Conservative Unionism and the Problem of Coercion
Pity Crystal Carey. Nominated by President Trump to be the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, she might have expected to sail through a Senate dominated by the president’s party. Yet her confirmation hearing was anything but smooth. One especially tense moment came when a senator asked her about “captive audience” meetings—i.e., mandatory meetings during work time to discuss unions. This senator noted that the NLRB had recently declared the meetings illegal, and he demanded to know whether Carey would enforce that decision. Carey tried to explain that, as general counsel, her role would be to enforce the NLRB’s orders, whether she agreed with them or not. But the senator cut her off, pivoting to her existing clients. He accused one of those clients of treating its workers as non-employees even though it “controls every detail” of their lives. Carey, understandably, demurred; she explained that she couldn’t talk about specific clients or cases. But the senator wasn’t satisfied. The issue, he thundered, “matters to the livelihood of thousands of workers.”
You could be forgiven for assuming that this senator hailed from the Democratic Party, with its long and deep ties to organized labor. But, in fact, it was Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from the deep-red state of Missouri. In his short time in Washington, Senator Hawley has become maybe the most important voice for unions in national government. He has walked union picket lines, accepted union donations, and repeated union talking points. He has written pro-union op-eds and introduced pro-union legislation. He has even appeared on pro-union podcasts. Without question, he is one of the unions’ strongest allies in Washington. And he is a conservative.
More importantly, he is not alone. Increasingly, self-described conservatives have urged their party to reconsider its longtime stance toward organized labor. They have described labor as a “moral” issue, one intertwined with family, community, and even faith. They say that workers with good jobs are also good parents and good citizens. These workers go to church, raise healthy families, and support their communities. In other words, they do the things that conservatives have always wanted them to do. And unions help them do that. So shouldn’t conservatives care about unions too?
This is a serious argument. It exposes a dividing line in modern conservative thought: the tension between free-market and common-good ideologies. It also speaks a vocabulary pleasing to the conservative ear: American values, American character, and American strength. It offers conservatives much to think about and a lot to like.
And yet, it is also deeply flawed. Stripped of its rhetorical ornament, its basic argument is that unions can do some good things. But almost no one denies that. Conservatives don’t dispute that unions can encourage some socially beneficial behavior. What conservatives do dispute is whether unions’ modest social benefits can justify their coercive tactics. Modern unions ride on the back of government-bestowed monopolies: they use legal force to corral employees under their banners and drag employers to the bargaining table. Conservatives object to that coercive power, which effectively negates free choice at work. Pro-union conservatives have offered no answer to that objection; and to date, their policy prescriptions would only make it worse. So until they have a better answer, their project will remain incomplete.
The Neoclassical Critique
The word conservative is capacious: people use it to describe a lot of different things. For some, it means a package of ideas related to low taxes, light regulation, and free trade. In more technical circles, the package is sometimes called neoclassical economics—basically, price theory. The theory assumes that people act rationally and try to maximize their own utility. That means they make deals with other people only when each side comes out better off. For example, you will buy an apple from me for a dollar only if what you get from eating the apple is worth more to you than having the dollar in your pocket. And I will sell you the apple only if I need the dollar more than I need a healthy snack. Either the deal works for both sides or it doesn’t happen.
In labor markets, this basic idea explains the link between wages and jobs. As wages rise, workers become more expensive. At some point, they cost more than they produce. It no longer benefits a company to hire another person. The company therefore stops hiring workers, and employment levels fall. The market finds its own equilibrium—an equilibrium driven mostly by labor costs.
Labor costs are why most neoclassical economists have long frowned on unions. Unionized firms almost invariably pay more than the market rate for labor; by some estimates, they pay as much as a 15 percent “union premium.” In economic terms, this premium is a “supracompetitive” wage—one that puts the firm at a competitive disadvantage. The firm might try to offset this disadvantage by cutting its investments in improvements, hiring fewer workers, or both. Whatever it does, the firm produces less and grows more slowly. That slower growth chases away investors, draining the firm’s resources even more. The firm stagnates, stops innovating, and creates fewer jobs over time.
So from a neoclassical point of view, labor unions are a job killer. They weigh down their host and sap its long-term viability. They end in the kind of industrial ruin now plaguing swaths of the American Rust Belt.
Unions, Citizens, and the Common Good
But American conservativism isn’t limited to neoclassical economics. There are other strands, including one rooted in traditional values, personal virtue, and the common good. Today, this strand is often associated with the religious right—the people who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. But while associated with religion, it also embraces a broader suite of cultural views: ideas about sex roles, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), and even immigration. It connects the present with a traditional view of the common good, one centered on community, family, and shared customs. It looks skeptically on social innovations, and it seeks actively to restore traditional values to center stage.
It is in this thread that the pro-labor conservatives find their niche. They make no serious attempt to rebut the neoclassical critique; instead, they reject neoclassical premises outright. While proponents of neoclassical theory emphasize efficiency—maximizing people’s preferences in the market—pro-labor conservatives respond that what people prefer isn’t always what’s good for them. A person might be willing to work for a “poverty” wage, but that wage won’t make her a better citizen. It won’t give her the security she needs to get an education, raise a family, or contribute to the community. It might even lock her into a cycle of powerlessness and dependence. So even if she wants to work for a low wage, society shouldn’t let her. Society (as an entity in itself) should instead put its own interests first—namely, its interest in promoting strong morals, forming good citizens, and fostering the common good among its members.
That’s where unions come in. Yes, unions may reduce jobs and discourage investment. But, many conservatives argue, those losses buy us a more secure citizenry. The jobs we do have will be better ones, and those better jobs will help promote the values conservatives care most about. They will help people start families, raise their children, and contribute to charity. They will give us a society of active citizens rather than a mob of wage drones.
This idea has a conservative pedigree. It echoes figures like Thomas Aquinas, who accepted markets as a means to an end. Aquinas in the Summa argues that markets and wealth are good only when they promote human flourishing. And he saw markets as usually the best way to achieve that goal. But by extension, when the market stopped helping people do socially productive things, it stopped being good. It wasn’t an end in itself; it was a means to promote other values, traditional ones, those that many would call conservative.
Echoes of a Tradition
This core idea underlies many contemporary policy debates. While few would compare Donald Trump to Thomas Aquinas, the latter’s ideas sometimes echo in the former’s words. For example, when defending his tariff policies, Trump suggested that it might not be a bad thing if children owned “two dolls instead of thirty.” While perhaps not phrased in philosophical terms, Trump was basically saying that wealth isn’t valuable in itself. It’s valuable only when it promotes other values—only when it makes us better people. And we don’t become better people just by having more stuff.
And it isn’t only Trump who’s echoing Aquinas. Increasingly, the right’s pro-union movement is translating its common-good ethos into policy. In Spring 2025, Senator Hawley announced a “pro-worker” legislative framework, including higher penalties for labor violations and a ban on “captive audience” meetings (presaging his sharp questioning of Carey). Later, he introduced the Faster Labor Contracts Act, a bill to speed up contract negotiations by shuffling the parties into mediation and then binding arbitration. He also introduced a bill to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour—a longtime union priority. He framed these policies in explicitly “moral” terms, arguing that workers deserve good pay and good jobs. Good jobs produce secure workers, and secure workers are good for America.
Hawley is making himself heard in other ways, too. As the effective swing vote on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee, he’s been widely credited with shaping appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Six months into his administration, the president still hasn’t successfully placed any new members in that agency. This slow pace has been attributed in part to Hawley, who is reportedly demanding nominees acceptable to the labor movement. His treatment of Carey only confirms those suspicions: during her hearing, his questions rang with the rhetoric of a labor-hall speech. He has become labor’s de facto senator.
Hawley’s role is important for another reason. It doesn’t just mark a shift in conservative rhetoric; it shows how the rhetoric is translating into policy. Conservative unionism is no longer an idea debated in internet forums and academic lounges: it is a political movement proposing real legislative change. It has to be taken seriously and met on its own terms.
Tilting with Strawmen
On its own terms, conservative unionism isn’t without its attractions. It is at its best when it strikes at the tensions in modern conservative thought. Conservatives have long talked about family values and free markets as a single ideal: the peanut-butter-and-jelly American strength. But in fact, tensions have always lain beneath the surface. Tax cuts don’t always help families, who might benefit more from robust services. Tight budgets don’t always help kids, millions of whom attend public schools. Teased out, these tensions can prompt tough questions. We don’t let people sell their kids, even for a good price. So why should we let people sell their labor for a bad one?
Pro-union conservatives also frame labor unions as tools for a smaller government. At the labor movement’s height, workplaces were mostly governed by collectively bargained rules. Those rules were sometimes imperfect, sometimes rigid. But they were at least written for a specific workplace by the people who worked there. Contrast that system with the modern regulatory state, which dictates everything from wages to scheduling to rest breaks. Conservatives have long believed central regulators are incapable of accommodating local conditions; they lack the granular knowledge available to people on the ground. Why, then, would conservatives prefer a system of central regulation to one built by the workers themselves?
Uncomfortable as these questions may be, they ultimately prove too much. They essentially defend aspects of unionism to which almost no conservatives object. Conservatives don’t object to the social aspects of unions, nor to low-touch regulatory models. What they object to is how unions work in practice. Under American labor law, each union possesses a miniature workplace monopoly. The union has a right to represent every employee in the workplace. And by extension, no employee has a right to represent herself. She’s forced to bargain through the union, and the employer is forced to bargain with the union in her stead. In both directions, the union achieves and maintains its status through coercion. It is a labor cartel, backed by the state.
Of course, unions didn’t always operate as state-backed monopolies. Before the 1930s, they organized and bargained on the strength of their voluntary membership. But conservative unionists aren’t proposing to return to the age of voluntarism. To the contrary, their policy prescriptions offer a model far more coercive than the current system. Their top idea has been sectoral bargaining—a system in which a single union represents all employees in an industry or sector. They say that such a system could alleviate some of our own system’s internal flaws. For example, unionized employers would no longer face a competitive disadvantage; every firm in the sector would have to pay the same price for labor. Even better, they say, disputes over wages could be removed from the workplace, taking the heat out of employee–employer relations.
There’s reason to doubt those happy outcomes. Even in countries that practice sectoral bargaining today, like Germany, employers have been fleeing the system for decades—not a trend you’d expect to see in a cooperative utopia. But even if the system did work the way its proponents promise, it would still magnify the coercion problem. Thousands or even millions of dissenting employees would be forced to accept a union they didn’t want. None of them would be able to opt out. They wouldn’t even be able to avoid the union by getting a new job: even in the new job, the union would be there. The result would be suffocating, Orwellian, even Soviet—not exactly a selling point to American conservatives.
That leaves us with an incomplete ideology. Pro-union conservatism still can’t answer the concerns that most conservatives have with unions. Their theory is incomplete. They have raised real questions about the tensions latent in conservative thought. But what they haven’t done is shown how those tensions can be resolved by unions.
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