Republicans Have Anti-Worker Policies — They Are Not the Party of Labor
JASON REDMOND/Getty ImagesWith less than two months to go before the 2024 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans alike are pulling out all the stops in their quest to convince enough voters in enough very specific states to hand them the keys to the Oval Office for the next four years. After the coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ new nominee, what initially felt like an impossibly stale, brutally dispiriting matchup between two out-of-touch old white men has turned into something that looks — and feels — a lot different.It remains to be seen how a Harris administration would tackle the many major issues facing the US electorate, but her initial overtures toward progressive causes have been met with cautious optimism. Major unions, in particular, have buoyed the Harris campaign, and her focus on the “care economy” has been winning praise for her from organizers advocating for paid family leave, housing assistance, childcare, and eldercare. Most of the same major unions who endorsed Joe Biden for president quickly transferred their blessing to Harris’s campaign.At a recent rally, Harris and Tim Walz, her VP running mate and Minnesota governor, pledged, if elected, to pass the PRO Act, a broad labor reform package that has been sitting at the top of labor’s wish list for years — though actually getting it through Congress is far easier said than done. Walz is known as a pro-worker, pro-union politician, and unions like the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, and many more cheered his addition to the ticket. As the UAW opined, “Tim Walz doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk.” It’s still early days, but it seems clear that a Harris presidency, with all of its inevitable flaws, would be a million times better for unions, union members, and the working class.Then there is the Republican ticket. Donald Trump and the GOP are making a new push to convince union members to ignore all of their wildly anti-worker, anti-union policies, and vote Republican.The GOP’s latest attempt to sell itself to the very union members it has spent decades systematically disenfranchising revolves around Trump’s new VP pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. The Yale-educated lawyer-turned-San Francisco venture capitalist and author has been falling all over himself to emphasize his “hillbilly” bonafides, but he seems unable to stick the landing. He’s received a lot more attention for his wildly misogynistic comments and overall creepiness than his leaden anecdotes about his “Mamaw.”In my view, Vance’s support for workers hinges almost entirely on white Christian nationalism. He does not want to uplift the US working class in all its vibrant, multiracial, multigender beauty; he wants (white, male, Christian) workers to earn better wages so that their (white, female, Christian) spouses can stay home and raise more (white, Christian) children.Vance, like so many morally bankrupt Republican politicians before him, leans heavily on cultural signifiers — Diet Mountain Dew, anyone? — and racist dog whistles about immigration and birth rates to signal his support for certain (read: white) workers, but shies away from supporting worker-friendly policies. Earlier this year, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Vance teamed up on a piece of legislation, the TEAM Act, that they said was meant to help workers gain a seat at the table. Instead, it was really just a veiled attempt to legalize company unions (also known as yellow unions, or non-union in-house employee organizations that are dominated by their employer). In short, to quote Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, “He ain’t one of us.”Vance isn’t the GOP’s only working-class cosplayer, though, or the only person who’s trying to make the case that this time the party might actually believe in its pro-worker sloganeering (pinky promise). When Teamsters president Sean O’Brien took the stage at the Republican National Convention, he delivered a speech that criticized the failure of both parties to protect workers but included praise for several Republicans (including Vance, Trump, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley) whose anti-labor records we’ll get into below. Meanwhile, convention attendees waved “Mass Deportation Now” signs and applauded when the Teamster called Trump “tough.”O’Brien’s appearance drew heavy criticism from within the labor movement — his support of Hawley, a banker’s son with two Ivy League degrees, was found especially galling. One of the Teamsters’ own social media staffers even went rogue, tweeting from the official union account, “You don’t unite a diverse working class by scoffing at its diversity.”This is the same party that has spent decades waging war on unions. Labor historians can point to several inflection points over the years, but 1981, the year that then-president Ronald Reagan stepped in to break the air traffic controllers’ strike, resonates as a major turning point in the relationship between workers and the US corporate class. That’s when rampant union-busting and declining membership really began to hasten the labor movement’s decline. Prior to that, according to conservative think tank American Compass, Republicans generally supported collective bargaining, at least in theory; support for so-called right-to-work laws, which hamstring a union’s ability to function, gained ground during the Reagan era, and the Republican party accelerated its aggressive campaign against organized labor in the 1990s.Since then, Republican politicians have distinguished themselves by voting against raising the minimum wage; against passing right-to-work laws; not advocating for child labor; supporting racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic legislation; angling to strip funding from federal agencies that enforce labor laws; and trying to remove or weaken important worker health and safety regulations.Now we also have to contend with the horrifying, borderline-authoritarian prospects outlined in Project 2025, a chilling roadmap for a new Republican presidential administration. As Steven Greenhouse wrote in The Guardian, Project 2025 contains next to nothing that would actually improve workers’ lives, but it is loaded with anti-union cuts, corporate sweetheart deals, and culture war nonsense. If the project’s architects and proponents get their way, millions of workers could lose overtime pay, would have to struggle even harder to organize unions, and lose health and safety protections.Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that if he retakes the White House, he would likely push anti-worker legislation and kill the incredible upswing in energy we’ve seen across the labor movement. The GOP is the party of business, after all, and Trump’s business is destruction.So it is worth emphasizing — loudly and often — that Republicans do not truly care about workers, our unions, or our lives. The GOP has had countless opportunities to prove that it is genuinely interested in workers’ welfare by advancing pro-worker economic, political, and social policies — and each time, the GOP has done the exact opposite. According to Pew Research, 51% of registered Republicans are white adults without a college degree, a demographic that the media tends to blanket-label as working class; of course, some of those folks are working class, but that narrow perception of class and labor erases the vast majority of actual workers in this country.In reality, 45% of the working class is made up of Black workers, Latino workers, and other workers of color; women workers make up half of the overall total, and 8% of workers are disabled, according to data from the 2021 American Community Survey (ACS). This more complex picture doesn’t leave enough room for simplified hate, though, so of course the Republicans focus exclusively on their small slice of working-class voters and demonize the rest. But now that their candidate seems to be losing steam and their hateful MAGA movement is failing to expand, Republicans are simply looking for the next set of suckers to draw into their poisonous embrace. We cannot let them get away with it.The Republicans are trying to make fools of us by pandering to outdated and incorrect stereotypes about who union members are and what the working class is, hoping to turn us against one another by harping on perceived differences — the same way union-busters and grimy bosses have done since the beginning of wage labor in the US. But it won’t work. There are no neutral positions here — and we know which side they’re on.Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue TakeOriginally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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