The freedom Ben Connelly celebrates is mostly fiction. In his “Labor Day Is a Triumph of Capitalism” for the National Review, Connelly argues that free-market capitalism deserves the holiday because it replaced slavery with legally free labor, gives individuals sovereignty over their own labor, and leaves career decisions in private hands. Unions and socialism, he says, chain that labor to collective masters. He’s wrong about what actually holds the American worker down.
Freedom to sell your labor to the only buyer in town isn’t freedom. It’s a one-party election.
Connelly is right that owning your own labor is a real principle. Chattel slavery was a horror. The right to leave an employer matters. A person who can be sold owns less of their life than a person who can quit. Concession made.
But free labor and bargaining power are not the same thing. You can own your labor and still rent it back at whatever price the person buying it offers. Ask for a raise alone, and the employer brings up the budget. Mention rent, and you have revealed the budget. One of you can wait out the other. Usually, it is not the employee.
This is what economists call monopsony. In a large share of US labor markets, a single employer dominates hiring — a hospital system, a poultry processor, a logistics hub. When only one firm is hiring, the worker’s “freedom to walk away” is the freedom to walk away from the paycheck. The employer sets the wage. The worker takes it or goes hungry.
Connelly treats this as a side issue. He wants the grand argument — freedom of contract, the dignity of self-ownership, the Confederacy as a kind of socialism. He drags in Bernard Shaw’s line about treating idlers as embezzlers of national funds and treats it as proof that all collectivism ends in coercion. But that’s bait. Shaw was describing a particular Victorian authoritarian socialism. American unionism is not Shaw’s national workhouse. A union is two parties sitting down to negotiate a contract each has the right to reject.
The argument’s favorite statistic deserves a second look. Connelly notes that 90 percent of American workers do not belong to unions and concludes that everyone is better represented by freedom from organized labor. No. The fact that 90 percent are not union members does not show that they chose the present arrangement. It shows that they are not inside an institution bargaining on their side. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 survey puts union membership at about 10 percent of the workforce and contract coverage at roughly 11 percent. The distinction matters: a worker may be eligible for benefits negotiated by a union without joining it. Membership splits stark: 5.9 percent in the private sector, 32.9 percent in the public sector. Public-sector workers are over five times as likely to belong to a union as private ones.
A landscape is not a referendum. It is a record of choices, laws, organizing drives, firings, victories, and defeats. A worker sitting alone across from an employer did not vote on the organizational chart.
This was not always the landscape. American union density reached roughly one-third of nonfarm workers during the 1950s. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 authorized state-level right-to-work laws that starved unions of resources by letting workers benefit from union contracts without paying dues. In 1981, Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers and showed which side the federal government would back. The wages have told the same story in reverse ever since.
Connelly also leans hard on the Frémont history. The first Republican presidential candidate did oppose slavery. Slavery was an evil. But the GOP of 1856 was not the friend of free labor in any sense a 2026 worker would recognize. Free labor in 1856 meant free to compete with chattel slaves for wages your boss set. The freedom Connelly celebrates is the freedom a ten-year-old had to quit the Lowell mill in 1903.
When a third of a workplace signs cards, the boss can’t quietly replace the whole crew the morning after they file for a raise. That’s not compulsion. That’s the closest most workers will ever come to the equal-footed bargaining Adam Smith described in 1776. Unions don’t chain your labor to the collective. They give you the bargaining power your individual contract never had.
The argument then gathers Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Edward Bellamy, and George Bernard Shaw and announces that they all lead to forced labor. That is what happens when a bookshelf is treated as a spreadsheet. These thinkers did not all describe the same economy or propose the same machinery. Conflating Shaw’s Victorian authoritarian socialism with the Ghent system, or with Mondragon’s worker-owned federation, is the kind of category error you commit when your only tool is a scare word.
The command-economy examples are real. Soviet, Maoist, and Cambodian communism killed tens of millions of people and crushed the workers it claimed to liberate. Full stop. The right to organize cannot exist when the state owns the factory, the newspaper, the courthouse, and the party that decides whether disagreement is permitted.
But one danger does not turn every alternative into the same danger. The Danish government does not assign you your occupation. It taxes broadly, funds universal services, and relies heavily on sector-level bargaining between organized employers and organized unions. Private firms still compete. Workers still change jobs. The state did not steal their time merely because it helped pay for a hospital. A collective agreement does not make your labor state property. Medicare is not a labor draft. A credit union is not a command economy. A worker cooperative does not abolish exchange; it lets the people doing the work own the firm and divide the surplus.
The problem is not collective provision. The problem is unaccountable power.
I’m not anti-market. I am against a market in which one side writes the rules, keeps the surplus, and calls the other side’s practical dependence a choice. That is not freedom with equal bargaining power. It is a contract performed with a microphone.
The answer is not to hand your career to a planning ministry. We know where that road goes. Build countervailing power instead. Enforce the right to organize. Let workers bargain across entire industries when bargaining shop by shop lets a nonunion competitor underbid the unionized one. Use wage boards. Tie public contracts to decent labor standards. Make it easier for employees to become owners and for owners to sell the business to them.
Count everyone a union contract covers, member or not, and Nordic coverage runs roughly four workers in five. By that same measure, about 11 percent of American workers are covered. The percentages are not an invitation to airlift a finished Danish society into Minnesota. American unions lack the density of Nordic unions; corporate employers are highly organized politically even when they bargain separately; more than seven decades of right-to-work laws and union-busting have damaged the machinery that bargaining requires.
The policy is the floor. The institutions are the building.
Worker ownership is one of those institutions. America has roughly 820 worker cooperatives and about 10,000 worker-owners, depending on the count. Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx employs roughly 2,000 people in exactly the low-wage, high-turnover sector everyone says is hopeless for organizing. Mondragon, founded in 1956 in the Basque Country, has grown to about 80 cooperatives employing roughly 80,000 people while keeping a roughly 5-to-1 pay ratio between the highest- and lowest-paid worker, and giving every member one vote regardless of capital contributed.
But worker ownership is not magic. Mondragon’s flagship Fagor cooperative went bankrupt in 2013, loaded with debt and crushed by European housing collapse and Asian competition. The federation declined to throw good money after bad. About 1,700 of Fagor’s roughly 1,800 Spanish worker-members were relocated to other co-ops in the group. That is the adult version of hope: ownership does not repeal failure. It changes who bears the failure and what happens to the people left carrying it.
The United States already has credit unions — about 145 million members — and roughly 900 rural electric cooperatives serving 42 million people across 56 percent of the landmass. Build on that habit. Create cooperative banks and shared loan funds that understand a member-owned bakery is not defective because it lacks a distant shareholder. Require public contractors to leave room for worker-owned bidders. Give co-ops the patient capital that ordinary lenders mysteriously stop understanding when the borrower shares the votes.
Anyway. The next time someone puts “free labor” at the center of Labor Day, put the bargaining table beside it. Build enforceable organizing rights, industry-wide standards, worker-owned firms, and patient cooperative finance. Then freedom means more than the right to reject a bad offer. It includes the power to help write a better one.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. This is one we can choose.
Connelly says workers are “sovereigns unto themselves.” Fine. Give them the tools to act like it.