Throughout the 2024 election marketing campaign, the Republican Celebration’s traditionally fraught relationship with organized labor appeared to be changing. A number of influential Republicans reached out to unions, looking for to cement the loyalties of the growing ranks of working-class Americans who’ve been backing Donald Trump’s presidential runs and voting for different members of his celebration.
Throughout Trump’s first bid for the White Home, the proportion of votes in households the place no less than one individual belongs to a union fell to its lowest level in a long time. In 2021, Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator on the time, wrote a USA As we speak op-ed supporting a unionization drive at an Amazon facility. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, walked a United Auto Workers picket line in 2023 in solidarity with hanging staff.
Because the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, Trump spotlighted Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with a outstanding talking slot on the Republican Nationwide Conference—rewarding the union for staying neutral in that campaign after endorsing Joe Biden 4 years earlier.
But O’Brien shocked many within the conference crowd by lambasting longtime GOP coalition partners such because the Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise Roundtable for hurting American staff.
As soon as in workplace, Trump continued to sign a point of solidarity with the blue-collar voters who backed him. He selected former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), a Teamsters ally, to be his second-term labor secretary.
I’m a sociologist who has been researching the U.S. labor movement for over two decades. Given conservatives’ long-standing antipathy towards unions, I used to be curious whether or not the GOP’s larger engagement with labor portended any sort of change in its insurance policies.
Fumbled on the beginning line
The GOP’s numerous outreach efforts through the 2024 marketing campaign led College of Chicago regulation professor Eric Posner, a scholar of declining labor energy, to write, “Is a pro-labor Republican Celebration attainable?”
Greater than six months into Trump’s second time period, I’d say that, based mostly on the proof to date, the reply to Posner’s query is a convincing no.
In late March 2025, Trump issued an govt order stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.
In a single day, twice as many federal workers misplaced their union protections as there are members of the United Auto Workers union, making the action “the most important and most aggressive single act of union-busting in U.S. historical past,” in accordance with Georgetown College labor historian Joseph McCartin.
Whereas affected unions have challenged that motion and related subsequent ones in courtroom, the Trump administration is moving on to other agencies. In August, over 400,000 federal workers on the Division of Veterans Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency noticed their union contracts terminated and their collective bargaining rights dissolved.
Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Authorities Workers president, described the attacks on federal staff as a “setback for elementary rights in America.”
Tariffs, different insurance policies aren’t serving to
The Trump administration has pitched its erratic tariff insurance policies as a boon to U.S.manufacturing, together with within the automotive business, as soon as the foundation of the U.S. labor motion.
In actuality, U.S. automotive producers are struggling to keep up with rising tariff-related costs of raw materials and parts. The variety of manufacturing facility jobs has fallen to the lowest level because the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even United Auto Staff President Shawn Fain, a supporter of focused tariffs to buttress the home auto business, criticized the administration’s trade policy in April 2025, saying, “We don’t assist reckless tariffs on all international locations at loopy charges.”
Different administration actions forged as aid for struggling staff are unlikely to ship as marketed. The “no tax on suggestions” provision in Trump’s huge tax-and-spending package excludes the practically 40% of tipped workers whose earnings fall beneath the federal revenue tax threshold. Tipped staff make up a tiny share of the low-wage workforce.
Culinary Staff Native 226, a powerful Nevada union representing many tipped staff in Las Vegas and Reno, supported the supply. But it blasted the general package deal, calling it a “big, horrible bill” for its windfalls to the wealthy as an alternative of the working class.
Eradicating the watchdogs
The Nationwide Labor Relations Board is answerable for guaranteeing that administration and labor adhere to provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. Handed in 1935, that regulation established staff’ elementary rights to collective bargaining. The board is answerable for conducting union elections, investigating allegations of unfair labor practices and outright abuses by employers, and imposing courtroom orders when employers or unions are discovered to have damaged labor legal guidelines.
Presidents usually use vacancies to tilt the ideological stability of the board to a roughly labor-friendly place. Trump, nonetheless, went additional.
Quickly after he was sworn in for a second time period, Trump fired the National Labor Relations Board’s common counsel together with board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was solely midway by way of her five-year time period. Wilcox’s dismissal was unprecedented and violated the National Labor Relations Act provision on board personnel modifications.
Wilcox’s elimination left the physique and not using a quorum, stopping it from responding to appeals or requests for evaluate and permitting employers accused of violating staff’ rights to delay any settlement. The Trump administration has left these vital NLRB jobs vacant for months, though it has nominated two management-friendly replacements, each of whom awaited Senate approval in mid-August.
Within the meantime, the company is unable to hear labor disputes.
Disempowering the NLRB is a long-standing Republican tactic, suggesting extra continuity with previous GOP assaults on labor than a brand new period of partnership.
Hawley standing out
To make sure, Republicans don’t all agree with each other on the significance of supporting staff and labor rights. One who has stood out thus far is Hawley. The comparatively pro-labor Republican senator’s stance led him to associate with Sen. Corey Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, to cosponsor the Faster Labor Contracts Act.
This new invoice would drive employers to barter a contract in an affordable timeframe with workers as soon as they’ve voted in favor of forming a union.
Hawley additionally joined with Democrats to reintroduce a invoice that may ban harmful work velocity necessities in warehouses. Hawley stated, when summarizing his efforts on behalf of working folks, “It’s time we deliver for them.”
The Missouri senator shouldn’t be fully alone. Sens. Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Roger Marshall of Kansas, each Republicans, have backed some labor-friendly laws within the spring and summer time of this 12 months.
GOP leaders in Congress aren’t transferring these payments ahead thus far, seemingly partly as a result of pushback from Republicans and their allies outside Congress.
And there are limits to Hawley’s labor friendliness. He voted for Trump’s tax-and-spending package deal, despite publicly airing his misgivings in regards to the hurt it might trigger his blue-collar constituents.
In the meantime, his previous companions within the extra labor-friendly wing of the GOP now occupy outstanding administration posts. But they’ve largely fallen silent on union points—besides, in Rubio’s case, to oversee the firing of properly over 1,000 State Division workers, lots of them members of the American Overseas Service Affiliation union.
Trump’s labor method echoes Reagan’s fashion
One other GOP presidential administration courted segments of the labor motion to divide a key Democratic constituency, solely to take actions that weakened unions.
In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan sought and won the endorsement of the Skilled Air Site visitors Controllers Group. A 12 months later, he fired 13,000 hanging members of that union.
The Teamsters union also backed Reagan—twice. It endorsed him in 1980 after he pledged through the 1980 marketing campaign to not pursue anti-labor insurance policies. Though he broke his promise, personal outreach from Vice President George H.W. Bush within the lead-up to the 1984 election earned him the Teamsters endorsement a second time.
What appears clear in my opinion is that every time the GOP has tried to forged itself as a labor-friendly political celebration, it has emphasised symbolism over substance, favoring utilizing rhetoric embracing staff who belong to unions versus taking actions to strengthen labor rights.
Jake Rosenfeld is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis.
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