their whole selling point, but just like they can’t break the laws of physics, they can’t break the laws of economics either. If their demands are too high, they will lose whatever power they have left. They’re pinned down by supply and demand just like everyone else in the private economy is.