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  "path": "/article/211968/unions-culture-war-transgender-abortion",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-17T10:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Politics",
    "Wall Street Journal",
    "Unions",
    "Transgender",
    "Abortion",
    "Bill Cassidy",
    "Republicans",
    "Josh Hawley",
    "Labor",
    "What’s the Matter With Kansas",
    "Public approval of labor unions",
    "included right-to-work boilerplate",
    "How to Get A Labor Rights Bill Through A GOP House",
    "discharge petition",
    "who appeal to the working-class voters",
    "problematic oyster farmer",
    "a good shot",
    "A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left",
    "text",
    "summary",
    "previous editorial",
    "Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language",
    "Mifepristone",
    "the Supreme Court decided",
    "according to",
    "the Senate version",
    "13 percent",
    "only two percentage points higher",
    "allowed himself to be conned",
    "gone from the place"
  ],
  "textContent": "For years, the conservative partisan playbook to win working-class votes was to ignore economic inequality and demagogue the culture war. The journalist Thomas Frank published a best-selling book about this in 2004. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote in  _What’s the Matter With Kansas._ “Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.”\n\n\nIt may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 at 48 percent, has been rising ever since, according to Gallup, and lately it’s around 70 percent, which is higher than at any time since the salad days of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Although support stands highest (90 percent) among registered Democrats, in 2022 a 56 percent majority of Republicans also approved of unions. That’s fallen since to 41 percent, but it’s still a significant minority for a party that for nearly four decades included right-to-work boilerplate in every quadrennial platform.\n\nIt took a few years, but a significant minority of congressional Republicans is now beginning to catch up to GOP voters. The 2024 Republican Party platform was the first since 1980 not to include a right-to-work plank, and, as I noted last week (“How to Get A Labor Rights Bill Through A GOP House”), two labor rights bills successfully bypassed Republican Speaker Mike Johnson in recent months via discharge petition and passed with support from 20 Republicans. Meanwhile, Democrats are fielding, to challenge red-state Republicans, candidates who appeal to the working-class voters they long neglected. Even the problematic oyster farmer Graham Platner has a good shot at unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine.\n\nGiven that the culture war no longer serves to distract voters reliably from labor rights, the new conservative strategy is to re-define labor rights  _as_ culture war. On Monday  _The Wall Street Journal_ published an editorial (“A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left”) that’s a sort of trial balloon.\n\nThe editorial addressed House passage of the second labor rights bill to sneak past Speaker Johnson, the Faster Labor Contracts Act (text; summary), which time-limits management dithering after a union election. I fully expected the  _Journal_ edit page’s usual tirade about greedy union bosses extinguishing capitalism’s animal spirits. That was the gist of the  _Journal_ ’s previous editorial about the bill in May, when the discharge petition acquired the necessary 218 signatures.\n\nBut the thrust of the new editorial was quite different. Unions, it said, only  _seem_ like they’re about improving your working conditions; really, they’re just a front for sex-changers and baby-killers. “We wonder if Republicans know what they’ve voted for,” opined the  _Journal_. “Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare.” Those 20 Republicans who voted for the Fair Labor Contracts Act, the  _Journal_ said, are “selling out their constituents to the progressive left.”\n\nThe  _Journal’_ s Exhibit A was an “Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language” recommended by the AFL-CIO. This document does indeed propose “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services, including contraceptives, abortion services (procedural and pharmaceutical) and gender-affirming care.” But the AFL-CIO is not a labor union—it’s a federation of labor unions that plays no role in negotiating union contracts. That’s typically the work of a union local.\n\n“Unions are democratic institutions,” Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO explained to me, with officials at all levels elected by members and conventions. “They take positions accordingly, based on where the members are.” If a contract includes health coverage for gender-affirming care or Mifepristone, that’s because members want these things. Any member of Congress who actively opposes such language is interfering with the terms of a private contract, which is something conservatives are supposed to hate.\n\nThe  _Journal_ editorial didn’t identify any union members who object to their health plan covering abortion and gender reassignment. (My guess is such people are hard to find.) Instead, the  _Journal_ complained that “many businesses have objected to those provisions on religious grounds.” Oh, please. If I may be permitted a conservative complaint: I never even _imagined_ I’d hear such an argument before 2014, when the Supreme Court decided, outrageously, that businesses enjoy the same First Amendment right to religious freedom as individuals. Bring back the good old days when they didn’t! Fourteen years after that high court ruling, I’ve still never seen a corporation take communion or read from the Torah.\n\nThe culture-war argument is being test-driven not only by the  _Journal_ editorial page but also, according to Gabrielle M. Etzel of the  _Washington Examiner_ , by Thomas Beck of the union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. “It’s going to be easy for the arbitrator to say, OK, employer, I’m not going to make you pay the high wages that the union is demanding,” Beck told Etzel, “but what I am going to make you do is … make you give generous health benefits and give very generous access to abortion on demand and give very, very generous access to so-called gender-affirming care.” But in truth, that will be easy for the arbitrator to say only if the union local, which is accountable to rank-and-file workers,  _truly does_ care more about abortion and gender-affirming coverage than about a wage hike. The arbitrator has no reason to prefer one over the other.\n\nSenator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who introduced the Senate version of the Faster Labor Contracts Act, was confronted by the  _Examiner_ with Beck’s and the  _Journal_ ’s moronic argument. Rather than present any of the logical arguments I make here, Hawley, who is a social conservative, accepted a culture-war framing but performed a sort of jujitsu, identifying the woke enemy to be not unions, but corporations. Or rather, his spokesman did. “Giant corporations are desperate to kill legislation that would help American workers,” the spokesman said, “while they invest billions in DEI insanity…. Senator Hawley is fighting for the American worker, rather than the same Big Business who stands with the radical left to push woke, transgender ideology.”\n\nBut Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and therefore will decide the fate of Hawley’s bill, sides with Beck and the  _Journal._ In reality, I’d guess Cassidy opposes the bill not because it gives aid and comfort to the trans and abortion lobbies, but more straightforwardly because Cassidy is anti-labor, with a lifetime AFL-CIO score of 13 percent. (Hawley’s, it should be noted, is only two percentage points higher, so don’t call him a working-class hero just yet.) But rather than tell the  _Examiner,_ “Look, I don’t want to give organized labor more power,” Cassidy said piously: “I’m all for finding solutions to strengthen worker’s rights and make collective bargaining more efficient, but a policy forcing Louisiana workers and small businesses to potentially fund abortions and sex-change operations is not the answer.”\n\nSo that’s one Republican legislator willing to embrace the new dogma.\n\nThen again, Cassidy, an actual physician, allowed himself to be conned by Robert Kennedy, Jr., when the Health and Human Services secretary promised at his confirmation hearing to leave vaccines alone. And anyway, Cassidy will be gone from the place in six months. It remains to be seen whether anybody else will recite this new catechism.",
  "title": "Unions Are Getting More Popular. The Right Isn’t Taking It Well"
}