Picking Lori Chavez-DeRemer as secretary of labor would undermine Trump’s agenda.
Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R., Ore.) is rumored to be under consideration for secretary of labor in the second Trump administration, reportedly at the urging of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. Chavez-DeRemer is one of only three House Republicans who support the PRO Act, which would undermine state right-to-work laws, curtail freelance work and franchising, and make it easier for unions to intimidate and collect personal information from workers. It’s bad legislation that the vast majority of Republicans rightly reject, and supporting it should be disqualifying for being secretary of labor in a Republican administration.
But the PRO Act is only for private-sector unions. Chavez-DeRemer’s stance on public-sector unions is arguably even worse.
Trump and his allies have talked endlessly about the need to take on the “deep state” or “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. Sometimes such talk veers into conspiracy-theorizing, but it’s certainly true that many federal bureaucrats are opposed to Trump and their obstruction can prevent him from governing as he was elected to govern. For years, conservatives have been raising the alarm about the constitutional problems that an entrenched, unelected administrative state presents when it hinders the elected leaders from making decisions. Government unions stand in the way of making many reforms to the civil service that Trump would like to see.
At the state and local level, public-sector unions are even more pervasive, and they often represent one of the major power sources for state-level Democratic parties. The bad behavior of teachers’ unions became more widely known during the Covid pandemic when they were advocating school closures. This helped spur renewed energy in the school-choice movement, which teachers’ unions oppose with all their might, with eleven states now having universal education savings accounts. Trump’s selection of school-choice proponent Linda McMahon as secretary of education indicates that he wants to see that trend continue.
Picking Chavez-DeRemer as secretary of labor would undermine Trump’s agenda. She supports the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which the vast majority of House Democrats support. Kamala Harris supports it, too. So does Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Lee Saunders of AFSCME.
It makes sense why Democrats and government unions would love it. The bill would federalize all public-sector bargaining by forcing all states to recognize public-sector unions. That would effectively rewrite labor-relations law in roughly half of the states, many of them Republican-governed, which currently either prohibit collective bargaining by public employees or don’t explicitly authorize it.
The bill establishes “minimum standards” to be overseen by the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the public-sector equivalent of the NLRB. If the FLRA doesn’t think a state government is meeting those standards, it would have power under the bill to take over the supervision of public-sector bargaining from state authorities.
The bill would ban the annual recertification elections for public-sector unions that have been included in reforms passed by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans. All these provisions say is that a union should have to demonstrate that it has majority or supermajority support from the workers it claims to represent if it wants to keep representing them. That shouldn’t be an onerous burden to meet if the union is doing a good job. But government unions feel threatened by these state laws because, in Wisconsin for example, about half of local teachers’ unions have failed recertification votes.
An article about the bill by Alexander T. MacDonald from the Federalist Society said, “This scheme would be, to put it gently, constitutionally adventurous.” It would likely be unconstitutional because it would “enlist state officers to carry out federal policies” and “instruct states to adopt specific legislative programs.” Since the establishment of federal labor-relations law under the Wagner Act, state and local governments have been exempted from federal control, and Franklin Roosevelt, who signed the Wagner Act, didn’t believe the public sector should be allowed to unionize at all.
The Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act is an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government that would invalidate many of Republican governors’ greatest policy wins over public-sector unions and imperil further efforts for school-choice expansion and civil-service reform that are central to Trump’s policy agenda — and Lori Chavez-DeRemer supports it. Voters in her district kicked her out of office after only one term in the House. Trump shouldn’t give her a new office in the executive branch.