As soon as the votes were counted in Chicago’s mayoral election, declaring Brandon Johnson, a longtime Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) leader as both a rank-and-file member and staffer, the winner, the concern trolling began. Conservative and liberal pundits had questions. Or rather, one question: How could Johnson represent the “public” when he’s “beholden” to the teachers’ union?

Since Matt Yglesias is the smartest of these pundits, I’ll pick on him. Writing in the Washington Post, he deplored the choices before the voters in Chicago’s mayoral election, with Paul Vallas representing the police unions and Johnson representing the teachers’ unions, calling the situation “a warning to anyone who cares about the future of American cities.” Yglesias’s big fear? Johnson won’t “allocate fiscal losses among the city’s relevant stakeholders.” In other words, Yglesias fears that Johnson won’t deliver the austerity that Chicago’s imagined “public” needs — that Johnson won’t screw over the city’s workers.

Yglesias is probably right that Johnson will not throw the city’s workers to the wolves of Reaganite, Heritage Foundation–style fiscal logic. But he’s wrong to worry about this. Unions are the principal and one of the only institutions in American life that democratically represents workers. The union is the only collective form we have that allows workers to contest bosses’ power and fight for their own interests — and occasionally, to win.