So there are some huge pictures of Presidents Trump and Teddy Roosevelt hanging from the Department of Labor building in Washington, DC, right now – recognizing the two presidents who perhaps stood up for the American worker better than any other.
Both Trump and Roosevelt came to power after enormous economic transformations – the information age and industrial revolution respectively. Both contributed huge leaps forward for mankind, both improved the lives of almost everyone with new technologies, and both required government to adjust its course on behalf of normal Americans.
But while the dance may have changed, the idiomatic song remains the same. When forces of industry threaten the average worker, populist leaders need to intervene. In Teddy’s time, for many that meant workers needed labor unions to protect them from corporate interests. But nowadays, the workers need to be protected from those unions themselves.
Unions and their Congressional allies are pushing legislation to take away a worker’s right to vote. Legislation is before Congress that will shift power from rank-and-file members to the union leadership – the Senate’s innocently named Faster Labor Contracts Act. It pretends to protect workers, yet it would take away their right to vote on the terms and conditions of their own employment. Were this bill to become law, the government would have the power to force a business and its workers into a union contract without either party’s consent. Undemocratic by design, this idea is what union leadership and their allies in Congress are trying to do. This legislation is likely to move in the House of Representatives soon.
A bill as bad as this is sure to garner some attention. In rebuking it, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it allows the government to draw up contracts without employee approval and threatens small businesses that don’t have the political muscle to put back. “Right now, when a workplace votes to unionize, workers and employers have the freedom to negotiate contracts together. It’s a straightforward, fair system where both sides find common ground. But this bill would replace negotiation with forced, government-written contracts. That means less freedom for you and more control for the government,” the Chamber said in a published statement. “When government meddling drives up costs, it’s workers who pay the price—through fewer hours, fewer jobs, or even lost benefits.”
That what makes this bill so bizarre. Its sponsor is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who is usually a conservative champion. But of the bill’s 15 co-sponsors, 13 are Democrats. This is a Democrat bill and Republicans should know to stay away from it. With the scathing headline “The New Big Labor GOP,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “The latest sign of Republican midterm panic is the surrender to Big Labor policies that unions couldn’t pass when Democrats ran Congress and Joe Biden was President. … The pro-union Republicans fancy themselves as tribunes for the common man, but they’re really rubber stamps for labor bosses who are allies of the Democratic Party.”
The last decade has represented a tectonic shift in American voting patterns. Long gone are the days of Republican leaders many steps removed from the average American – the Mitt Romney-esque politicians who seemed like they would have fired your boss’s boss. Despite being a billionaire, President Trump seems to understand the everyday man better than any president since, well, Teddy himself. So it’s surprising that populist Republicans have been lured into this rather than knowing to stand their ground.
As Teddy said in his famous “New Nationalism” speech in 1910:
“Friends, in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers.”
This won’t help the average employee or businesses trying to grow. We don’t need “fast” labor contracts, we need good ones. With the uncertainties around the ever-shifting global workforce and the unknowable future of AI, we need the government help the average American – or at least stay out of the way. We certainly don’t need the government to take the side of union kingpins. They have made us an offer we can refuse.