Why Is Josh Hawley Bringing Obamanomics Back from the Grave?

The dirty little secret of the Current American Plurality that elected President Donald Trump is that while it added many voters to the losing coalitions of prior Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney, a majority of its voters and supporters are and were consistently conservative Republicans, who voted against former President Barack Obama twice.

This makes something Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is doing exceptionally strange. Most of the time, Sen. Hawley is a strong voice for conservative policy, as in his passionate defenses of religious liberty and his devastating grilling of unqualified left-wing judicial nominees. But in issuing what he is calling a “pro-worker framework,” reportedly developed with the aid of special-interest advocate extraordinaire Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters Union, Sen. Hawley has dug up the rotting corpse of one of President Obama’s failed initiatives—an initiative judged so extreme at the time Obama could not get unified Democratic support for it—the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Obama’s Not-So-Free Choice

Before we examine Hawley’s contemporary Obamanomics that may or may not have conservative characteristics, let us refresh with some Obama-era history. In the late 2000s, with Democrats in the ascendancy as President George W. Bush’s second term devolved into failure at home and abroad and with the Long Decline in union organizing continuing, Big Labor and its allies in Big Philanthropy and other left-wing groups pushed the Employee Free Choice Act as critical legislation to compel more American workers into labor unions. That is, the bill would force workers to join the same unions that are some of the biggest donors both to Democrats’ election campaigns and to left-wing pressure groups across the full spectrum of issues, including religious liberty and judicial nominations.

That bill was best known for its mandate that employers recognize “card checks”—the potentially coerced or deceptively obtained public signatures of workers on union authorization cards—to determine majority support for a union, rather than letting workers cast secret ballots. Opponents seized on this mandate as a “kick me” sign: Eliminating workers’ secret ballot on such a momentous decision was so obviously contrary to American values and practice that the “card check” provision both defined and sank the bill.

But card-check was not the only bad idea in EFCA. Perhaps even more problematic for businesses and workers’ rights alike was a mandate for “binding arbitration” of first union contracts, which would give an arbitrator power to dictate a contract if a business and the newly organized union could not reach an agreement. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) wrote at the time:

Once a worksite is unionized through the elimination of the secret ballot, if the employer and union don’t agree to terms in just over three months, a federally appointed arbitrator would impose wages, benefits, hours of work, and other terms and conditions of employment on both the employees and employer.

And what about the rights of the worker? Workers, who didn’t vote on the formation of the union to begin with and lost their right to participate in a secret-ballot election, would now have a contract thrust upon them without their vote or consent.

EFCA also included a provision to fine employers whom the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found to have infringed its special procedural rules, infringements known as Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs). While this might sound fair, it both procedurally and substantively gives an advantage to labor unions. Even under current law, which only allows the NLRB to award restitution pay to workers harmed by an employer’s ULP, unions file numerous dubious ULP charges during organizing campaigns and contract negotiations as part of broader campaigns to damage businesses’ reputations (known in the trade as “corporate campaigns”) and as general lawfare tactics to compel an employer to agree to union demands.

Senate Democrats also considered “quickie elections” to replace card-check and speed up union organizing. These rules were later adopted by President Obama’s (and President Biden’s) NLRB. For Big Labor, the principle is simple: By shortening the campaign period in which employers may argue the drawbacks to union organizing—and employers’ talks with their workers are already subject to various restrictions the NLRB has imposed—unions have an easier chance to make non-binding, politician-like promises to workers without counterargument from management. That is a major structural advantage. (When the NLRB is controlled by pro-union officials, who sit as de facto prosecutor, judge, and jury, the situation becomes even worse.)

Hawley’s Necromancy

Sen. Hawley received the paltry sum of $5,000 for his re-election campaign from the Teamsters Union, less than the $25,000 the union gave to the hybrid PAC of California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who was not even up for re-election in 2024. All included, OpenSecrets assesses that the total organizational and employee contributions to House and Senate candidates from the Teamsters Union in the 2024 election cycle broke 92 percent for Democrats (actually more like 93 percent, since independent candidates who received contributions were former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), whom OpenSecrets classified as an independent candidate; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who caucuses with Senate Democrats; and Nebraska candidate Dan Osborn, a nominal independent who was supported by Senate Democrats’ official Super PAC) and 7 percent for Republicans. This consummated what the social-democratic (that’s a fancy European term for “socialist”) magazine Compact characterized as a “pathbreaking alliance” between the Missouri senator and Big Labor.

As part of that pathbreaking alliance, Hawley is trying to resurrect Obama’s labor policies from the dead. (At least when former President Obama supported them, he had at least 85 million reasons, rather than a mere 5,000.) Hawley’s office released “A Pro-Worker Framework for the 119th Congress” that is supposed to “protect good American union jobs.”

Emphasis strongly on “union,” because the framework is essentially Obama’s EFCA with quickie elections substituted for card check joined to another Obama-era regulatory creation (compulsory pro-union posters to be placed in workplaces) and workplace regulations aimed squarely at the warehouse industry, a target for Teamsters organizing.

Whose Side Are You On?

When the original EFCA was proposed, Gingrich wrote:

EFCA’s imposed binding arbitration would irreparably wound one of the most extraordinary features in American society, the willingness to take risk to build an enterprise that generates prosperity for one’s family and community. It must never be allowed to be signed into law.

He was right then, and the Senate and American people agreed. EFCA did not reach the Senate floor in the 111th Congress once it was clear that it would not clear a filibuster because of bipartisan opposition. The American people then rendered their verdict on EFCA and Obamanomics as a whole in the 2010 midterm elections, which were a historic “wave election,” even by the standards of midterm elections favoring the opposition party. In the 2010 elections, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, took state legislatures they had not held for decades, and stormed to control of gubernatorial offices from Maine to Alaska.

Little evidence suggests that the Current American Plurality that returned Donald Trump to the White House secretly backs full-throated Obamanomics (or its woke derivative, Bidenomics). President Trump’s first term featured solid labor policy in line with conservatives’ 80-year Taft-Hartley Consensus response to the nearly century-old Labor-Progressive Alliance. President Trump has nominated an alumnus of his first administration who had issued regulations supporting independent contractors for the post of Deputy Secretary of Labor, in a sign that the administration—despite its selection of the extremely problematic former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) for Labor Secretary—will not be fully committed to repudiating the Taft-Hartley Consensus for an EFCA/PRO Act-based union-stooge policy that will benefit Big Labor’s progressive allies.

It remains to be seen what legislative form Sen. Hawley’s framework will take. If it looks anything like Obama’s EFCA, it will be worthy of nothing more than the circular file.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/why-is-josh-hawley-bringing-obamanomics-back-from-the-grave/