Is JD Vance Really A Friend Of Unions?

Earlier this year Senate Democrats penned a letter attacking Amazon over its labor practices, calling the retail giant’s subcontracted delivery network a big scheme to prevent drivers from unionizing. They only managed to rustle up three Republicans to sign on. After all, it was a letter in support of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a longtime ally of the Democratic Party.

Among the trio of GOP signatories was Ohio Sen. JD Vance, whom Donald Trump selected as his vice presidential running mate on Monday. Vance, sounding more like a Democrat than a typical pro-business Republican, told HuffPost at the time that he believed Amazon was playing a game.

“There are some weird ways that Amazon treats certain people and I think they ought to do a better job,” the senator said. “I think they use certain loopholes to try and pretend they aren’t actually employees, and they are.”

Vance is part of a very small subset of Republican lawmakers who’ve walked a strike picket line and have criticized companies like Amazon for the way they treat workers. Sometimes using similar language to the left, these conservatives speak of the need to engender more “worker power” as a counterweight to corporate forces, and they say organized labor can play a role in that, despite their party’s longtime antipathy to collective bargaining.

The 39-year-old Vance’s place on the GOP ticket has accelerated talk of a GOP realignment on economic issues, one that could weaken the party’s ties with big corporations and maybe even allow for a functioning relationship with unions. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called for just that in an address at the Republican National Convention on Monday. O’Brien had praised Vance as being “great on Teamster issues” in an interview before his speech, citing his Amazon stance, as well as a bipartisan bill Vance co-sponsored aimed at stopping the overseas outsourcing of airline maintenance jobs.

Vance’s GOP colleague, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, published an essay the next day titled, “The Promise of Pro-Labor Conservatism.” “Thousands of Americans have voted to unionize in elections but can never get a contract done, often due to corporate tricks. How can we let that stand?” Hawley asked. (Hawley and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas were the two other Republicans to sign that Amazon letter, alongside 25 Democrats.)

The idea of a pro-union dawn in the Republican Party is complicated by a few things ― first and foremost, Trump’s patently anti-union record as president, as well as the voting records of ostensibly union-friendly Republicans like Vance. Policy experts who’ve spent years thinking about how to rebuild unions (in 2023, membership dropped to just 6% in the private sector) are leery of conservative ideas for reform, and doubtful of whether the “pro-labor” positions of people like Vance will extend much beyond economic nationalism and tariffs.

“I would say my skepticism runs deep,” said Celine McNicholas, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and former special counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that referees union matters in the private sector.

She noted that although Vance visited striking auto workers in Ohio last year, he has not gotten onboard with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, Democrats’ sweeping proposal for labor law reform. The legislation would, among other things, prevent companies from permanently replacing strikers.

“Vance may do a little bit better on the rhetoric, but there isn’t a ton of daylight between the vice-presidential nominee and Trump,” McNicholas said.

At the forefront of the conservative collective-bargaining talk is Oren Cass, a veteran of the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign who now runs a think tank called American Compass. The group seeks to steer conservative thinking away from “growth for its own sake to widely shared economic development that sustains vital social institutions.”

Cass said in an interview that Vance was among the first to endorse American Compass’ mission, and called him “somebody we’ve worked with a lot” since the organization launched in 2020.

“We do want to have thriving free markets, and we want the purpose of those to be to deliver good outcomes for workers and their families. If that’s the case, for capitalism to work well, you need workers to have power,” Cass said.

There must be a “mechanism of governance” that supports workers’ solidarity and gives them influence in the labor market, Cass went on.

“Conservatives should obviously want that, and prefer that way of achieving it to just kind of taxing and redistributing on the back end,” he said.

There are things a guy like Cass likes about unions ― in particular, the social structure they provide, a bridge between workers and families embodied in the union hall. What they like a lot less: the way unions have become hitched to the Democratic Party ― a natural outgrowth of decades of conservative post-Reagan hostility to labor ― and the adversarial nature of organizing and bargaining in so many American workplaces.

Vance told the New Statesman earlier this year that he endorses a form of European-style sectoral bargaining, where wages and working conditions are set through a collective bargaining agreement that covers a broader industry, as opposed to a single employer. Sector-wide bargaining is a mainstream idea embraced by many on the labor left who believe the U.S. system of enterprise bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act ― unionizing one Starbucks at a time, then spending years fighting for a contract ― is broken.

Cass acknowledged some conservative politicians might latch onto these ideas out of nothing more than political expedience. Union favorability is near a six-decade high, and unions’ approval among Republicans has risen more than 20 points since 2011, up from 26% to 47%, according to Gallup. But Cass insists something bigger is going on.

“At a more intellectual level, this is part-and-parcel of the broader rejection of market fundamentalism, and kind of taking seriously the question of what the right rules and institutions are to actually have capitalism work well at all.”

So far, Republican lawmakers in Washington don’t seem to be pushing many bold new ideas to empower workers and foster more organizing.

Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) proposed a bill in January known as the TEAM Act, an earlier form of which goes back to the 1990s. The legislation would loosen the National Labor Relations Act’s ban on what are known as employer-dominated labor groups ― pseudo-unions controlled by companies themselves ― to more easily allow for so-called works councils and other labor-management bodies to form inside companies.

Rubio argues this reform would give workers some kind of seat at the table, a much-needed third choice beyond “no representation [or] woke union leadership.” But there is a ban on “company unions” for a reason: to prevent employers from heading off real unions by setting up sham ones steered by management.

Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard Law School, said it’s dangerous to pursue such a discrete reform when it’s not part of a broader, holistic approach to reengineering a ruptured system ― such as the one Sachs co-authored, called “Clean Slate for Worker Power.”

“If you just have works councils like the TEAM Act proposes, I think you’re going to end up with company unions,” Sachs said. “When you put together the TEAM act and opposition to the PRO Act, you leave people like me … really, really skeptical.”

In addition to barring employers from permanently replacing strikers, the PRO Act would ban anti-union “captive-audience” meetings at work, make it easier for newly unionized workers to secure their first contract and preempt state right-to-work laws, among other measures. Those who crafted the bill view it as the best way to revitalize the labor movement within the current legal system.

It has no support among the Senate GOP.

If Vance supports sectoral bargaining, Sachs added, then he should back the current, progressive NLRB’s “joint employer” rule, which makes it easier for more workers to form unions ― including the Amazon drivers who Vance said are being gamed by the e-commerce giant. Instead, Vance voted for a GOP-led resolution that would nullify the rule.

That vote raises an important question for Vance: What kinds of labor officials would he want Trump to hire, if he reaches the White House? The aggressively pro-union kind, like Biden’s pick for NLRB general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo? Or someone from the management side who will stick it to unions and reverse Abruzzo’s progressive reforms, like Trump’s last NLRB general counsel, Peter Robb?

Project 2025, the White House transition blueprint drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation and other Trump allies, includes at least one surprise on the labor front. It calls for the NLRB’s general counsel to make greater use of court injunctions to put workers back on the job when they’ve been fired for trying to unionize. That recommendation certainly isn’t coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Cass said American Compass provided input on Project 2025’s labor section.)

But most of the document, which the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from, sounds like standard conservative anti-labor policy: increase oversight of unions, label more workers as “independent contractors,” exempt more employers from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act, make fewer workers eligible for overtime pay, expand the use of child labor and restrict what’s considered “protected concerted activity” by workers.

Sharon Block, a former NLRB member who co-authored “Clean Slate” with Sachs at Harvard, said she has a hard time seeing a Trump administration give workers more bargaining power, whatever his running mate might say about unions. She called Trump’s last NLRB the “most anti-union” since at least the Reagan years, and possibly ever.

“It was a stunningly anti-labor lineup over there,” said Block, who also served as a regulatory czar in the Biden White House. “And there’s no amount of words right now that they could say to change that.”

Still, Cass said, a second Trump administration might come with some twists. He called the Trump of 2016 “the dog that caught the car,” who arrived in Washington with nothing there “but the pre-Trump GOP.”

“You now have a bench of people across policy areas … who actually have been working on this, building proposals,” Cass said.

But Block said she won’t believe a Republican administration will actually put labor-friendly policies and personnel in place until she sees it.

“Talk is cheap,” she said. “Working people need policies to change.”