Republicans and Big Labor: Reagan-Bush and Beyond

Republicans and Big Labor, a Failed Courtship (full series)
Before Franklin Roosevelt | Wagner and Taft-Hartley
The Two Minds of Tricky Dick | Reagan-Bush and Beyond

Reagan-Bush and Beyond

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president over union-backed incumbent President Jimmy Carter. While Reagan himself had been the actors’ union president during his Hollywood career, his labor secretaries deviated from the models set by his 20th century Republican predecessors. Rather than union bosses like Durkin, Brennan, or Dunlop’s Ford administration successor William Usery or an outside supporter of organized labor like James Mitchell (who replaced Durkin under Eisenhower) or John Dunlop, Reagan appointed the deregulation-minded Raymond J. Donovan to the labor secretary role. Donovan was forced to resign amid lawfare attacks in 1985, but his two Reagan administration successors were Republicans who kept in line with Reagan’s deregulatory mold. After George H.W. Bush was elected to succeed Reagan, he appointed Elizabeth Dole to the role. Dole would later co-sponsor a National Right to Work bill as a U.S. senator.

Running away from Big Labor, most prominently by Reagan’s Transportation Department sacking illegally striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981, did not harm the GOP. Reagan’s re-election over Carter’s Vice President, Walter Mondale, saw the GOP win its highest share with union household voters (46 percent) between 1976 and 2020, despite his aggressive breaking of the PATCO strike. The key to securing the “Reagan Democrats” was not expanded collective bargaining, appeasing union bosses, or otherwise giving into what the former Sen. Joseph Ball called “the eastern Republican group” during the Eisenhower era: It was delivering a strong deregulatory and tax-cutting agenda that controlled inflation and restarted economic growth.

Following the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the ascent to the AFL-CIO leadership of the left-wing activist John Sweeney in 1996, relations between the GOP and the declining labor union movement further soured. Sweeney’s aggressive (and unsuccessful) push to return Congress to Democratic control in 1996 led to criticism from the union-friendly then-Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who told a journalist:

“If the Democrats take back the Congress, Sweeney could well be one of the two or three most powerful people in the country. If they don’t, he’s really hurt organized labor,” because he has totally alienated the GOP. “If he’d been more of an appeaser to pro-labor Republicans, we wouldn’t get drilled by [House speaker] Newt [Gingrich] for supporting labor. But now he can just say, ‘Why are you stupid bastards messing around with them? They’re just a Democratic annex.’”

The Teamsters, now under “reformist” leadership of Ron Carey, broke with the union’s Republican ancestry and joined at the hip with the Clinton White House, leading to (among other things) Carey’s removal from office amid a campaign-finance scandal. Carey’s successor, James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy), was little more than a false target for Republican outreach from the George W. Bush campaigns; the Teamsters endorsed Democrats in 2000 and 2004.

Following the latter election, Hoffa fils took the Teamsters back out of the AFL-CIO alongside the left-wing activist Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to form Change to Win, an unsuccessful organizing and political coalition that sought to reinvigorate the declining union movement. That aligned the Teamsters Union even more closely with the Democratic Party and left-wing activism, as the SEIU ended up by far the senior partner in the coalition.

The fall of Change to Win and a new regime at the Teamsters Union that plays special-interest rather than left-wing ideological politics (at least in name) has reinvigorated those on the right about whom Senator Ball warned almost three-quarters of a century ago, today led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. These Republicans have forgotten that the Reagan Democrats stuck with Reagan even after the PATCO strike, thinking instead that the way to appeal to right-leaning working people is by increasing the strength of left-leaning (or outright left-wing) union bosses. Working people do not follow union leadership’s guidance closely. As an electoral matter, union leaderships’ claims to speak for working people (or even their members) as a class are hollow.

The Eisenhower and Nixon/Ford “outreach” eras also demonstrate that ideology-based “splits” in Big Labor never last. Government-sector unions and private-sector unions have too much overlap in staffing and policy goals to stay disunited, especially if the Republican Party wants to do anything remotely conservative in domestic affairs. It is no coincidence that the liberal-on-domestic-affairs Nixon and Ford administrations were the most consistent in outreach to Big Labor.

Ultimately, any short-run electoral benefit the GOP might obtain (and the historical evidence suggests that benefit may not even exist) would come at the cost of bad policies. The Nixon and Ford administrations left America with the deeper institutionalization of the Great Society programs in American life, and the AFL-CIO turned right around and endorsed the Democrats to deepen the institutionalization of the Great Society anyway at the next election.

Unions are, and have been since their creation, creatures of the political Left. Shifts to the right among working people are completely independent of union boss wishes, and with exceptions rare enough that they warrant noting by name they are explicitly contrary to union boss wishes. Empowering union bosses by increasing labor union powers not only will fail to secure their loyalty and the loyalty of their members, it will harm the broader economy and offend working people outside of organized labor (most prominently independent contractors) who are otherwise friendly to a free-market conservatism.

In his 1953 Freeman piece, former Senator Ball warned, “bucking the [Eisenhower] White House on this issue could mean primary defeat for many G.O.P. congressmen. Only those sure of the support of their own districts on this issue could afford to risk it, and there are not enough of them.” He continued, “Some G.O.P. congressional leaders have even swallowed the political deal aspect. As of now, a White House bill to amend the heart out of Taft-Hartley could not be stopped in Congress.” Worker freedom advocates have been here before, with a Republican administration flattering the interests of Teamsters Union leadership in a mistargeted effort to reach out to working Americans. In 1953, the long-term logic held, and Taft-Hartley survived, but not without the work of activists interested in these issues. One hopes the past will prove prologue.