RALEIGH – Words are weapons in politics.

I don’t just mean in the sense that words are a means of conveying rhetoric attacks and defenses, though of course that is true. A chief function of (limited) government, and thus a core element of the birth of any civilization, is to transform conflicts from violent to verbal. Although politicians and activists sometimes forget or obscure the fact, it is important to remember that politics is ultimately about physical force. It seeks to determine under what conditions force should be used to compel people to behave a certain way or to surrender resources to the state to finance a public function.

My point here is more specific: the choice of a particular word can be invested with major political significance. Because our language has a large vocabulary of synonyms and antonyms that bear varying shades of meaning and emotional baggage, the parties to a political dispute have a strong incentive to choose words likely to frame the debate to their advantage – and then to have those words become the standard parlance.

I was thinking about this subject Monday while hearing reports of a rift within the AFL-CIO. Most media reports call the organization a “labor federation,” which makes sense, as would “labor association.” The members of the AFL-CIO are called “labor unions,” except when it is deemed disadvantageous to do so.

Over the years, I’ve probably had about half a dozen serious arguments with lawmakers, reporters, and others about the use of the term “labor union.” Specifically, they don’t like it used to describe the North Carolina Association of Educators and the State Employees Association of North Carolina. Both organizations play a significant – though not equivalent – role in state politics, and neither wants to embrace the term “labor union” in one of the strongest right-to-work states in the country.

Unfortunately for them, the term sticks. It is the only meaningful description of what the groups do and how they fit into the national context. This is particularly true for NCAE, which is an affiliate of the National Education Association. Members of NCAE, an “association,” are also members of NEA, a “union.”

Those who wish to downplay talk of NCAE as a union typically make the claim that since North Carolina does not allow formal collective bargaining between government workers and the state, NCAE can’t be considered a union. This is an example of politics masquerading as semantics. Labor unions existed for many decades before there were laws requiring employers, public or private, to treat unions as collective-bargaining agents. No one doubted that these organizations were “unions.” Only later was it suggested that a group shouldn’t be called a union unless it has the legal right to represent its members – and even non-members, outrageously – in binding contract negotiations.

In practice, groups such as NCAE and SEANC do bargain collectively with the state in the sense that their officers spend much of their time seeking pay increases, protecting benefit programs, and the like. I don’t necessarily oppose these efforts, by the way, but I do oppose the pretense that they are not union activities.

In a truly free society, labor unions would certainly exist and might even thrive – assuming that the benefits they offered their members justified a voluntary membership fee. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.