On 22 November, Donald Trump did what was once unthinkable: the Republican president-elect nominated a secretary of labor who supports the labour movement’s number one legislative priority – the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Indeed, Trump’s labour nominee, the Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was one of only three GOP lawmakers to sponsor the PRO Act in 2023. Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer won instant plaudits from labour leaders, including Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers.
It’s the first tangible fruit of the realignment of the US’s two parties, and the work of a small but dogged group of conservative politicians to bring about a more labour-friendly GOP. Republicans now have a historic chance to advance the interests of their new, non-college-educated base. Labour, meanwhile, could re-emerge as an independent force, free to stand apart from and influence both parties (rather than continuing to serve as an adjunct of the Democrats).
The GOP’s populist turn under Trump has long met with scepticism from the labour left. This, even as he won a decisive margin of union households in 2016, and expanded the GOP’s appeal to working-class people of colour four years later.
The sceptics weren’t entirely wrong. Despite some early outreach to unions, Trump’s approach to labour issues in his first term was barely different from that of any conventional Republican. He appointed anti-union leaders to the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and he splurged much of his political capital on a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. Meanwhile, for some conservative lawmakers and think-tankers, “populism” became a sort of costume they’d put on while pushing the same old Reaganite agenda.
But that wasn’t the whole story. For one thing, Trump’s economic nationalism and opposition to mass migration promised to tame labour arbitrage: the ability of corporations to play populations and jurisdictions against each other by offshoring jobs and/or importing foreign-born workers willing to toil for less. Many workers in manufacturing (and more tangible forms of labour generally) viewed his tariffs as a job-protecting shield. Trump was thus renewing a pattern familiar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when working-class people and labour leaders, like the AFL’s Samuel Gompers, would tactically rally to the GOP, the party of economic protectionism, even though Republicans favoured bosses when it came to industrial relations.
Meanwhile, a trio of Republican senators began advocating for a pro-worker GOP. In 2019, Florida Senator Marco Rubio delivered a speech at Catholic University in DC, drawing on the teachings of Pope Leo XIII to call for a “common-good capitalism” . Afterward, Rubio supported organising drives at Amazon warehouses. He justified his stance in “anti-woke” terms, to be sure, but it was of a piece with a broader rethink on political economy.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, and soon-to-be vice-President, made similar gestures, most notably joining a United Auto Workers picket line in October 2023. As a legislator, Vance’s most significant initiatives were crafted alongside economic progressives, including a railroad reform bill that targeted neoliberal-style “just in time” scheduling in the industry (with senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio); a bill to claw back compensation from executives at failed banks (with senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts); and still another bill to lower insulin prices (with senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia), among others.
Meanwhile, senator Josh Hawley of Missouri became the sole Republican to sign a letter in defence of the NLRB’s determination that Amazon delivery drivers are employees (and thus entitled to employee protections), given the degree of control the mega-retailer exerts over their work; wrote a letter to Treasury officials urging them to save union jobs in the wake of the transportation company Yellow Corporation’s bankruptcy; and intervened on workers’ side to help end a General Electric strike. Hawley’s efforts garnered praise from Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, as well as a modest donation. The Teamsters’ rapprochement with the Republican party ahead of the 2024 election grew out of a meeting with Hawley. As O’Brien told me in an interview in July, his first following his keynote at the Republican National Convention: “On the stuff that we can work together on, there’s no reason why a line in the sand should ever be drawn.”
The labour left hammered O’Brien for the RNC speech and for his friendliness with the socially conservative Hawley. But his gambit appears to have paid off in the form of a designated Republican secretary of labor who supports the PRO Act (the Teamster president had endorsed Chavez-DeRemer for the job). The PRO Act is much needed to reverse the generational decline of private-economy unionism: the fact that only 6 per cent of workers are protected by a collective-bargaining agreement today, down from a third in the New Deal era. But it won’t happen on day one. What’s needed now are smaller trust-building steps from both labour and the GOP that in the long term could lead to a much-needed labour-law reform, whether it’s the PRO Act or, even more ambitiously, something akin to the sectoral-bargaining model that prevails in much of continental Europe (a model that Vance has told me he supports).
On the Trumpian side, trust-building means allowing Chavez-DeRemer wide scope to uphold her pro-union views, while restraining the rabidly libertarian elements of the Maga movement, not least Elon Musk, the anti-union Tesla and SpaceX boss. Labour-friendly Republican lawmakers in red states, meanwhile, might encourage unions to promote workforce development, one of the movement’s great gifts and something the US desperately needs to revive manufacturing. It would be a shame if Chavez-DeRemer ended up functioning as a fig leaf on an administration whose labour agenda is set by Musk and co. Conversely, it behooves the labour movement to ease up on Democratic partisanship and the insistence that labour’s political allies must support full-spectrum progressivism on issues that have nothing to do with labour. Case in point: despite bucking her party to sponsor the PRO Act, Chavez DeRemer only receives a 10 per cent score on the AFL-CIO’s congressional scorecard – the rating the union gives to each lawmaker based on how he or she votes on specific bills. Chavez-DeRemer’s low rating owed, among other things, to the fact that she supported loosening pandemic restrictions last year.
What the likes of Vance want to see is a labour movement that isn’t actively hostile to their party. The good news is that such a labour movement would be able to demand and receive more from both parties, thus anchoring a new, bipartisan consensus around a market system that works for workers.
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