Republicans may be changing their rhetoric, but not their basic posture toward workers.
Donald Trump’s choice of Senator J.D. Vance as running mate breathes new life into an old question, at least in the press: Is the GOP becoming a pro-worker party? Some factions within the party certainly want us to believe that’s true. As evidence, they can point to Vance, a so-called economic populist, and to a Republican National Convention speech by Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. O’Brien attacked powerful corporations in a lengthy speech, saying, “Never forget, American workers own this nation,” and “We are not renters. We are not tenants, but the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime. We have got to fix it.” The day after O’Brien spoke, the RNC hosted Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia, a billionaire who was the nation’s top mine-safety delinquent in 2016.
The corporate elite have long counted on Republicans to advance their interests, though recent events have convinced some reporters that change is imminent. A piece this week from Politico says the party is “changing” as it comes to embrace “economic populism at home” and becomes “not only leery of, but hostile to, certain business interests.” Politico later quotes Oren Cass of the conservative think tank American Compass, who said that Trump selected Vance “in part to send a signal” to the business community and Wall Street. Meanwhile, Axios said in a newsletter that Vance’s nomination “could bring a new approach to conservative economic thought” to a Trump White House and that he “may emerge as a voice within the administration with whom business interests and traditional Reaganites clash.”
Some CEOs are indeed skeptical of Vance. They’re “shocked as this is quite an odd choice to try to balance the ticket with [someone] so hostile to business,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of Yale University’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute, told Semafor. Vance once praised FTC chair Lina Khan, who is known for her antitrust work, and told the New York Times that he isn’t “philosophically against raising taxes on anybody.” He introduced railroad-safety legislation after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, though he would later weaken the bill. He visited a UAW picket line — only for Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, to ask him, “First time here?”
Though Vance said he was “not a huge fan” of right-to-work laws in 2020, he opposes the PRO Act, which would make it significantly easier for workers to organize. He told Politico earlier this year that he opposes the act because he prefers a system of sectoral bargaining, where union contracts cover entire sectors or industries. But the PRO Act does not foreclose sectoral bargaining, and as Politico pointed out at the time, “advocates on the left have argued that the PRO Act could serve as a bridge to more sweeping reforms to America’s collective bargaining system.” Vance’s authentic rationale sounds partisan. “We can’t just be good, we have to be smart, and I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican,” he told Politico.
He has also drawn a distinction between “good unions” and “bad unions.” The Fraternal Order of Police is a good union, Vance said at an event hosted by the far-right Claremont Institute; the Starbucks union is not. He co-sponsored the reintroduced Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act, which would undermine unions by allowing “voluntary ‘employee involvement organizations’” that are not covered by union contracts and which “could be dissolved by an employer,” as Fast Company put it this week. He has also “rejected” pro-labor nominees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, and he voted for a resolution to strike down the NLRB’s revamped joint-employer rule, “which would have given workers more leverage when organizing at companies — like Amazon — that rely heavily on third-party contractors, by forcing both employers to participate in labor negotiations,” Fast Company reported.
Labor advocates should also worry about Vance’s allies. Although Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, he and Vance have strong ties to its architects, like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’s new book, and on Monday, Roberts praised Vance’s nomination to reporters. Should Project 2025 influence Vance or Trump, American workers are in trouble — especially if they’re women, as historian Rick Perlstein observed at The American Prospect. He quoted former Trump official Jonathan Berry, who wrote, “The role that labor policy plays in that promise is twofold: Give workers the support they need for rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers, and restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy.” That sounds like a good thing, but as Perlstein pointed out, there are reasons to be deeply skeptical. Berry also complained that President Biden has “imposed the most assertive left-wing social-engineering agenda” in favor of “human resources bureaucracies, climate-change activists, and union bosses — all against the interest of American workers.”
What might it mean to reverse that “social-engineering agenda” for workers? Perlstein has some thoughts. Though Project 2025 does not explicitly call to push women out of the workforce, it’s possible to “read the proper family roles in the penumbras and emanations instead,” he wrote. “There is impressive language on promoting ‘workplace accommodations for mothers’ — except that’s under the heading ‘Pro-Life Measures,’” which is “followed by advice on how the Labor Department can contribute to the cause of forced childbirth.” Berry’s vision doesn’t leave much room for working women, and that sounds familiar.
Let’s go back for a moment to Vance, who once tweeted that “universal daycare is class war against normal people” and that “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.” There isn’t much ideological distance between Project 2025 and Vance.
The working class is nearly half women. Some would like to stay home with their children, but not all. If the GOP wants to be pro-worker, politicians like Vance need to reconsider universal child care — and reject the anti-abortion position laid out not just in Project 2025 but in the party’s platform, which extends the 14th Amendment to fetuses and essentially grants them personhood rights. Women should be free to work or not work as they choose; abortion rights are key to that flexibility. Yet Trump takes credit for killing Roe v. Wade, and Vance has said he wants to ban abortion nationwide. There’s no reason to believe he’s fundamentally changed his views.
J.D. Vance is an excellent vice-president for today’s GOP, which is radical on the issues that matter to workers, and which always sides with wealth. He’s running with Trump, whose policies would be disastrous for the working class. The former president wants to extend his 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and some economists believe his plan to cut taxes while raising tariffs “could have harmful consequences by widening the gap between the rich and the poor,” the New York Times reported this week. Trump also wants to slash the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent, creating a massive windfall for business. It’s not a coincidence that Trump is backed by wealth, like Gilded Age scion Timothy Mellon. Though Vance said in the past that he wanted to leave the corporate tax rate as it is, the so-called populist is mute now.
What might a workers’ party look like? “Pro-worker is raising the minimum wage, ensuring people get overtime, supporting paid sick and family leave,” Terri Gerstein of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative recently said of Vance. “Playacting as working class by dressing up in jeans and acting aggrieved doesn’t do anything for real working people who are struggling.” The Democratic Party hasn’t always lived up to a pro-labor ideal, either; the education-reform wing of the party has warred against teachers unions, for example. The GOP, meanwhile, remains deeply opposed to workers’ interests, even as it courts their votes. A true pro-worker party does not really exist in the U.S., but should it ever come into being, it wouldn’t look much like today’s “changing” GOP.
As the party unites behind Trump, it reveres the boss and scorns the worker. Republican politicians — including Vance — would divide, not unite, the working class by crushing unions and more. Their open hostility toward women workers, their vicious plans for migrants whose labor is so vital to America, and their unabashed bigotry toward LGBT people all point at the truth. Working-class solidarity is a threat to the GOP — and it’s more important than ever.
