For years, the conservative partisan playbook to win working-class votes was to ignore economic inequality and demagogue the culture war. The journalist Thomas Frank published a best-selling book about this in 2004. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas.“Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.”It may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 at 48 percent, has been rising ever since, according to Gallup, and lately it’s around 70 percent, which is higher than at any time since the salad days of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Although support stands highest (90 percent) among registered Democrats, in 2022 a 56 percent majority of Republicans also approved of unions. That’s fallen since to 41 percent, but it’s still a significant minority for a party that for nearly four decades included right-to-work boilerplate in every quadrennial platform. It took a few years, but a significant minority of congressional Republicans is now beginning to catch up to GOP voters. The 2024 Republican Party platform was the first since 1980 not to include a right-to-work plank, and, as I noted last week (“How to Get A Labor Rights Bill Through A GOP House”), two labor rights bills successfully bypassed Republican Speaker Mike Johnson in recent months via discharge petition and passed with support from 20 Republicans. Meanwhile, Democrats are fielding, to challenge red-state Republicans, candidates who appeal to the working-class voters they long neglected. Even the problematic oyster farmer Graham Platner has a good shot at unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine.Given that the culture war no longer serves to distract voters reliably from labor rights, the new conservative strategy is to re-define labor rights as culture war. On Monday The Wall Street Journal published an editorial (“A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left”) that’s a sort of trial balloon.The editorial addressed House passage of the second labor rights bill to sneak past Speaker Johnson, the Faster Labor Contracts Act (text; summary), which time-limits management dithering after a union election. I fully expected the Journal edit page’s usual tirade about greedy union bosses extinguishing capitalism’s animal spirits. That was the gist of the Journal’s previous editorial about the bill in May, when the discharge petition acquired the necessary 218 signatures. But the thrust of the new editorial was quite different. Unions, it said, only seem like they’re about improving your working conditions; really, they’re just a front for sex-changers and baby-killers. “We wonder if Republicans know what they’ve voted for,” opined the Journal. “Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare.” Those 20 Republicans who voted for the Fair Labor Contracts Act, the Journal said, are “selling out their constituents to the progressive left.” The Journal’s Exhibit A was an “Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language” recommended by the AFL-CIO. This document does indeed propose “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services, including contraceptives, abortion services (procedural and pharmaceutical) and gender-affirming care.” But the AFL-CIO is not a labor union—it’s a federation of labor unions that plays no role in negotiating union contracts. That’s typically the work of a union local. “Unions are democratic institutions,” Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO explained to me, with officials at all levels elected by members and conventions. “They take positions accordingly, based on where the members are.” If a contract includes health coverage for gender-affirming care or Mifepristone, that’s because members want these things. Any member of Congress who actively opposes such language is interfering with the terms of a private contract, which is something conservatives are supposed to hate.The Journal editorial didn’t identify any union members who object to their health plan covering abortion and gender reassignment. (My guess is such people are hard to find.) Instead, the Journal complained that “many businesses have objected to those provisions on religious grounds.” Oh, please. If I may be permitted a conservative complaint: I never even imagined I’d hear such an argument before 2014, when the Supreme Court decided, outrageously, that businesses enjoy the same First Amendment right to religious freedom as individuals. Bring back the good old days when they didn’t!
