After the election in 2024, the AFL-CIO—America’s largest federation of labor unions and a major player in Democratic politics—feared an aggressive conservative Republican agenda. The union federation announced that “The Project 2025 agenda promises to dismantle labor unions because we are a pillar of democracy and a check on power” and vowed that “No one—not Donald Trump or JD Vance, nor any one CEO—can stop solidarity.”
But a powerful faction of the right, backed by some of the biggest liberal funders and labor unions themselves, is afflicted with a delusion that conservatism will advance by making the AFL-CIO great again. One year into the Trump administration, an aggressive effort to promote independent workers and reduce the power of a liberal flagship institution has not happened, as those who actually read Project 2025 feared. As a result, union power—and with it the power of the left—is paradoxically increasing as Democrats use midterm-election anti-presidential-party dynamics to threaten right-to-work laws and independent contractors across the nation.
When President Donald Trump took office for the first time in 2017 his administration openly expressed intention to reverse President Barack Obama’s and his administration’s thinly veiled payoffs to Big Labor bosses who had worked so hard and spent so much to put Obama into office. It also followed a state-level reform wave that had begun at the 2010 midterm elections and had government worker unions on their heels.
But at the beginning of 2026, the situation is much cloudier and the seas more turbulent.
The second Trump administration, afflicted by the Hewlett Foundation-funded delusion that claims empowering Big Labor is how to advance the interests of conservative constituencies, only got around to confirming its first National Labor Relations Board nominees shortly before Christmas. Its Labor Secretary, the Teamsters Union’s chosen Republican-In-Name-Only, remains at the head of a mostly aimless (if mercifully shrunken, courtesy of the first-year Department of Government Efficiency drive) department, that has yet to complete action to protect independent workers and franchisees (historically a staunchly Republican constituency!) from the union-friendly policies of the Biden administration.
At the state level, the story since the first off-year elections of the first Trump administration has been consistent reversals for worker freedoms. Politically competitive states saw Democrats surge to power in 2018, with further state-control gains. This was despite then-President Biden’s unfavorable approval ratings in 2022 powered by the Left’s Voting Machine, of which Big Labor is a constituent and to which it contributes funds.
Trump’s return to power in 2025 was predictably followed by further Democratic gains in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia. Both are considering aggressive moves to empower unions and penalize workers not on board with paying into the Everything Leftism machine as a condition of employment.
So, where do the core issues in labor policy stand at the beginning of year two of Trump II?
The old issues I covered at the beginning of the Biden administration remain. The left still seeks to treat every job as a factory job, to mandate the closed shop (or as closed a shop as Big Labor can get away with), to compel independent workers to be treated as employees and be unionized in a closed shop, and to use its coerced resources to advance full-spectrum Everything Leftism.
But as the field opens, new issues are emerging. Some unions, most prominently the Teamsters, are operating more like traditional special interest groups even as most unions dive ever deeper into Everything Leftism, hoping that the Hewlett Foundation-funded pro-union delusions can gain more influence among Republican policymakers. The worst afflicted have proposed adopting full-blown European socialist labor models such as sectoral bargaining.
In the immediate term, this mind virus has also brought one old and one new policy issue to the fore.
From the dead of the Obama era rises the specter of “mandatory arbitration” for first contracts. The policy would have the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (a small agency notorious for its employees’ luxurious offices gutted by the Trump administration’s DOGE efforts) cramming down employment rules regardless of worker or employer assent.
And there is a blue-state response to the Trump administration’s lethargy. New York and California have attempted to sidestep the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with their own, extremely pro-union boards, at least when the NLRB is not active because of absence of quorum.
As for American workers, much of this passes them by. As Brazil is said to be “the country of the future that always will be,” so also Big Labor’s membership resurgence is the political and economic factor of the future that seems like it always will be, no matter how much the metropolitan (unionized) journalists wish it to happen this (or any other) summer. Likewise, the biggest labor issue of all might be the changing composition of what remains of the union movement. Goodbye, manual-labor men; hello purple-haired they/them grad students and baristas. Let us examine all in depth.
Taking stock of the old issues
***
Palestinian-nationalist demonstrations featured activists from the United Auto Workers (UAW), drawing attention to how few UAW members are actually automobile workers.
***
In 2021, I identified five “core issues” in labor-relations policy: Joint employment definitions, independent contracting, right to work legislation, the standing ban on secondary and general strikes, and social justice unionism. In that year, those hoping to keep worker freedom alive trembled under the possibility that Democrats, who controlled all three elective arms of the federal government, would cram through their “Protecting the Right to Organize Act” and vitiate worker (and public) protections in all those issues in one fell swoop.
Independent contracting and joint employment
But Democrats failed to vitiate these protections in one stroke. The PRO Act could not surpass the Senate’s super-majority “filibuster” threshold, which survived the Biden administration despite well-funded efforts to get rid of it. (The PRO Act lives on among the Democratic opposition’s top priorities, a Chekhov’s gun waiting to be fired by the next progressive “trifecta.”)
Instead, the Biden administration’s czars and czarinas tried to effect as much of the legislation through regulation as they could get away with. The National Labor Relations Board vastly expanded “joint employer” liability, a key demand of the Service Employees International Union, which seeks a mass-card-check organizing of quick-service restaurants. The Labor Department, under critical race theoretician Julie Su (now an official in socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration), issued regulations curtailing freelance work. Blue states, perhaps most prominently New Jersey, have continued their efforts to copy California’s anti-contracting AB 5 legislation.
One would expect a new Republican administration in 2025 to issue regulations to reverse those actions. It hasn’t, though the Labor Department did finally list reversing the Biden administration’s independent contractor classification rule on its regulatory agenda in September 2025, suggesting it is on the administration’s radar to be completed in the fullness of time.
While that is a bit of good news for independent workers, the slow progress is concerning given the ever-reducing time remaining in the Trump administration’s electoral mandate.
I won’t be so bold as to suggest Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s past support for the PRO Act has anything to do with any delays. A likely culprit for the Trump administration’s lethargy in protecting small business owners (a staunchly Republican constituency!) and freelance workers is that the American Compass pro-union mind virus infects the administration and certain Republicans in the U.S. Senate (about whom more later), which slows down any efforts to enhance worker freedom.
President Trump did not get his first flight of two NLRB nominees and nominee for NLRB General Counsel (the agency’s powerful chief-prosecutor role) confirmed until just before the Christmas break. All appear to be aligned with the conventional Republican Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to unions. While this restores the NLRB’s quorum of three members (alongside an incumbent Democrat nominated by former President Joe Biden), the Board still lacks three affirmative Taft-Hartley Republican votes to reverse Biden-era precedents.
The incumbent Democrat’s term also expires in 2026. So, even the quorum will not last unless the administration focuses on appointing new members to fill the one certain vacancy, the one disputed vacancy the administration created when President Trump dismissed a Democratic member before the conclusion of her term, and the vacancy soon to come.
Right-to-work, general strikes, and the specter of sectoral bargaining
Union voluntarism through right-to-work laws, which allow dissenting union nonmembers forced to accept union “representation” not to pay for it, is in retreat, with the risk of a supremely destructive rout increasing. Michigan reversed its right-to-work protections in 2023, becoming once again a forced-unionism state. The Democratic trifecta elected in 2025 in Virginia, which has been a right-to-work state since the 1940s, seems determined to follow Michigan’s example. No comparably-sized state is even seriously considering adopting a right-to-work law, and efforts in much-smaller Montana and New Hampshire to capitalize on Republican strength following successes for state-level Republicans in 2024 have stalled.
With the PRO Act’s failure (at least until the next Democratic trifecta), the Taft-Hartley Act’s standing ban on “secondary strikes” targeting businesses other than a union member’s direct employer remains in force. That has not stopped the United Auto Workers from promoting a “May Day General Strike” for 2028, surely only coincidentally the next presidential election year.
Even worse, the mind virus has Republicans considering repudiating the Taft-Hartley consensus and adopting socialist European models of labor relations that would supersede the restriction on general strikes and perhaps right-to-work as well. “Sectoral bargaining” is endorsed by figures in the orbit of the nominally-conservative American Compass. This would force every single American worker to accept working conditions set by labor unions and could lead to them being compelled to pay labor unions for the privilege.
Social justice unionism
Big Labor’s vision would be greatly strengthened by a sectoral bargaining regime. In 2021, I called this vision “social justice unionism,” after a trade unionist term for using union structures and bargaining to advance social and political leftism. These days the terms “the Omnicause” or “Everything Leftism” might be more common. But the principle still holds: Big Labor is a foot soldier in the progressive ideological coalition rather than an independent pole.
Over the past five years, social justice unionism-Everything Leftism has continued to expose itself within what was once called the “labor movement.” Palestinian-nationalist demonstrations featured activists from the United Auto Workers (UAW), drawing attention to how few UAW members are actually automobile workers. Union officers used members’ pension funds as muscle for the left-wing “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investment project and corporate-rule campaign, with radical activists salivating at the thought of using pension funds as a “weapon” against political conservatives.
Going deeper, and uniting the retreat of voluntarism with the continued relevance of social justice unionism, we can examine Big Labor’s “bargaining for the common good” model, endorsed by America’s two worst teachers unions among other radicals. It does not mean affirming social solidarity across classes like a nineteenth-century Pope (or a socially conservative “postliberal” political thinker) would wish; it means Everything Leftism, with defunding the police, mandatory DEI trainings, and adopting the radical Black Lives Matter “guiding principles” into school curriculums among the promoted demands. Big Labor’s “common good” also apparently rests on Minnesotan remittances to Somalia, according to Big Labor.
Even the American Compass brain-wormed among the public policy profession know that Big Labor’s alignment with the progressive movement is a problem for convincing conservatives and Republicans that strengthening unions is in conservatives’ and Republicans’ interests. In a discussion report produced by Baron Public Affairs, one such admitted that actually existing unions were “the elephant in the room” that could “just […] come in and mess everything up” with their ideological activism.
Unless Big Labor responds to increasing its power by dissolving itself, the practical, political, and ideological cases against sectoral bargaining that I have made before will remain relevant so long as the lousy European idea lingers. The economic case is inescapable, no matter what a union looks like ideologically; as I noted, “Adjusting economic policy to raise the cost of living, a certainty under sectoral bargaining, would likely trigger the American consumer’s visceral response to higher prices” — and that would be just the beginning.
New issues before policymakers
***
Bachelor’s-degree-holders have been more likely to be unionized than non-degree-holders since at least the mid-1990s…
***
The only good news about sectoral bargaining is that, outside of weird circumstances like California’s fast-food industry, it isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Even its misguided conservative supporters admit this, with one telling Baron that “we’re a minimum of 25 years from having that conversation.” But Congress and the Trump administration also face new issues.
Union strategic responses
In 2025 the AFL-CIO readmitted Big Labor’s prodigal they/them, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The justification was 200-proof Everything Leftism. Incoming President Donald Trump had vowed to cull the federal workforce and rigorously enforce immigration laws. In order to centralize the energy of the #Resistance, the SEIU ended its two-decade pretension to challenge the AFL-CIO for leadership of American labor unionism.
But as I noted at the time, the SEIU’s strategy of ever closer union to the Omnicause and the broader left was not universally adopted by American labor unions. The Teamsters notably refused to endorse the presidential campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris at the national level, though local and regional Teamsters divisions, including in battleground states, were another matter.
Instead, the union’s national headquarters adopted classical special-interest politics. Rather than showing slavish devotion to one political side (as labor typically does by sending over 90 percent of its direct campaign contributions and up to 99 percent of its other political-advocacy spending to progressive, socialist, and liberal Democrats), Teamster boss Sean O’Brien’s regime has sought to create divisions among Republicans and offered favorable treatment to those legislators willing to do his bidding.
The SEIU’s strategy remains dominant among organized labor by far, and conceding policy to O’Brien ultimately strengthens the classically Everything Leftist wing of Big Labor more than its special-interest wing. But O’Brien’s strategy has an audience among those afflicted with the American Compass pro-union ideology.
Another more openly leftist source is funneling funds to American Compass to propagate its destructive ideology further. The Hewlett Foundation, a committed anti-capitalist institution that seeks to divide and rule America’s political right, is the principal known funder of American Compass. Another funder is likely the Teamsters Union, which is not surprising.
Conservative institutions that should know better have enabled American Compass to propagate its progressive agenda. The Heritage Foundation all but outsourced the Mandate for Labor Error in Project 2025 to American Compass, leading the project to endorse union-labor mandates in government projects (Project Labor Agreements) and the European socialist policies of works councils and union representatives on corporate boards. The author of that chapter, Jonathan Berry, is now President Trump and Secretary Chavez-Deremer’s Solicitor of Labor, the chief legal officer of the department.
The biggest labor issue of all
There is an old joke about Brazil. A country of 200 million people with vast natural resources that dominates the Atlantic coast of South America is always poised for growth. It should be the country of the future. But, thanks to a century-plus of misrule by plantation aristocracies, fascist authoritarians, socialists, military juntas, and corrupt small-d democrats, the country never reaches the future. Thus, Brazil is “the country of tomorrow, and always will be.”
American organized labor, after over a half-century of Long Decline, is the social institution of the future, and always will be. It is an annual ritual for the metropolitan press, ideologically sympathetic to Big Labor and often unionized itself, to proclaim that ‘this is the year’ that unions have finally broken the Long Decline and restored their centrality to American economic and social life.
But at least for the past half-decade, that has not only proven false in the main but false as to the specific year-to-year trends in union density (the proportion of the workforce that is unionized), which fell from 10.8 percent in 2020 to 9.9 percent—a modern-era low—in 2024.
But there is one way in which you cannot fault the leftist cosplayers in newsrooms for believing, like fans of the New York Jets, that this really will be ‘their year.’ The biggest labor issue of all is the changed, and still changing, composition of Big Labor’s membership. And the people the metropolitan press live and work around—journalists, government workers, and liberal nonprofit staffs—are represented well in that changed composition.
Right-of-center friends of labor, when asked to explain why they are promoting the interests of a left-wing constituency, tend to argue that they are looking out for the interests of the forgotten American worker. They have a strong image of who the forgotten American worker is: a high school-educated male in a traditional trade or mechanical occupation who works in the private sector.
But that image doesn’t describe today’s labor union members. Bachelor’s-degree-holders have been more likely to be unionized than non-degree-holders since at least the mid-1990s, according to the UnionStats database of union membership statistics maintained by academic economists.
That “forgotten American worker” demographic especially isn’t who makes up unions’ most prominent targets for new organizing. In the conversations with Baron, one “pro-labor official” on the right said, “It’s a significant problem that so much of the oxygen in this conversation has been sucked up by college students trying to unionize.”
It absolutely is a problem for the pro-union conservatives that the people actually trying to join unions and whom unions wish to add to their ranks are left-wing constituency groups rather than the forgotten men American Compass-types hope to help.
The cultural left-tint of new unionists goes beyond students. The United Auto Workers might be called the “united non-auto non-workers” after years of organizing among politically radical highly educated graduate students (like Harvard’s) and years of retirements among its old membership among actual automotive-industry workers. Political radicals like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and left-wing groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Greenpeace have endorsed Starbucks Workers United, the SEIU-backed campaign to organize workers at the coffee chain. The radical journalists of the “Fired Four” at Conde Nast became a brief cause celebre. And the most prominent unions in today’s “labor movement” might be the teachers unions under Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle, both of which consist largely of college-educated women who work for the government.
Politicians—traditionally left-wing Democrats but distressingly often throughout history purportedly conservative Republicans—may believe that union bosses, whether Everything Leftists like the AFL-CIO’s Liz Shuler or SEIU’s April Verrett or special-interest operators like the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien or the east coast Longshoremen’s Harold Daggett, speak for workers as a class.
But less than one in ten of all workers and one in sixteen in the private sector are union members. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found in 2023 that there were more than four million more workers on their sole or main jobs who were independent contractors (11.9 million) than private-sector union members (7.4 million).
And more than 80 percent of contractor-workers preferred that working arrangement to the union-preferred traditional employment that union-backed governments seek to mandate.
That figure alone indicates a wide dissention among American workers from the labor movement, which today represents a highly ideological, largely (over-) educated, and largely government-worker-biased faction of the actual body of American workers. And that is granting that dubious classes of union members, like Harvard graduate students, count as “workers.” Those who seek to uplift forgotten American workers must be careful not to confuse Big Labor’s faction with the whole.
