Toward a new labor movement
Conservatives need labor, and democratic capitalism needs new models for workers’ organizations
The vast majority of working Americans go to work every day to earn a living and provide for their families, not because they want to participate in the latest ‘woke’ workplace trend. In reality, many American workers are sick and tired of being subjected to radical company policies and would gladly trade in their ‘diversity workshop’ for a discussion on benefits or flexibility. — U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida)
As political realignment continues apace in 2022, one thing is becoming increasingly apparent: American workers need a new labor movement, and so does American democratic capitalism.
One does not survive without the other. With capital comes labor; with capitalism comes a labor movement. And, as the messy divorce continues between the working rank-and-file and the Big Labor-Democratic Party partnership, it’s not too soon for the Republican Party to enter the fray, for out of the tumult of globalism, if capitalism survives at all, will come some form of a labor movement. It needs to be authentic and alternative, competitive and democratic.
Not that political support should be given to any attempt to revive the institutional labor movement as it exists today, and has existed for decades now, assuming that could be done anyway. Big labor remains steadfastly wedded to Democrats, to their bureaucratic government, and to woke bureaucratic corporations. With them, it’s rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub.
But just as workers have a stake in what goes on in their workplaces, so do Republicans and liberty-minded people. For as multinational corporations and Big Government have become increasingly insinuated into each other’s fabric, their power has reached the point where it poses an existential threat to the democratic republic. To successfully fend off the utter destruction of our constitution and democracy, we need all the counterpowers to globalism’s tyranny we can muster, and that includes workers organizing in the belly of the corporate beast.
The Republican Party, which now holds out the best hope for a liberty-first society, meaning a free society, must support those efforts, so long as they are authentic and alternative, and figure out how to do so quickly before its historic opportunities are lost. To be sure, workers have been streaming into the GOP since Reagan Democrats helped elect him president, and many have stayed true to conservative voting patterns. Donald Trump’s onslaught against globalism—not to mention the Democrats’ inevitable allegiance to a culturally elite identity politics—have opened the Republican door to new waves of working class and minority voters.
But so far, apart from sloganeering about working class values and the general economic prosperity of the GOP agenda, Republicans have been shy about the courtship: Much like having an affair, Republicans love their dalliance with the working class so long as they don’t have to go public with it. But the time has come when that approach will no longer work. The republic needs an organized working class voice within corporate America in addition to its political voice.
To be sure, Republicans are rightly wary of traditional labor unions as represented by Big Labor. There never should be any support for that. Right-to-work laws protect worker freedom; prevailing wages simply distort labor markets and most often result in Big Labor taking a cut from inflated construction contracts that bilk both taxpayers and the non-unionized workforce. Labor’s stilted work rules and seniority crush creativity and innovation, impede productivity, and strip the workplace and the economy of merit-based advancement. Not least, public sector unions simply shouldn’t exist.
All of which probably leads many to wonder, just what kind of labor movement, then, does that leave room for? Or is it impossible to have a worker movement that conservatives can support?