Is JD Vance really a friend of the union?

Earlier this year, Senate Democrats letter Criticizing Amazon’s labor practices and the retail giant’s Subcontracting supply network It was a grand scheme to prevent the drivers from forming a union. They got only three Republicans to sign the letter. After all, it was a letter supporting the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a longtime Democratic ally.

Among the GOP trio of signatories was Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who Donald Trump nominated Monday as his vice presidential nominee. Vance, who sounds more like a Democrat than a typical pro-business Republican, told HuffPost at the time that he believed Amazon was playing the game.

“There are some weird ways that Amazon treats certain people, and I think they should do better,” the senator said. “They try to exploit certain loopholes to pretend that they’re not actually employees, when in fact they are.”

Vance is part of a tiny subset of Republicans who have walked picket lines and criticized companies like Amazon for how they treat workers. These conservatives, who sometimes use language similar to that of the left, talk about the need to create more “labor power” as a check on corporate power, and say organized labor can play a role, despite the party’s long-standing antipathy to collective bargaining.

The 39-year-old Vance’s entry onto the GOP ticket has accelerated talk of a GOP realignment on economic issues that would weaken the party’s ties to big business and even allow for a dysfunctional relationship with unions. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called for just that in his speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday. In an interview before his speech, O’Brien praised Vance as “great on Teamster issues,” citing his Amazon stance and a bipartisan bill Vance co-sponsored to stop the overseas outsourcing of airline maintenance jobs.

Vance’s GOP colleague, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, made the announcement: essay The next day was titled “The Promise of Worker-Friendly Conservatism.” “Thousands of Americans voted in elections to form unions, but often never got a contract because of corporate deception. How can we let that go?” Hawley asked. (Hawley and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas were the two other Republicans who signed the Amazon letter, along with 25 other Democrats.)

The idea of ​​a pro-union Republican dawn is complicated by several facts, most notably Trump’s A clear record of opposition to unions As president, and as a union-friendly Republican like Vance, so is his voting record. Policy experts who have been thinking for years about how to rebuild unions (the number of union members in 2023 is just 100 percent) (6% in the private sector) are skeptical of conservative ideas about reform, and doubt that the “labor supremacist” stance of people like Vance extends beyond economic nationalism and tariffs.

“I would say my skepticism runs deep,” says Celine McNicholas, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and former special counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that mediates private-sector union issues.

She noted that Vance visited striking autoworkers in Ohio last year but has not yet joined them. Organizational Rights Protection ActA sweeping Democratic proposal for labor reform. Among other things, the bill would prevent companies from permanently replacing strikers.

“Vance may be a little better at rhetoric, but there’s not a lot of difference between the vice presidential candidate and Trump,” McNicholas said.

At the forefront of the conservative collective bargaining debate is Oren Cass, a veteran of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign who now runs a think tank called American Compass. The group seeks to move conservative thinking “away from growth for its own sake and toward broadly shared economic development that supports critical social institutions.”

In the interview, Cass said Vance was one of the first to support American Compass’ mission and called him “someone we’ve worked with a lot” since the organization launched in 2020.

“We want a prosperous free market, and we want that to be about delivering good outcomes for workers and their families. And if that’s the case, then for capitalism to work, workers need power,” Cass said.

Cass added that there must be a “governance mechanism” to support workers’ solidarity and exercise influence in the labour market.

“Conservatives would certainly like that, and they would prefer to do it that way rather than just tax and redistribute on the back end,” he said.

There are things that people like Cass like about unions, especially the social structure they provide, the bridge between workers and families embodied in the union hall. What they like much less is the way unions have become entangled with the Democratic Party, a natural consequence of decades of conservative, post-Reagan hostility to labor. hostile personality In American workplaces, many unions are organizing and negotiating.

Vance told the New Statesman earlier this year that he supports a form of European-style sectoral bargaining, where wages and conditions are set through collective bargaining agreements covering a wider industry rather than a single employer. Sectoral bargaining is a mainstream idea embraced by many on the labor left, who believe that the US system of corporate bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act—where unions form one Starbucks at a time and then fight for contracts for years—is broken.

Cass acknowledges that some conservative politicians may be clinging to such ideas as little more than political expediency. Union support is near its highest level in 60 years, and among Republicans, support for unions has risen more than 20 points since 2011, from 26% to 47%, according to Gallup. But Cass argues something bigger is going on.

“On a more intellectual level, it is part of a broader rejection of market fundamentalism and a taking seriously the question of what rules and institutions are actually needed for capitalism to function properly.”

So far, Republicans in Washington have not appeared to be pushing forward many bold new ideas to empower workers and encourage more organizing.

Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) proposed legislation in January known as the TEAM Act, which dates back to the 1990s in an earlier form. The bill would relax the National Labor Relations Act’s ban on employer-sponsored labor associations, or “fake unions” controlled by the company itself, making it easier for so-called works councils and other labor-management bodies to form within companies.

Rubio argues that this reform would give workers some kind of place, a desperately needed third option beyond “no representation (or) woke union leadership.” But there’s a reason why the ban on “company unions” was put in place: to prevent employers from creating fake unions led by management to sabotage real unions.

Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School, said it is dangerous to pursue such individual reforms unless they are part of a broader, holistic approach to rebuilding a broken system. Sachs co-authored a book titled “A Clean Slate for Workers’ Power.”

“I think if you just have worker councils, like the TEAM Act proposes, you’re going to end up with company unions,” Sachs said. “When you combine the opposition to the TEAM Act and the opposition to the PRO Act, it makes people like me really, really skeptical.”

In addition to barring employers from permanently replacing strikers, the PRO Act would ban anti-union “captive audience” meetings in workplaces, make it easier for newly unionized workers to secure their first contracts, and preempt state right-to-work laws. The bill’s authors believe it’s the best way to reinvigorate the labor movement within our current legal system.

It received no support from Senate Republicans.

If Vance supports sectoral bargaining, Sachs added, he should support the current progressive NLRB “joint employer” rule, which would make it easier for more workers to unionize, including Amazon drivers who Vance said were being duped by the e-commerce giant. Instead, Vance voted in favor of a GOP-led resolution that would nullify the rule.

The vote raises a crucial question for Vance: What kind of labor manager would he want to hire if Trump were in the White House? A pro-union kind, like Jennifer Abruzzo, Biden’s pick to be NLRB general counsel? Or someone on the executive side, like Peter Robb, Trump’s last NLRB general counsel, who would fight back against unions and reverse Abruzzo’s progressive reforms?

Project 2025, the White House’s transition blueprint drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and other Trump allies, includes at least one surprising fact about labor: It calls on the NLRB’s general counsel to use court orders more to get workers fired for trying to unionize back to work. That recommendation did not come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Cass said American Compass provided input on Project 2025’s labor section.)

But much of the document the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from sounds like standard conservative anti-labor policy: more oversight of unions and classifying more workers as “independent contractors.” It excludes more employers from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act, reduces the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, expands the use of child labor, and limits what workers consider to be “protected cooperative activity.”

Sharon Block, a former NLRB member who co-wrote “Clean Slate” with Sachs at Harvard, said she had a hard time seeing the Trump administration giving workers more bargaining power, no matter what his running mate says about unions. She called Trump’s last NLRB the “most anti-union” body since at least the Reagan era, and probably at any time.

“That was an incredibly anti-labor lineup,” said Block, who served as regulatory czar in the Biden White House. “And there’s nothing you can do right now to change that.”

Still, Cass said a second Trump administration could involve some reversals. He called Trump in 2016 “a dog that caught a car.” He said when he arrived in Washington, there was nothing but “the pre-Trump GOP.”

“Now we have a group of people across the policy spectrum who have actually been working on this issue and making proposals,” Cass said.

But Block said he won’t believe a Republican administration will actually implement pro-labor policies and personnel unless he sees it.

“Talk is cheap,” she said. “For working people, the policy needs to change.”