It was such a small thing: just a simple anti-skid mat for a dishwashing station. Or rather, the lack of such a mat.

It was my first day working in the kitchen for a multibillion-dollar chain of bakeries , and I noticed there was no mat at the dishwasher station, which meant there was nothing to prevent us workers from sliding around and getting injured.

When I brought this up to the manager, I was told it would take a few days to get the mat. I was then told that if I decided the situation was unsafe and I left, I would be fired. I didn’t stay long at the job. I left for a grocery store that was unionized and cared about its workers and safety measures. For what it’s worth, I’m a conservative.

Sohrab Ahmari would understand my story. Ahmari’s new book is called Tyranny, Inc. : How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It. Ahmari wrote that the “general tendency of Tyranny, Inc., is the domination of working- and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich.” Alluding to Milton Friedman’s famous analogy , Ahmari wrote, “The market economy isn’t made up of billions of Robinson Crusoes trading their surpluses, cooperating happily without coercion.” He argued, “Most have only the power to sell their labor and subject themselves to the coercion of the owner class — or withhold labor and risk odds of survival as steep as those faced by the famous literary shipwreck.”

A political conservative whose previous book was a defense of tradition “in an age of chaos,” Ahmari argued in Tyranny Inc. that while “we on the Right don’t think of the market as a place where we could be coerced and especially unjustly coerced,” in reality there is coercion. Workers are forced out of fair negotiations by things such as “right to work” policies, which kill unions and give corporations the power to set the rules for workers. This leaves, as one reviewer put it, “workers left unable to enjoy family stability by wage and scheduling precarity; others accepting total surveillance in shockingly one-sided employment agreements; still others having their grievances corralled into private arbitration courts, where corporations set the rules.”

Moreover, it’s not the 19th century anymore, making it harder for workers to strike out on their own entrepreneurial mission and be their own bosses.

Ahmari is offering a real opportunity for conservatives here. Because the economics of journalism have been precarious since the digital revolution, I’ve had to take a lot of part-time jobs on the side. I’ve worked in bakeries, grocery stores, and hardware stores and at pools. One thing I noticed is the cultural conservatism of a lot of my co-workers. Many are immigrants who come from religious places that value family and traditional values. Early on, I saw that many of the Hispanic men I worked with (and for) liked Donald Trump.

These were also people who highly praised the places they worked at — provided those places were unionized. I told one co-worker, an immigrant from Ethiopia, that I was thinking of moving to a state in the South. He calmly explained to me the difference in benefits and protections between a grocery store that was unionized, where he and I worked, and one that wasn’t. From pay to sick leave to insurance, the difference was stark.

As recent polling has shown, working people and minorities are breaking for the Republican Party. They are turned off by identity politics, punitive liberalism, and academic elites who now make up the Democratic Party. As Henry Olsen argued in his book The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, if conservatives sell themselves as the party of the working class and not the party opposed to the parts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that genuinely helped people, Social Security for example, they can form a gigantic multiethnic and multigenerational coalition.

So yes, an anti-slip mat at a dishwasher station is a big deal. As Ahmari put it: “I think if we have a society in which even if you don’t have a college degree, you can make ends meet relatively well, and retire in dignity, and take care of your elderly parents, and raise children without being worried that if they get sick, you’re going to go bankrupt — if we have that, I think the temperature of the culture war will come down. It’s not going to resolve everything. There’s some real profound disagreements, but it could turn down the temperature a little bit, and I think we’ll be a little bit less at each other’s throats on cultural issues.”

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.