NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {M} issouri Republican senator Josh Hawley made headlines recently for walking the picket line with striking United Auto Workers members. But Hawley is showing support for left-wing unions in more than just photo ops. In two recent radio interviews in Missouri, Hawley has said he no longer supports right-to-work laws. Given his state’s history with right-to-work, Hawley’s abandonment of the conservative position on this issue is troubling.
A right-to-work law is very simple: It says no worker can be required to give money to a union as a condition of employment. It enshrines the principle of voluntary association into employment law. Workers who wish to join unions still can.
Organized labor would rather force workers to contribute to their cause. Unions know that most American workers, when given the choice, opt to keep more of their paychecks rather than contribute part of it to oftentimes corrupt organizations (such as the UAW) that will likely use the money for left-wing activism.
So unions fight right-to-work laws, and have done so ever since Congress first allowed states to pass them in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. They slandered Taft-Hartley as the “Slave Labor Act.” Yet its provisions were so popular in the aftermath of economy-crippling strikes that bipartisan majorities in the Republican-led Congress overrode President Truman’s veto to enact it into law. Union opposition hasn’t let up, but after decades of conservative activism, a majority of states are now right-to-work.
After the Tea Party–wave elections and strong Republican state-level victories during the Obama administration, a new wave of states passed right-to-work. Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia all adopted right-to-work laws between 2012 and 2016. In 2017, Kentucky adopted one as well. With that, Missouri was in the unenviable position of having every state it borders be right-to-work (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky) except Illinois. And if there’s one rule for Midwestern conservatives, it’s to never be like Illinois.
Missouri Republicans had passed right-to-work bills several times before, but they always ran into a Democratic governor who vetoed them. In 2015, Missouri Republicans attempted to override then-Governor Jay Nixon’s veto. Despite having veto-proof majorities in both chambers, some Republicans voted with Democrats in the override vote, and Nixon’s veto was upheld. In response, Hawley, then a lawyer active in the conservative legal movement, tweeted, “Time for an end to union-backed candidates in the GOP. #changeiscoming #RightToWork.”
In 2017, Republicans finally had unified government, and then-Governor Eric Greitens signed the right-to-work bill into law, which would have made Missouri the 28th right-to-work state. But the Missouri constitution allows for a veto referendum on laws signed by the governor. The AFL-CIO and other progressive activist groups led signature-gathering efforts to subject the law to a referendum.
Despite claiming to have submitted over 300,000 signatures, they collected 250,327 valid signatures — in a state of approximately 6 million people — which was still more than enough to clear the threshold of just over 100,000 to get the referendum on the ballot. The AFL-CIO and the Teamsters paid a Washington, D.C.-based firm over $600,000 to conduct the signature drive.
That would be only the beginning of pro-union spending in the campaign. The pro-union side outspent the right-to-work side by almost four to one. Unions mobilized a national effort to flood the state with advertising, door-knockers, and phone-bankers. Understanding the political machine they were up against, Republicans in the general assembly moved the date of the referendum to coincide with the primary election instead of the general election. The right-to-work law was defeated in the lower-turnout August 2018 referendum with 67 percent of the vote.
A campaign spokeswoman for Hawley, then Missouri’s attorney general and the GOP nominee for that year’s Senate election, did not say whether Hawley supported the law when asked by the Springfield News-Leader what his position was after the referendum.
According to the National Right to Work Committee, Hawley signed the group’s candidate pledge when he ran for Senate in 2018, which included the promise to “cosponsor and seek roll-call votes on legislation to repeal the provisions in federal laws which authorize compulsory union dues.” But according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in a recent radio interview, Hawley said of the 2018 Missouri referendum result, “The people of Missouri made their decision and now the question is are we going to support these workers and their struggle to keep jobs in America.” In another interview, he said, “I respect that decision and I certainly wouldn’t support any federal legislation to impose right to work on anybody.”
Right-to-work laws don’t impose anything on workers. It’s the unions who want to impose their agenda on workers by forcing them to financially contribute to them as a condition of employment. And right-to-work doesn’t have to be a state issue. Republican members of Congress regularly introduce legislation that would amend the National Labor Relations Act to make the whole country right-to-work. Rand Paul introduced it in the Senate this year, and the bill has 28 co-sponsors, all Republicans.
Hawley’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
“Senator Hawley has broken the pledge he made to Missouri right-to-work supporters. It is deeply disappointing,” National Right to Work Committee president Mark Mix told National Review. “The fact is nearly 80 percent of all Americans believe it is wrong to force a worker to pay union dues or fees just to get or keep a job.”
The UAW has made it abundantly clear that it despises Hawley — and Republicans more generally. Labor PACs spent $405,500 in Missouri’s 2018 Senate election, and 98 percent of that went to Claire McCaskill, Hawley’s Democratic opponent. Hawley opposed a Missouri minimum-wage increase that the unions supported, and he also opposes the PRO Act that Big Labor has been trying to get passed in Washington for years. The UAW gave him a 0 percent rating on its most recent legislative scorecard, from 2019. It used nine votes for its score; eight of them were on the confirmation of conservative federal judges appointed by Donald Trump, which the union opposed.
Organized labor supports the full spectrum of progressive policy goals, including the expansion of abortion, gun control, and social-justice ideology, as Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center has documented. One hopes Hawley’s change of heart on right-to-work won’t extend to these issues as well.
Unions don’t represent the working class. Ninety percent of American workers (and 90 percent of Missourian workers) are not union members, and about half of union members work for government. Despite the self-described “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history” in the White House and a steady barrage of pro-union spin in the media, the promised “union renaissance” has failed to arrive, with the union-membership rate hitting a record low in 2022. Polling that shows positive attitudes toward unions also shows that non-unionized Americans are not interested in actually joining one. And despite setbacks in Missouri and Michigan, the conservative movement has been extremely successful politically against organized labor for the past three-quarters of a century.
Americans don’t want to be forced to pay union dues. Republicans should continue to present a contrast to union-backed Democrats and support right-to-work laws that protect voluntary association in the workplace — even when the going gets tough.