Can the GOP really become the party of workers?

The most surprising moment of this year’s Republican National Convention may have come on its first night, when the president of the Teamsters railed in prime time against corporate elites and denounced a “war against labor” by business groups. The gasps from some in the hall were almost audible on television.

But in many ways, it was a little-noted speech the week before, by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, that was more revealing about the party’s evolving relationship with organized labor.

If anything, Hawley, a rising Republican star who is one of the Senate’s most conservative members, seemed to outflank the Teamsters’ leader. His speech, delivered at the National Conservatism Conference, criticized Republicans who “cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade, then watched these same corporations ship American jobs overseas.” Hawley concluded that, “in the choice between labor and capital,” his party must “start prioritizing the workingman.”

Since at least the Nixon era, Republicans have nodded rhetorically at the working class, asserting that their party stands for the cultural values these voters hold dear. And for just as long, Democrats have called that pitch hollow, insisting that Republicans have sought to dupe blue-collar voters into supporting policies that benefit the wealthy. Speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Convention this week went on in this vein.

What’s far less common is for a Republican to agree with that critique. “The recent Republican Party, the 1990s party, privileged the money crowd in just about every possible way,” Hawley said in his speech.

He is no anomaly. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the party’s vice presidential nominee, has lamented the corrosive effects of cheap labor and proposed lifting the minimum wage. Other Republican senators, like Roger Marshall of Kansas and Marco Rubio of Florida, have joined them in criticizing corporate labor practices or seeking to give workers more say on the job.

These populist Senate Republicans are only the most visible portion of a larger movement. They have worked closely with a new generation of think tanks and intellectuals, who flesh out proposals for what a conservative economic populism might look like. That ecosystem has even come to include certain labor unions and other left-leaning groups that want to nurture a political coalition for reining in the free market.

And looming over all of them is Donald Trump, who has made his own overtures to workers based on their economic interests. It was, after all, Trump who put Vance on his ticket and brought the Teamsters to his convention.

So is the Republican Party poised to become the party of workers? Judging strictly from its leader, the answer is probably no. Yet Trump may be only a bit player in this drama. When it comes to rethinking the relationship between conservatism and labor, the project runs far deeper and broader than the nominee.

A break with Republican orthodoxy

The issues that animate Trump — immigration, trade, competition with China — have obvious implications for workers, but in many ways he is more nationalist than populist. His interest in them often stems from a sense that America is taken advantage of by foreign rivals, not a direct identification with workers’ concerns. He has frequently venerated the entrepreneur rather than the worker as the indispensable economic actor.

His actions as president tended to reflect these priorities. Trump enacted tariffs on imports of machinery and metals. He also renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, long seen by organized labor as a cause of job losses. But many of the new agreement’s key labor provisions came at the insistence of congressional Democrats, who had the power to block the deal.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board under Trump generally took a deregulatory approach to worker issues and union protections. His administration argued that employers should be able to prevent workers from bringing class action lawsuits, and sought funding cuts for workplace safety programs. His deputy labor secretary once worked as a lobbyist to prevent the federal minimum wage from applying to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth where some workers earned less than $1 an hour.

But if Trump didn’t necessarily embrace workers, his breaks with Republican orthodoxy prompted a broader reappraisal of conservative thought that grew to include labor issues.

“It’s like what Kamala Harris might say — it allowed a discussion of what could be, unburdened by the past,” quipped Oren Cass, a former policy aide to Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah whose think tank, American Compass, pushes Republicans to adopt more a populist economic agenda. Launched in 2020, American Compass advocates not just policies in the Trumpian sweet spot — like higher tariffs — but also those that would directly shift power to workers, like enabling more of them to bargain collectively with employers.

“The economic nationalism on the trade and globalization side created actual space to do pro-worker policy,” Cass said.

After President Joe Biden took office, mainstream Democrats emphasized a similar combination of economic nationalism and worker-centric policies. Many Republicans seemed to feel a political imperative to follow suit. Republican senators such as Rubio, Hawley, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and later Vance, who had been exploring some of these ideas, built on proposals informed by American Compass and like-minded groups, and even a few labor unions.

Vance has spoken favorably about sectoral bargaining — the idea that workers and employers should collectively bargain over wages and benefits on an industrywide basis — while he and Hawley signed letters to Amazon raising concerns about its treatment of delivery drivers.

Vance is a co-sponsor of a bill backed by Cotton and Romney that would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $11 an hour from the current $7.25, while mandating measures to ensure that the pay increase benefits only those authorized to work in the United States.

And Vance, Hawley and Rubio backed a bipartisan railway safety measure after the train derailment last year in East Palestine, Ohio, that would advance a top priority for rail unions: a requirement that freight trains operate with at least two-person crews.

At their most expansive, some of these Republicans articulate an entire philosophy built around family-sustaining work and vibrant communities, along with a suspicion of large corporations and high finance. In his recent speech, Hawley chided Republicans who “sang the praises of global integration while Wall Street bet against American industry and bought up single-family homes — so that after the banks took the workingman’s job, he couldn’t afford a house for his family to live in.” You don’t have to squint hard to see a conservative version of Elizabeth Warren in this language — or, you know, William Jennings Bryan.

Union officials and liberal politicians remain skeptical, saying that for all the heterodox thinking, the Republican Party remains the key obstacle in Congress to enacting strong worker protections.

“It’s a total con,” said Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants. She notes that no Senate Republican has backed the PRO Act, a package of changes that would make it easier for workers to unionize and costlier for employers to retaliate against them. (Hawley has hinted he could back a version of it.)

“Every single thing they’re holding up to show they’re pro-worker is a one-and-done,” she said, adding that it has long been possible to find a few Republican allies on specific issues. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe you unless you’re willing to put permanent power in the hands of workers.”

Even Cass concedes that some of the legislation backed by the labor-minded Republicans, while earnest in its expression of policy goals, is partly intended as a political exercise. The minimum-wage-cum-immigration-enforcement bill introduced by Cotton, for example, has little chance of enactment given the politics of immigration on the Democratic side.

“We’ve seen that there’s some messaging involved — ‘now watch Democrats vote against a minimum-wage increase,’” he said. (Cass and other conservatives argue that immigration restrictions are pro-worker since they tighten the job market.)

On the other hand, optimists note that as recently as five years ago it would have been hard to imagine a Republican vice-presidential nominee who had supported collective bargaining and suggested raising corporate taxes and had recently walked a United Auto Workers picket line.

“I still think it’s going better and faster than anybody who was rooting for it would have any right to expect,” said Jennifer Harris, a former Biden administration official now at the Hewlett Foundation, which finances groups on the left and the right seeking alternatives to free-market policies, including Cass’.

Even the much-derided Project 2025, the governing manifesto assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation and later disavowed by Trump, nods at the recent trend lines. The 900-page document includes a collection of familiar proposals, like expanding school vouchers and easing fossil-fuel regulations, as well as more of-the-moment libertarian ideas, like amending child labor regulations so that teenagers can take more hazardous jobs.

But it also includes pronouncements on how “American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace” and proposes that labor regulators do more to help reinstate workers who are fired for trying to unionize.

‘Small, trust-building steps’

For all of the Republicans’ embrace of workers at their convention, the party appeared to lurch in the opposite direction just weeks later.

In an Aug. 12 interview, Trump heaped praise on Tesla CEO Elon Musk for what he claimed was Musk’s commitment to firing workers on strike. Days later, he interrupted his own economic policy speech to cede the mic to a prominent financier, whose brilliance he gushed about.

These developments appeared to demoralize the worker-minded precincts of the conservative intelligentsia. “You can fawn over Elon Musk or you can run a populist political campaign, but you can’t do both,” wrote conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari, a founder of Compact, an online magazine that features populist thinkers across the political spectrum.

Ahmari and some of his allies also question whether Republicans have moved as far toward labor as the party’s financial backers will tolerate. Whatever their political incentives to court workers, Republicans still depend far more than Democrats on money from small and medium-size businesses whose labor costs have a large impact on their bottom lines.

“The guy who owns a tire distributor and goes to rubber-chicken dinners where self-made men are toasted — of all the various segments of capital, that person is the least reform-minded,” Ahmari said in an interview. If there is a path forward, he argues, it involves “small trust-building steps” between Republican politicians and unions.

That’s essentially what Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has undertaken since 2022, long before he was invited to speak at the Republican convention. The union’s federal legislative director, Sunshine McBride, cited the relationship with Hawley as especially fruitful.

In addition to signing letters to Amazon about its treatment of delivery drivers, Hawley was the only Senate Republican to support a rule making it easier for them to unionize, which the Teamsters are pushing for. He has joined a Teamsters picket line and asked the Treasury Department to modify a loan to a bankrupt trucking company to help save the jobs of Teamsters members.

The union has reciprocated, contributing $5,000 to Hawley’s reelection campaign. It’s not hard to imagine other industrial unions, like steelworkers or machinists, eventually forging similar relationships and helping to shift the party over time.

Still, other factions of the labor movement will be loath to get on board. Some of the labor-friendly Republicans take positions — like questioning the integrity of the 2020 election — that make them uncomfortable allies even for politically moderate unions.

And in the end, their understanding of labor may be too narrow to fully accommodate today’s working class. As their platonic ideal, Hawley and Vance often evoke a lone breadwinner in a production job whose spouse can afford to stay home and raise children. They give shorter shrift to the millions of people — often women — who work in health care or at restaurants and retail outlets, or who may have less traditional families.

“Time was, a workingman could support his family — a wife and children — on the work of his own hands,” Hawley said in his National Conservative Conference speech. “Now Americans toil away in dead-end jobs in cubicles, servicing the global corporations, while paying outrageous sums for housing and health care.”

Hawley said in an interview that he believes service jobs must be made better paying, too, and that he’s agnostic about how families allocate work and child-rearing, so long as one parent can stay home if he or she chooses. But gender politics aside, there may be something anachronistic about the worldview — a vision of an economy that existed before global corporations and may no longer be attainable.

That vision will almost certainly appeal to some workers. Whether it captivates the full range of the labor movement is far less clear.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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