Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 8.3% (67 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 2.7% (22 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 17.9% (145 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 4% (32 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 12.2% (99 hits)
• Framing Effect - 7.5% (61 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 6.8% (55 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 5.4% (44 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 1% (8 hits)

Article text

Workers Need Strong Borders and Strong Unions

The politics of American organized labor are changing.

In 2024, Sean O’Brien became the first Teamsters president in the organization’s 120-plus-year history to address the Republican National Convention.

In his speech, O’Brien declared the union beholden to no party and ready to work with anyone who would put American workers first.

Republicans like me took him up on it, and we are beginning to deliver real results.

The response to this realignment from some of America’s most powerful corporations and their friends in the media has been to smear our efforts as a betrayal of conservative economic principles and social values.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Americans should recognize these corporations’ antics for the political gamesmanship that they are.

After all, many of the loudest critics of the realignment that is putting the American worker first are the same people who have been carrying water for progressive causes for years.

In the past decade alone, America’s corporate leadership advanced an ESG investment strategy that undermined our country’s energy dominance, adopted a discriminatory DEI policy regime, and lobbied for unchecked immigration—both legal and illegal—to undermine our own American workforce.

These companies are not conservative bastions, and they are playing political games to protect the only thing they truly care about: maximizing profit at all costs, especially at the cost of the American taxpayer.

When major corporations such as Walmart and Amazon don’t pay their employees high enough wages or give them enough hours to keep them off Medicaid, SNAP, and other public welfare programs, they are effectively enlisting the American taxpayer to cover their workers’ healthcare and food.

Taxpayers were asked to payout more than $900 billion to fund Medicaid and nearly $100 billion to cover SNAP benefits in 2024.

That’s approximately $1 trillion in hard-earned taxpayer dollars that are being spent on programs that often trap the Americans receiving these benefits in a cycle of dependency.

Think of it this way: A worker who earns a decent wage, owns his own home, receives medical insurance through his job, and can provide for his family without government assistance is the foundation of self-reliance, community, stability, ordered liberty, and everything else conservatives believe in.

A Walmart employee who makes just enough to get by, cover rent, and qualify for Medicaid and SNAP is forced into dependency on the government.

The Walmart model drives up the national debt and quietly shifts the cost of worker benefits onto the taxpayer’s tab.

“Pro-worker conservatives need not listen to corporate America and its media allies’ lectures.”

So, pro-worker conservatives need not listen to corporate America and its media allies’ lectures about fiscal responsibility, workers’ rights, or conservative values.

Instead, we should be working to address the broken arrangement these companies have with their own employees through policy that gives American workers more agency.

First, that means stricter immigration enforcement and reforms that lower overall levels of immigration.

For decades, powerful corporate interests have undermined workers by importing foreign labor, both legal and illegal.

Foreign workers are cheaper, more malleable, and far less able to demand better wages, better conditions, or the right to organize.

Their presence in our labor market makes American workers easier to replace and thus lowers the floor for everyone.

Unions do the opposite, and supporting them should be the second pillar of our approach.

When unions were at their peak in the 1950s, they represented about 30 percent of the American workforce.

They didn’t just raise wages for their members.

They set a floor that lifted conditions for non-union workers too, forcing employers across the board to compete for American labor.

These two pillars work together, too.

Consider the case of the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

When Smithfield’s workers tried to organize in 1994, the company worked tirelessly to oppose the union and replace its employees with cheap foreign labor.

As one former worker, Wade Baker, recounted: “They started hiring Mexicans to help beat the union… And they knew they could control the Mexicans and make them afraid to vote for the union.”

In 2007, ICE raided the Tar Heel plant and more than a thousand illegal workers left.

Shortly thereafter, Smithfield began hiring Americans again and just over a year later—fifteen years after the initial attempt to organize—the plant finally had a union contract.

Cutting off the supply of cheap foreign labor brought the company to the negotiating table and gave workers agency to push for better pay and conditions.

American workers shouldn’t be forced on to Medicaid and SNAP by their employer, and they should never have to wait fifteen years to get a fair deal again.

And if the Faster Labor Contracts Act—which I was proud to vote for earlier in June—passes the Senate and is signed by the president, they won’t have to.