Checking in on the Party of the Working Class
How are the Republicans helping workers so far?
One of the most excruciating threads of political discourse I have ever had to endure in my entire life is the ongoing Very Serious Discussion of whether the Republicans are now the “party of the working class.” It has been particularly excruciating to me and all of my counterparts who write about labor issues, who have been forced to write 987 explainer-type essays about how this is all ridiculous bullshit. (Here is my most recent.) At least I get to cuss in these essays. My peers who write for stuffier outlets are required to craft meticulous stories about this preposterous shit with total sobriety, in a way that indicates that this is an argument that deserves a great deal of care. This has been going on for years now! It’s still going! For a labor journalist, this is kind of like waking up in hell and finding out that your punishment is to spend all eternity writing toaster instruction manuals for people with Alzheimer’s. “Do NOT take the toaster in the bathtub,” you write. “It’s very dangerous.”
Sorry, buddy—you know they took that toaster in the bathtub. Why don’t you write it again, with slightly different wording? Maybe this will be the one that sticks.
Even writing a piece debunking this idea means that you are entertaining the idea as within the realm of possibility. For this reason I would be happy to never write such a debunker again. The problem is that this meme, this valueless sheen of concern for “the working class,” has infiltrated The Discourse enough that it takes on a life of its own. It has wormed its way into the Overton window of Positions That Mainstream Pundits Are Allowed to Take, and from there it can spread into the populace. Thus we are still, today, subjected to Oren Cass and Third Way and Ruy Teixeira and other professional opinion-havers who, I hasten to add, have spent their careers not doing jack shit for the labor movement, declaiming on either How Republicans Can Cement Their Status as a Working Class Party or How Democrats Can Win Back the Working Class or other things that imply, by their very existence, that “Republicans as working class party” is a serious topic of discussion.
Let’s just check in real quick on how the Republican party’s commitment to the working class is going, now that Trump is fully in power. Shall we? Sure. First let’s look at the National Labor Relations Board, the most important government agency when it comes to organized labor and worker power, the one that is supposed to enforce and enhance labor laws and ensure that corporations aren’t illegally oppressing workers. Trump fired Jennifer Abbruzzo, the very good general counsel of the NLRB under Biden, and installed William B. Cowen, a Republican establishment lawyer. (Who has not said anything about the fact that Trump also illegally fired a Democratic NLRB board member and has therefore ground the entire agency to a halt, to the delight of corporations like Amazon, who now believe they have no need to deal with their unions at all.) What has Cowen done so far? Well, of course, the first thing he did was come in and announce that he is reversing all of the good pro-labor memos that Abbruzzo wrote while she was there. Among the things that Cowen rescinded just a few days ago:
The finding that college athletes are employees, and are therefore legally allowed to organize, and have labor rights. No more!
An Abbruzzo memo protecting employees from abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance on the job. No more!
A ban on severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections, that infringe on your rights. These are back now!
A ban on the widespread use of non-compete agreements, which companies forced workers to sign in order to get jobs. These are back now!
A ban on captive audience meetings, where the boss forces you to sit in a room while they tell you how horrible a union would be for you. These are back now!
These are just the beginning of what will soon become a complete rollback of every last iota of progress in worker rights from the NLRB. You know what’s weird? You know what I can’t figure out? Why would a party that loves the working class… want to roll back every last iota of progress in worker rights? It just doesn’t make sense. Huh. Weird.
Want an example of why this matters, on the ground? In North Carolina, a scrappy and dedicated band of organizers just held a vote to try to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Garner, NC. They lost the vote by nearly a 3-1 margin. It is extremely difficult to unionize an Amazon warehouse under the best of circumstances. It’s only happened once. And “the best of circumstances” means that the government, in the form of the NLRB, is scrupulously policing all of the ways that Amazon is trying to illegally lie to and intimidate their workers into voting against the union. They do it routinely, and that is why the company has picked up dozens and dozens of unfair labor practice charges during past organizing drives. Without a very zealous NLRB on the job, it is open season on workers who want to organize, by Amazon. When Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia successfully voted to unionize last month, Amazon’s response was to argue that the election should be discarded because Trump illegally fired an NLRB commissioner and therefore the NLRB can’t function correctly and therefore Amazon’s inevitable time-wasting litigation of the union vote can’t be processed, so hey, none of this is gonna count. Amazon is also among the companies trying to get the courts to declare the NLRB’s entire structure unconstitutional, btw. They are being greatly assisted in this project by the new Republican administration.
Oh—you know what’s weird? This just occurred to me. I thought the Republicans loved the working class and also hated Amazon? Because Amazon is woke? But now the Republican administration’s utterly predictable actions are helping Amazon ignore their brave low-wage employees who successfully organized and are legally entitled to negotiate a fair contract in good faith? Isn’t that strange? It’s so mystifying how that works? How does this all square? We may never know.
Well, maybe the Republican Party’s concern for the working class is evident somewhere outside of Washington, DC? Out in Real America, perhaps. How about in Utah? Let’s see: In Utah, the Republican legislature and the Republican governor just successfully banned collective bargaining for public employees. Huh. That means that all of the hardworking, working class public school teachers and firefighters and sanitation workers and cops are now legally barred from negotiating fair pay and working conditions for themselves. Wow. It is so very difficult to understand how a party of the working class could do such a thing. It’s also so very hard to understand why so many other Republican states also ban collective bargaining for many employees (although sometimes they make exceptions for cops).
If I didn’t know better I would think that the Republican Party’s decades-long implacable opposition to all forms of worker power, and to labor unions in particular, is still going just as strong as ever, despite the fact that a thousand lying politicians and a thousand idiot pundits said a million words about how maybe the Republicans are the “party of the working class” now. Okay, I understand how you might think that Republicans work incessantly to limit the power of working people if you only look at their actions, and at facts. But if you look at this picture of Donald Trump sitting in a big truck, you might think differently. So who can say which side is correct? And hey, the Teamsters are applauding Trump’s appointment of a former Amazon executive to lead OSHA, at the same time that they are trying to organize Amazon, which is illegally resisting those attempts at organization, with the help of the current Republican administration. So, that’s something, I guess.
I am not even going to write about Republican economic policy here. My god.
Am I dripping enough condescension? Do America’s beleaguered labor reporters need to continue to write this piece every few months until we are rescued by death’s sweet embrace? Or no?
The Democrats fucking suck too! But not in the same way. Please join a union.
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Related reading: Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years; Dark Times Are Coming; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; Listen: Republicans Do Not Want Unions to Exist; How the “Working Class Republican” Scam Works.
I wrote a book called “The Hammer,” about how the labor movement can save us from the sort of crisis that we are now living through. It feels pretty relevant. You can order it wherever books are sold. (I will also send you a signed copy for $40 via Paypal.) Let me shout out two unions right here in Brooklyn who can use your support right now: Barboncino Workers United, at NYC’s first unionized pizza shop, are all being laid off, and you can donate to those workers here; and the unionized workers at Alamo Drafthouse are on strike after a mass layoff of 70 members, and you can find out how to support them here.
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The GOP is - and always has been - the party of management, bosses, and owners. Sadly, they've managed to convince a large segment of the working class to believe that unions are the problem.
I’m sorry, HamNo, but I think you need to put out an explainer such as this every single week.