Illustration by Alex Nabaum
This article appears as part of a special issue of The American Prospect magazine on state policy divergence and aggression. Subscribe here.
One of the more surprising themes to emerge in this election cycle is the question—sometimes asked earnestly, other times in biting disbelief—of whether the Republican Party is becoming pro-union. A representative New York Times headline asks, “Can the G.O.P. Really Become the Party of Workers?” answering that “A new generation of Republicans is learning to love labor.” The Republican National Convention invited Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the first night, and he praised vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) for walking a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)—he of the famed raised fist on January 6, 2021—also joined UAW picketers and went on to pen an opinion piece in Compact magazine in which he called for “bipartisan labor law reform.” His complaints were not unlike what you’d hear from many readers of The American Prospect, lamenting that “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 concludes that “unions are a vital piece of the fabric of a nation that depends on working people.”
There are many ways to figure out whether Republicans are serious about welcoming unions, and much of the evidence for “no” has been pointed out already. A few weeks after the Republican convention, its presidential nominee Donald Trump praised Elon Musk’s decision to fire striking workers. Not a single Republican senator supports the PRO Act, a law that would actually do what Hawley says he wants. In a short time in the Senate, Vance has established a record of opposition to pro-labor NLRB nominees, and voted with his fellow Republicans to kill the Board’s critical rule on joint employment. The list goes on and on.
But there’s another important window into what the GOP believes about workers and the labor movement: what’s been going on at the state level over the last year. Just as Vance, Hawley, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and a handful of other Republicans in Washington have been talking about supporting unions, GOP leaders at the state level have been deploying their governing power to try and kill them.
This may strike some readers as odd. After all, labor policy is supposed to be the exclusive province of the federal government. But in practice, this is decreasingly true. In fact, both red and blue states are pushing the boundaries of federal labor preemption law—which says that questions of union organizing and collective bargaining are off-limits to state governments—and enacting policies that either hinder or facilitate unionization, depending on the party doing the enacting. States also have the discretion to set labor policy for their own public-sector employees, and have taken the initiative there as well. So contemporary developments in state labor policy provide a great way to figure out where the two parties actually stand on the union question. And it’s pretty clear that they stand in the same position the parties traditionally have: with Democrats supportive of unions and Republicans opposed to them.
LET’S START WITH THE RED STATES. While Hawley and Vance bragged about visiting the UAW picket line, six GOP governors engaged in a vigorous campaign to thwart the UAW’s organizing drive among automakers across the South, with a mix of propaganda and actual legislation. On the propaganda front, the six governors—Kay Ivey (AL), Brian Kemp (GA), Tate Reeves (MS), Henry McMaster (SC), Bill Lee (TN), and Greg Abbott (TX)—drafted an open letter that could have come from the National Right to Work Committee.
It opens with a warning, professing concern “about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states. As Governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” And it closes with a very clear statement of the GOP governors’ position on unions: “We want to keep good paying jobs and continue to grow the American auto manufacturing sector here. A successful unionization drive will stop this growth in its tracks, to the detriment of American workers.”
The outlook for workers is in many ways determined by whether a Democrat or Republican sits in their governor’s mansions.
The attack didn’t stop with tough talk. Three GOP trifecta states—Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee—enacted legislation directly aimed at undermining the UAW and workers’ ability to organize unions. Under the new laws, all modeled on a bill shopped by the notorious right-wing policy shop known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), any corporation that wants to receive economic incentive funds from the state must agree not to respect the results of a card check, whereby a majority of workers at an employer sign cards in favor of unionizing. In simple terms, these laws dictate that any firm wanting state economic development money must waive their federal labor law right to recognize a union based on cards signed by its workers.
Since card checks are the most effective way for workers to organize today, this bill takes a swipe at many unions considering organizing in the South. But the bills are of special relevance to autoworkers. Why? Because the collective-bargaining agreements the UAW won with the Big Three, following last year’s historic strikes, commit those automakers to respect the results of card checks at their electric-vehicle and battery plants. These laws aim to prevent just that, since many of those plants are in the South, like Ford’s proposed BlueOval plant slated for Tennessee. (We should note that in September, a GM battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, recognized UAW representation after a majority of employees signed cards. That battery plant’s money from the state of Tennessee wasn’t at risk, because it was granted before the passage of HB 1342, and is therefore grandfathered in.)
It’s not just the autoworkers who have been targeted by the GOP. Public-sector workers and their unions remain the recipients of particular GOP hostility. In Florida, for example, the state legislature recently enacted a “double whammy” set of laws that aims to make it difficult if not impossible for unions to function. One law requires decertification of public-sector unions that can’t certify they are collecting dues from 60 percent of membership-eligible workers, while the other law makes it illegal for those unions to collect dues through payroll deductions from those same workers. Florida lawmakers thus set up a hurdle for unions that they then made it exceedingly difficult to clear. The result? Sixty-three thousand Florida workers had their unions decertified in the last year, accounting for an 11 percent decline in union density in the state.
Republicans in Iowa tried to go even further then Florida, by requiring decertification of public-sector unions if the employer failed to submit a list of the employees covered by an expiring collective-bargaining agreement. Had this law not been blocked by union opposition, it would have given employers an obvious mechanism for eliminating employees’ right to unionize.
THE STORY IN BLUE STATES has been quite different. Governors and legislatures are enacting new policies to expand organizing rights and foster empowerment for workers. Take Minnesota as one leading example. In 2023, the Minnesota legislature passed and Gov. Tim Walz (currently the Democratic vice-presidential nominee) signed a bill that included the following slew of worker rights-enhancing and power-building measures:
Banning captive-audience meetings: Employers can no longer mandate that their employees be subject to meetings or presentations about the employer’s views on unionization (or religion or politics). This removes one of the most widely used and effective union-busting tools from the employer toolbox.
Expanding bargaining subjects for teachers: Public school teachers can negotiate over staff-to-student ratios, effectively making staffing levels a mandatory subject of bargaining.
Worker voice mechanisms in setting labor standards: This creates several new channels for worker voice, on topics ranging from wages to safety to productivity monitoring. For example, wages and benefits for workers in the nursing home sector will now be set by the Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board, which includes representatives of both workers and the industry. As part of a broad effort to protect workers from ergonomic injuries in high-risk industries like meatpacking, warehousing, and health care, employers in those sectors will have to come up with programs to reduce those kinds of injuries. These ergonomic programs must be developed by committees that include workers and union representatives.
Providing information to warehouse workers: Companies that operate warehouse distribution centers like Amazon must share important information about conditions in their workplaces, like how they track productivity and set productivity quotas for workers. This data then can be used to support organizing campaigns, and it also can uncover potential safety hazards that can be brought to state or federal regulators.
Mandating paid sick days for private-sector workers: Full-time employees in Minnesota are now eligible for at least six paid sick and safe days, a change that will empower workers by decreasing their precarity. Workers who feel less precarious in their jobs are more likely to advocate for themselves and their co-workers.
While the Minnesota legislation is noteworthy for its breadth, other blue states have adopted many of these individual pro-worker legislative strategies. For example, California has launched the Fast Food Council, which like the Minnesota Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board, will set wage and benefit minimum standards across a whole industry in the state. (New York had already increased fast-food worker salaries in 2021, through a state wage board.) California also enacted protections for warehouse workers that include a requirement that employers provide information to workers about productivity tracking and quotas. And eight states in addition to Minnesota now ban captive-audience meetings: New York, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
Another active area of state and local action is the establishment of collective-bargaining rights (or other channels of worker voice) for workers excluded from the protections of the NLRB. For example, 12 states, two cities, and Washington, D.C., have enacted Domestic Workers Bills of Rights. In Seattle, the legislation included a Domestic Workers Standards Board, a tripartite mechanism that gave these workers a seat at the table in determining wages and benefits for the sector.
Because federal lawmaking is stuck in gridlock, it can be easy for politicians to posture without being responsible for any real policy. By looking at states and cities, we can see more clearly when and how the parties actually govern. When it comes to unions and workers, the divide is stark: Red states are going one way and blue states the other.
This brief survey also helps shed light on whether there is an internal policy divide within the two parties. Are Republicans holding federal office more pro-labor than their counterparts in the statehouse? Or are state and local Democratic leaders getting out ahead of the federal ticket? The answer is again pretty clear. No Republican senator from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida—or from anywhere else, for that matter—came out against the anti-labor bills that passed recently in those states. Neither has Donald Trump nor JD Vance. But Kamala Harris showed her view about the innovations moving through blue-state legislatures by choosing the governor of Minnesota to be the vice-presidential nominee.
So long as states remain under partisan control, the outlook for workers is in many ways determined by whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in their governor’s mansions. But there are opportunities for Democrats to win some measure of improved conditions in red states. Since 1998, 24 initiatives to increase the minimum wage have been placed on state ballots. All 24 were victories, including in such unlikely locations as Florida, Ohio, Montana, Missouri, South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Alaska. (Purple states like Nevada and Arizona have passed minimum-wage measures as well.) This winning streak has provided tangible benefits for low-wage workers, if not full union membership. In Missouri in 2018, voters even repealed the state’s “right to work” law, making it easier for workers to organize. (Ohio voters rejected legislation that would have limited public-employee collective bargaining in 2011.)
In the 26 states that still allow for some kind of citizen-initiated ballot measures, then, growing public support for unions can manifest on Election Day, even in states whose leadership is primarily anti-union. Without taking advantage of this opportunity, red-state workers are likely to fall even further behind.
