8 December—Today is the 135^th anniversary (known to the great horde of pleonasts as the 135-year anniversary) of the founding of the American Federation of Labor, the country’s first really well-organized association of trade unions. To save you the trouble of doing the arithmetic, the AFL was founded in 1886.

The AFL was largely the brainchild of Samuel Gompers, born in 1850 in London, a Jewish New York cigar maker, like his father, who reveled in Hebrew but reviled Yiddish and was a rabid anti-socialist and more of a racist than most Jews of the time. He was a compromiser within the AFL and a national political activist for the benefit of the AFL and labor in general. He was president of the organization from its founding until his death in 1924, with a year off from 1894 to 1895.

In 1955, the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations—which comprised unions expelled by the AFL and had itself been expelled in the thirties—to form the AFL-CIO, which survives to this day, with just over 12 million dues-paying members. Well over a hundred specialty unions have been affiliated with the AFL-CIO through the years; and about a dozen labor-friendly organizations are allied with it.

Unions certainly were needed in the nineteenth century, quite as they are now, to support and defend workers and fight abuses committed by capital—management, the employers. Abuses were far more prevalent and blatant back then, of course, but they’re still evident here and there, even given all the often intrusive federal and state regulation in the United States. More common these days, of course, are the abuses committed by unions.

The State of Connecticut is especially friendly to and exploited by unions, as if we have to be reminded; and the state’s taxpayers are systemically and systematically abused by unions that intimidate and collude with politicians, as if we have to be reminded . . .