His mistake is thinking that the way to win over working-class voters is by supporting policies favored by union leaders.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is the most pro-union Republican in Congress. Just ask him. It’s a point of pride for the senator, who argues that the GOP needs to embrace unions if it truly wants to represent working-class voters. The problem with this line of thinking is that it confuses supporting the goals of union leaders with backing workers.
The senator has introduced legislation called the Faster Labor Contracts Act. It would set a strict 100-day time limit from when the workers vote to organize to when a contract is completed. If a contract isn’t reached by then and mediation cannot solve the impasse, an arbitration panel can impose a binding two-year contract on both sides.
Management would have as few as ten days to even register a complaint about any election shenanigans before they would have to accept the results. Even if management does make a complaint, an arbitration panel could force the company to accept a union.
Hawley’s legislation would give unions a way to contest defeats that could result in them getting officially recognized as the workers’ representation despite the defeat. The legislation was pared down from an earlier, even more pro-union proposal that, among other provisions, would have prohibited managers from making the case to their workers against forming unions.
The Missouri senator also recently introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Such an increase would be a boon to union workers, since it drives up the cost of non-union labor (and collective bargaining contracts often use the minimum wage as a baseline for contract negotiations). Non-union workers — i.e., most workers — would instead feel a pinch as employers hire fewer workers and cut hours to absorb the costs.
Hawley has also come out against state right-to-work laws that prohibit private sector employees from being coerced into supporting a union if they don’t want to. Specifically, the laws prohibit union-management contracts that contain so-called security clauses requiring workers to back the union or be fired. Currently, 27 states have them. “I don’t think it is fair to ask union organizers to have to organize for people who are not paying union dues,” he explained last year. He had supported the laws previously, but now thinks “it’s not fair” that such workers get the benefit of a union contract.
Note that in each case, Hawley’s concern is what is fair for the organizers, not the individual workers. What if those workers don’t agree with what the union does? What if they don’t like the contract the union negotiated on their behalf? What if they think the union is in bed with management? What if they want to withhold the dues in protest to get the union to listen to their concerns? That would be prohibited under Hawley’s agenda.
Hawley seems to assume that unions are the collective voices of the workers. Hawley never seems to ask, If the workers in a union don’t wish to belong, then is the union really representing those workers? Is it fair to coerce those workers into supporting the union if they don’t feel solidarity with it?
Hawley doesn’t appear to have had much direct experience with unions. He never belonged to one himself, was criticized as anti-union earlier in his career, and has a lifetime rating of just 11 percent on the AFL-CIO’s Senate scorecard. In short, Hawley’s conversion to the union side appears to be relatively recent.
Labor leaders have been trying to build inroads to the Republican Party, and Hawley is the most visible fruit of that effort. President Donald Trump’s reelection plays into this. The president has a complicated relationship with unions that runs hot and cold, but his rhetoric often fits right in at a union hall. Leaders such as Sean O’Brien, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters president, are trying to build on this relationship through actions — for instance, speaking at the Republican National Convention, as O’Brien did last summer.
Hawley, who got a shout-out in O’Brien’s speech, is at the leading edge of this would-be alliance. He presents his pro-union stance as a 200-proof version of President Trump’s Make America Great Again philosophy: “There was a time when Republicans knew that American strength depends squarely on American workers — and their way of life: family, neighborhood, church, union hall,” he said in an op-ed titled “The Promise of Pro-Labor Conservatism” for the populist commentary site Compact. “I have stood on the picket line with the UAW [United Auto Workers] and the Teamsters – all Republicans should do it,” Hawley boasted.
“Hawley is part of a wave of lawmakers trying to chart a new path for the Republican Party after former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election upended the status quo of conservative politics. For Hawley, that’s meant eschewing the traditional, business-friendly stances espoused by Republicans in favor of the working class,” opined the Kansas City Star last year.
Missouri became the 28th right-to-work state in 2017, only to have the law overturned by a union-backed voter referendum the following year. Hawley had been the state’s attorney general during that period. It’s a safe assumption that Missouri voters’ rejection of the law – the referendum passed by a 2–1 margin — affected Hawley’s thinking.
Matthew Ginsburg, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, praised Hawley’s efforts during a June labor law conference at New York University. He said the senator was attempting to get the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), a union wish-list bill that overturns right-to-work laws, among other provisions, through the Senate in piecemeal fashion. The PRO Act had stalled in previous Congresses. Hawley was helping the unions reach across the aisle, Ginsburg stated.
Hawley’s mistake is thinking that the way to win over working-class voters is by supporting policies favored by union leaders. Trump himself is proof that this isn’t the case. His first administration took a free-market approach that usually had union leaders fuming, but he nevertheless made serious inroads with union voters, especially in Rust Belt states. Trump did it by going over the unions’ heads and appealing directly to the voters themselves.
It’s a lesson that Hawley seems to have overlooked.