For many years, there was an understanding among most Republicans that playing footsie with union bosses was a loser’s game. Republicans who courted the bigwigs running the major unions rarely got anything for it. This could be seen under Dwight Eisenhower with his first Labor Secretary, and later more notably under Gerald Ford during the Common Situs Picketing fight in the mid-1970s.
More recently, this thing same happened in Pennsylvania in 2018, when public sector unions who had been close to the old establishment Republicans near Philadelphia for many years stabbed them in the back by supporting Democrats via a SuperPAC during a wave election that, wiping most all of them out of office, despite ostensibly being endorsed by those same unions. That same year, Republicans also lost control of the New York State Senate after the SEIU broke with them despite years of showering them with support.
The moral of the story should be obvious by now. As the saying goes: “Union bosses will rent a Republican until they can buy a Democrat.”
This ill-fated flirtation with union bosses comes from a basic misunderstanding of how and why union members have voted Republican both in the past and in recent years. They did so because Republicans spoke directly to them as voters, and not through the official channels of union bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, some elected Republicans seem to have forgotten these lessons, and are now trying to work with Big Labor elites to enact their agenda. Never mind that union bosses are never more out of touch with the rank-and-file they purport to represent than on labor policy.
Take Right to Work laws that make union membership and financial support voluntary, and are now on the books in 26 states. Polling shows 79 percent of union members support Right to Work laws, yet eliminating Right to Work is a top priority for union bosses. In fact the “PRO Act,” which would eliminate all state Right to Work laws by federal fiat, has long been Big Labor’s top legislative priority in Congress.
In recent years, a new group called American Compass has popped up in Washington to promote union boss priorities, led by former Romney campaign staffer Oren Cass. With significant funding from the left-wing Omidyar Network and Hewlett Foundation, the group is actively trying to redefine what is “conservative” in the labor sphere. Cass himself has claimed “Right to Work undermines [the American labor system],” despite of its overwhelming support among the union rank-and-file.
Cass’s efforts seemed to be paying off last year, with two bills that have passed the House, both forced to the floor by Democrats teaming up with a small group of Republicans on a “Discharge Petition” over the objection of pro-Right to Work Speaker Mike Johnson.
The first bill was H.R. 2550, which would nullify the Trump Administration’s executive orders to curtail federal sector union monopoly bargaining privileges in furtherance of national security, a power the President explicitly has under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Twenty Republicans voted for the bill last December, despite the fact many of these Republicans ran on a MAGA platform in previous elections that included calls to reform the federal bureaucracy.
The second bill, the grossly misnamed “Faster Labor Contracts Act” (H.R. 5408/S. 844), or FLCA, was devised by Sen. Josh Hawley in cahoots with Teamster President Sean O’Brien, a self-proclaimed “lifelong Democrat.” FLCA mandates that government bureaucrats impose a one-size-fits-all first union contract on employers and workers if an agreement is not reached within 120 days of union officials winning an organizing campaign. Workers never get a vote on the contract imposed on them.
This breakneck timeline puts workers’ jobs at risk by imposing rigid, unworkable contract rules on unique employment arrangements. Even union officials and union-aligned politicians acknowledge that first-contract negotiations can take years just to make sure the resulting contract is “governable.” Despite such obvious objections, including the direct threat to workers’ jobs, twenty Republicans voted for the bill in June.
This outreach hasn’t bought so much as a ceasefire. In the past year alone, union bosses poured more than $23 millioninto California’s Prop 50 map designed to wipe out five Republican-held House seats, and at least $600,000 in union dues money into Virginia’s redistricting referendum aimed at four more, with likely much more that was hidden in donations to third party groups.
This also obscures the nearly $2 billion allocated each cycle by the various unions towards political activism, most of which does not go directly to campaigns via PAC checks, but to the vast array of left-wing causes and groups with which organized labor has aligned itself the last few decades. And that’s only what unions publicly report.
But let’s move beyond these numbers, and focus on just one race for this cycle: The U.S. Senate race in Kansas. Incumbent Roger Marshall has done more than anyone else this Congress to betray his previous support for worker freedom by going all-in for the FLCA as a cosponsor.
Despite this blatant attempt to sell out to the union brass, Marshall only received $20,000 from two unions (the Air Line Pilots Association and the National Association of Letter Carriers) as of October 14th, and the obligatory endorsements of the Teamsters and their divisional affiliate BLET for getting on their bill.
Meanwhile, his Democrat opponent, Adam Hamilton, beyond receiving the AFL-CIO’s endorsement, received $5,000 each from eight separate unions (AFGE, ATU, Carpenters, IAM, IUOE, LIUNA, Pipefitters, and UAW) as of the same date. Again, this doesn’t include any in-kind donations that Hamilton likely received from Big Labor, including phone banks and “volunteer” door-knockers.
And as you saw on Election Night, Adam Hamilton ended up winning by a 51% to 46% margin.
If this was the best a Republican can expect for giving in to compulsory unionism in one of the most contested Senate races in the country this year, then it should be taken as a warning sign to all who are thinking about it:
The trade-off in selling out to union bosses is NEVER worth it.