Economic policies embraced by both political parties that have facilitated the reduction of corporate costs by offshoring jobs to less developed countries, and the resulting hollowing out of the American manufacturing base, have caused the destruction of working-class communities throughout the United States.
A decade ago, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton were surprised to learn from public health statistics that the mortality rate for white working-class males was rising, a statistical anomaly in view of the pace of medical advances. Their 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism attributed this increase to deaths from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-related disease, which they associated with the decline of working-class communities and the industrial base.
Traditionally, Republican political candidates, including Mitt Romney in his presidential run of 2012, have advanced economic policies that favored free markets and a lighter regulatory touch, arguing that prosperous businesses are the best thing for working Americans because rising profits would lift all boats.
That view seems to have changed in some parts of the Republican party. In 2018, Oren Cass, a young lawyer who had served as domestic policy director on the Romney campaign, published The Once and Future Worker, an attempt to put forward “conservative” or even “populist” policy proposals that would favor workers. Cass then established a think tank called American Compass to advance these principles.
Cass says the goal of economic policy should be “human flourishing,” and that “the economy is supposed to be serving people, not people serving the economy.” “[S]trong, stable communities, family formation, the ability of people to build decent lives, typically in the communities where they’ve lived and where their families have lived, to raise children, to be productive contributors to their communities—that’s really what the goal is supposed to be,” Cass told Ezra Klein of the New York Times in a July 2024 interview.
American Compass also advocates for strong unions, public policies that support families, and regulation of immigration to protect the wages of American workers.
It favors national “industrial policy” and the “re-shoring” of American manufacturing, including by the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. It looks favorably upon industry-wide sectoral bargaining as a new model for the organization of workers and unions. Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Tom Cotton (Ark.), and Senator Josh Hawley (Mo.), have each become associated with American Compass proposals.
Cass served on the committee that drafted the labor chapter of Project 2025, the putative policy guide for a second Trump administration that the Democrats made a centerpiece of the fall campaign. That chapter—which reads more like a catalog of discrete ideas than a coherent treatise—provides little evidence of movement of Republican labor policy in Cass’s direction.
It talks about eliminating critical race theory, limiting diversity initiatives, protecting employees’ freedom of religion and the rights of independent contractors, and it proposes limiting employers’ rights to require a college degree for certain jobs. It does not express support for existing labor unions, though it does support greater worker involvement in the management of companies. It does not give the impression that a new Republican administration would be more likely than past Republican administrations to support workplace regulation or existing labor unions.
Cass acknowledged as much to the New York Times: “[I]f your observation is that the politically salient things that Trump is focused on don’t align entirely with this economic vision, you won’t get any argument from me about that.” But Cass points to the embrace of a more worker-friendly agenda by the young Republican senators whom he believes are the future of the party.
Of course, organized labor remains a reliable pillar of support for the Democratic Party. The Biden administration promoted itself as “the most pro-union administration in American history.” Perhaps motivated in part by President Trump’s electoral strength, including support from working people in regions suffering from industrial decline, Democrats have been more focused on restoring the American manufacturing base.
During the Biden presidency, Congress passed a series of bills that made investments in infrastructure and manufacturing. These included the 2022 Chips Act, which made major investments in the subsidies for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, research and workforce training. Federal regulatory agencies during the Biden administration have been more vigorous in taking actions thought to be supportive of labor standards and employee rights.
A few weeks after Teamsters president O’Brien addressed the Republican National Convention, Trump, in an interview with Elon Musk, appeared to praise Musk’s 2022 firing of large numbers of Twitter employees. “I won’t mention the name of the company,” he said, “but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone.’”
The ambiguities in Republican labor policy are on display in the nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor. Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of a small city in Oregon, served one term in Congress but recently lost her re-election bid. The first Republican woman to be elected to Congress from Oregon, she is also notable as one of only three House Republicans to vote in favor of the PRO Act, a bill passed by the Democrat-controlled House in 2021 that would have increased the power of unions.
Republican senators, especially those from right-to-work states, have expressed concern about the Chavez-DeRemer nomination. Some union leaders have expressed support.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler has praised Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor record in Congress, but said “it remains to be seen what she will be permitted to do as Secretary of Labor in an administration with a dramatically anti-worker agenda.”
It is too early to tell whether the Republicans’ embrace of free markets will give way to a politics with a different approach to worker representation and to working-class families and communities.
