The union movement long ago married itself to the Democratic Party, but is no longer getting a lot of love. In fact, as Jeremy Lott, an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, puts it in the Detroit News, the “DNC holds unions in contempt.”

I almost feel sorry for the union bosses, reading his walk through some of the emails analyzed so far.

 [T]he emails that have been released highlight the rather one-way relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions. DNC staffers see the unions as good soldiers in skirmishes with Republicans, as a pain when it comes to getting things done and, ultimately, as pushovers.

One staffer urged using union workers as pawns, pulling off a strike to embarrass Republicans, not to accomplish anything at all related to the workers’ interests.  But the most pathetic purloined passages are related to the facility with which the DNC trampled over the priorities of the unions.

The union-DNC alliance does impose a few constraints on the DNC, which staffers both mocked and worked to circumvent. DNC staffer Katja Greeson, for instance, complained about delays involved in getting new business cards printed.

She explained to an irked communications director that sending work to union shops caused delays. “Believe me — it is equally frustrating to us,” she said. Greeson also threatened “if they can’t deliver,” DNC staffers would “go to FedEx Kinkos” and do it themselves.

The DNC pledges to use only unionized hotels. But it turns out there’s a workaround for that, too. Trey Kovacs, who has done yeoman’s work spelunking through the DNC WikiLeaks dump, uncovered this one. In an exchange over whether they could use the non-union Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a DNC staffer says they could just get a “waiver” to use it.

“It is unclear from the emails how or what circumstances must arise to obtain a waiver, but it seems that convenience for the chairman trumps loyalty to adhering to some kind of internal guidelines of exclusively patronizing unionized establishments,” Kovacs, a policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told me Wednesday.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky