North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) endorsed Joe Biden for president in yet another blow to the theory that stereotypically blue-collar unions might be political allies to conservatives.
NABTU is the trades-union segment of the AFL-CIO. It has 14 affiliate unions, including the IBEW, the Teamsters, the Laborers’ Union, and SMART. In a statement on Wednesday, president Sean McGarvey said, “North America’s Building Trades Unions can honestly say no elected official has shown our members and their families more respect than President Joe Biden. Through his policies and his personnel, President Biden has demonstrated his laser-like focus on not only rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing sector but rebuilding the American middle class itself.”
This is a vital point for union-curious Republicans to understand: It’s impossible to out-union Democrats. There is nothing Republicans can offer unions that’s better than what they’re getting from Democrats.
Biden appointed a former union president, Marty Walsh, as secretary of labor and is currently ignoring the will of the Senate to keep the pro-union acting secretary of labor, Julie Su, in office. Biden signed a $1.1 trillion infrastructure law, and now the Department of Labor is using the Davis-Bacon Act to exclude nonunion contractors from infrastructure projects. The American Rescue Plan Act that Democrats passed with zero Republican votes in 2021, supposedly for Covid recovery, included $86 billion in taxpayer money for insolvent union pension funds, with no requirements to reform the pensions at all. Biden appointees to the National Labor Relations Board will side with unions on just about anything, including protecting abusive employees from firing, ordering do-over representation elections when unions lose, and no longer requiring secret ballots in those elections. And Democrats have a decades-long track record as the party that bends over backwards to do anything for unions when it’s in power.
What more could Republicans possibly offer to unions in exchange for their political support? It’s hard to say. What more could unions possibly want? That’s easier to answer: They want the PRO Act, the repeal of right-to-work laws, a higher minimum wage, and the nationalization of California’s A.B. 5 restrictions on independent contracting, in addition to essentially the entire wish list of progressive policy goals. For example, another recent statement from the NABTU includes praise for Biden’s American Climate Corps, a New Deal–style program for environmentalist projects.
The price of union support for Republicans is giving up conservative policy principles. Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), in pursuit of union support, has already given up on right-to-work. Other Republicans would be wiser to avoid that path altogether and accept unions for what they are: part of the progressive movement. That means sticking to the approach conservatives have taken since the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947: ensuring union membership and financial support is always voluntary, mandating transparency on union activities, and limiting unions’ power to harm the economy with labor disputes.