Congress will deal a massive blow to the anti-abortion, pro-conservative values movement if it passes Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Faster Labor Contracts Act. The bill upends the current process for negotiating union contracts, allowing union-friendly government “arbitrators” to impose their own labor terms onto any private-sector business, large or small, that becomes unionized. The bill has a real chance of clearing the Senate after a small group of ill-advised Republicans teamed up with Democrats to circumvent Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and advance it out of the House.
FLCA would be the single biggest gift from Congress to labor union officials since the New Deal, which should alarm social conservatives and anyone with an ounce of common sense, because unions are the most reliable source of manpower and funding for the radical Left.
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Some may find this hard to believe. Aren’t unionized truck drivers, welders, electricians, construction workers, and other blue-collar Americans some of the people most fed up with “Wokeness” — the radical ideology that opposes the traditional understanding of marriage, family, and the sanctity of life; reduces individuals to members of racial and gender categories; and seeks to destroy the reputation of anyone who disagrees?
Yes, workers hate wokeness, but union political involvement isn’t driven by workers. It’s driven by union officials, who steer the use of union political contributions and mislead lawmakers on what workers are “collectively” demanding. The result is that unions almost exclusively support the Left, even as workers themselves support both sides roughly evenly.
Hawley and other populists who are pushing for an alliance with labor unions may know this is a problem, but they don’t take seriously enough just how deeply political the labor movement is. Every election season, unions spend big on Democratic candidates. But direct union funding of candidates’ campaigns is just the tip of the iceberg. Unions spent $1.8 billion on politics during the 2024 election cycle alone, much of which was paid out in “grants” to progressive voter mobilization groups.
The AFL-CIO has funneled over $107 million to “Working America,” a voter canvassing operation affiliated with the union. Since 2015, the Service Employees International Union has sent nearly $39 million to “The Fairness Project,” a progressive ballot initiative operation that is currently working to defeat a proposed abortion ban in Hawley’s home state of Missouri. Union operatives see “organizing” a workplace to form a union as just another kind of political organizing that a professional left-wing activist would do, which is why, once they take control of workplaces and begin negotiating a contract with the employer, unions push their political objectives, not just workplace conditions.
Blue-collar workers struggle to see the value in this kind of nonwork-related activism, so union organizers have turned their attention to white-collar professionals who are more sympathetic to their progressive politics.
When Hawley stood on a United Autoworkers picket line, he joined employees of General Motors, but most of the UAW’s recent organizing wins have been among white-collar professionals such as lawyers and college graduate students. The UAW inked a contract at New York’s New School, which specifies that the school must provide “medicated abortion services” at no additional cost and must negotiate with the union on offering any “gender affirming” health services.
The UAW also represents the attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights, the nonprofit law firm that tried unsuccessfully to defend a Mississippi abortion clinic in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case that resulted in Roe v. Wade being overturned.
Knowing all this, why would any right-of-center politician support expanding union power? Today, some conservatives, such as Hawley, envision a “productive” new political coalition between social conservatives and labor unions. They see union officials as populist heroes fighting against evil corporations on behalf of workers.
But the reality of union politics doesn’t match this fantasy vision. The reverse is true: union officials and corporation boards are fully aligned in their desire to push the views of the elite, institutional Left onto working people.
Look no further than the Teamsters union, which is working with Hawley to promote his labor contracts bill. When the Teamsters rewrote their master agreement with UPS in 2023, they removed all uses of the phrase “he/she” and replaced them with the gender neutral “they.”
Where the previous contract referred to “maternity leave for female employees,” it now reads “maternity leave for employees.”
THE NEW FUSIONISM: A BLUEPRINT FOR UNITING THE GOP
The Teamsters are left-wing to their core — 93% of Teamsters’ contributions to federal candidates went to Democrats — but all they’ve had to do is throw out a few crumbs of verbal and financial support to Republicans, and populists are ready to declare that a paradigm shift is underway in the labor movement. Wrong.
Pro-union populists want conservatives to ignore unions’ faults and get excited about unions as they may one day become, yet today they’re supporting alliances with Democrats to advance legislation that would empower unions as they exist today. Passing Hawley’s Faster Labor Contracts Act would instantly give far-left labor unions a faster road to workplace control, allowing them to collect union dues that fund their extremist political machine that supports abortion and radical gender ideology nationwide. It’s a bill congressional conservatives should strongly oppose.
Jace White is the manager of Government Relations at Advancing American Freedom.