J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene.
Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story.
This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.
In other instances, what superficially seemed to be examples of Republican support for worker rights were really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.
For example, legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021.
Only a sliver of the national work force dug in and refused to be vaccinated, including a small number of New York City employees recently granted reinstatement to their jobs by a Staten Island trial court judge. But anti-vax workers were stark outliers in relation to the vast majority of their peers, from United Airlines employees to Massachusetts state employees, who overwhelmingly complied with mandates.
Why did these conservative Republicans suddenly want a safety net for unvaccinated workers? Because it served a culture war narrative, one that frames everything in divisive us-versus-them terms and in the case of vaccines, sees them as a nefarious liberal plot and vaccine-or-test mandates as one more example of government overreach.
To that point, consider two legal cases, one brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when its enforcement arm was led by a Trump appointee, and another heard by the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees. Both cases involved workers — but neither touched on pocketbook or dignity issues central to most workers’ concerns.
The E.E.O.C. case involved two Kroger workers who claimed religious discrimination after being fired for refusing to wear company-issued aprons bearing a heart-shaped logo they saw as promoting gay rights. (In pretrial depositions, both workers were shown a range of corporate logos, and the workers said several of them also represented gay rights and were incompatible with their religion; they included the logos of NBC, Google, Southwest and Apple, as well as the Olympic rings.) A Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas rejected Krogers’ motion to end the case, ordering the case to trial, and earlier this month, the company and commission said they had reached a deal to resolve the dispute.
In a Supreme Court case that became a national right-wing cause célèbre, the six conservative justices ruled that a Washington State school district violated the free speech and religious rights of a public school football coach who insisted on praying very publicly after games with students at midfield, rejecting more private locations that were offered.
In light of genuine worker struggles in our country, these are the workers conservatives go to bat for? It seems the trickle-down crowd finds their inner Norma Rae only if it helps them “own the libs.” These aren’t workers’ rights issues. They’re divisive culture war battles that happen to occur in the employment arena. For ordinary workers, living paycheck to paycheck, who just want a safe place to work, decent pay, and some dignity, conservatives are AWOL.
The praying coach and Kroger worker cases involved First Amendment and religious rights. But the most common example of silenced expression occurs when workers get fired for reporting labor law violations or supporting a union. How many Republicans have spoken up to support the expressive rights of unionizing Starbucks or Amazon workers?
Similarly, Republicans may prioritize benefits for their favored workers (such as people who are unvaccinated), but all workers need a functioning safety net, including an adequately funded and functional unemployment insurance system. What’s also essential are robust and broadly available programs for paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave and universal health care, measures most Republicans have repeatedly opposed. In this context, the rush to ensure unemployment benefits to people refusing a lifesaving vaccine is cynical, indeed.
Workers need safe conditions, good wages, fair treatment and a collective voice on the job. The culture war labor incursions are divorced from what matters most to our country’s working people.
As the midterms approach, Republican candidates may play dress-up in plaids and work boots, as they vie for the votes of our nation’s workers. But even a pickup truck laden with bluejeans and hard hats can’t camouflage the callous facts. The absurdity of the worker causes Republicans champion should drive home the truth to wavering voters: these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.
Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.
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