The Republican Party Is Fracturing Over Trump’s Labor Agenda

Despite President Donald Trump’s claims to be a champion for American workers, the GOP under Trump isn’t coalescing around a labor agenda.

Trump’s first year in office is ending with a growing rift in his party over how to address affordability and a bipartisan rebuke of the administration’s move to end collective bargaining for federal workers.

“The conservative movement generally is going to have to grapple with these questions into the future and decide if they’re going to start growing closer to the organized labor playbook or stick traditionally to what they’ve done,” said Jarrett Dieterle, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

“It’s only going to be so much longer that the conservative movement is going to be able to paper over these fissures,” he added.

Trump has overseen major shifts in the labor movement. The Teamsters are coming to embrace more Republican politicians, and prominent figures on the right, like Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, have joined picket lines — territory historically occupied by Democrats. Union-member voters shifted toward Trump starting in 2016 (though Kamala Harris’ campaign did appear to reverse that trend in 2024).

In power, however, Trump’s moves around labor have run afoul of major unions, and a slate of proposed legislation from Republicans in Congress suggests that there isn’t widespread buy-in to the kind of bipartisan labor politics those like Hawley are espousing.

The open question: Which direction will the future MAGA movement take when it comes to labor policy?

“There’s always some traditional Republican views that tend to be opposed to union issues in general,” said Rep. Mark Messmer, a Republican on the Education and Workforce Committee’s workforce protections subcommittee. “There’s enough of the Republican members that do support labor issues that I don’t fear anything passing that would be an anti-labor position out of Congress.”

In his second administration, Trump has ended collective bargaining rights for around 1 million federal workers and stalled work at the National Labor Relations Board by firing board member Gwynne Wilcox and leaving the body without a quorum to oversee cases. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting in court against federal workers who say they were illegally dismissed.

Nine Republican lawmakers — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Nick LaLota, Michael Turner, Mike Lawler, Don Bacon, Robert Bresnahan, Christopher Smith, Derrick Van Orden, and Ryan Mackenzie — co-sponsored the Protect America’s Workforce Act, which would repeal Trump’s March executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights.

That bill passed the House with 20 Republicans in support after Democratic Rep. Jared Golden led a successful discharge petition to force a vote on it.

That show of bipartisanship is also reflected in Hawley’s “Pro-worker Framework” for this Congress, which raised alarm bells for the conservatives.

Hawley has co-sponsored a bill with Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Gary Peters, Jeff Merkley and Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno that would require employers to start negotiating labor contracts with unions within 10 days of their formation, called the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The Chamber of Commerce has come out against the proposal.

But neither the House bill overturning Trump’s order nor the Faster Labor Contracts Act is expected to get a vote in the Senate.

And both stand in contrast to bills released by Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last month that claim to realize Trump’s promises to workers, but have instead been praised by employers and panned by groups that support organized labor.

HELP Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy has offered bills that look to streamline unionization and processing at the NLRB, which resolves unfair labor practice cases. One bill, the RESULTS Act, would raise requirements for voter participation in union elections from a simple majority to two-thirds and eliminate voluntary recognition, where employers recognize union bargaining representatives who have majority support from workers, without going through the formal NLRB secret ballot election.

Another bill, the Fairness in Filing Act, would require documentation of workers’ unfair labor practice claims and charge as much as a $5,000 fine to people who file “frivolous charges” with the NLRB. The measures would limit claims that the committee said contribute to the agency’s years-long case backlog.

Critics of the Republican bills said they would make it harder for workers to unionize and discourage workers from filing claims with the NLRB. The Teamsters union has called for Cassidy to move forward bipartisan labor legislation instead.

Republicans are reluctant to say there are fissures in the party around unions and labor policy.

When asked whether unions should play a bigger role in the Republican platform, Rep. Kevin Kiley, who sits on the House Education and Workforce committee, sidestepped the question.

“I prefer to just talk about workers and supporting workers,” Kiley said. “Those are the sort of policies that we’ve been trying to advance out of the committee.”

“We have a lot more work to do for sure,” he added. Kiley voted against the legislation that would restore collective bargaining rights to federal workers.

From the outside, groups that support organized labor say they aren’t seeing Republicans coalesce around a platform.

Lauren McFerran, the former chair of the NLRB and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said Republicans’ pro-worker messaging doesn’t ring true with the party’s actions this year, including health care cuts and Trump’s moves around the NLRB.

“The rhetoric doesn’t match the reality of what’s happening on the ground to workers in this administration,” McFerran said.

Many Republican members of Congress, however, told NOTUS they are not so worried yet — least of all that their party is out of line with the president.

“I don’t necessarily see a gap,” said Rep. Mark Harris, who voted against restoring collective bargaining rights to federal workers. “Things that are sometimes viewed negatively that the president is doing is oftentimes far more politically charged than anything else. And what we’re trying to do is represent the individuals and make sure that we can help the American family have the greatest success they can.”