Earlier this year Senate Democrats penned a letter attacking Amazon over its labor practices, calling the retail giants subcontracted delivery network a big scheme to prevent drivers from unionizing. They only managed to rustle up three Republicans to sign on. After all, it was a letter in support of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a longtime ally of the Democratic Party.

Among the trio of GOP signatories was Ohio Sen. JD Vance, whom Donald Trump selected as his vice presidential running mate on Monday. Vance, sounding more like a Democrat than a typical pro-business Republican, told HuffPost at the time that he believed Amazon was playing a game.

There are some weird ways that Amazon treats certain people and I think they ought to do a better job, the senator said. I think they use certain loopholes to try and pretend they arent actually employees, and they are.

Vance is part of a very small subset of Republican lawmakers whove walked a strike picket line and have criticized companies like Amazon for the way they treat workers. Sometimes using similar language to the left, these conservatives speak of the need to engender more worker power as a counterweight to corporate forces, and they say organized labor can play a role in that, despite their partys longtime antipathy to collective bargaining.

The 39-year-old Vances place on the GOP ticket has accelerated talk of a GOP realignment on economic issues, one that could weaken the partys ties with big corporations and maybe even allow for a functioning relationship with unions. Teamsters President Sean OBrien called for just that in an address at the Republican National Convention on Monday. OBrien had praised Vance as being great on Teamster issues in an interview before his speech, citing his Amazon stance, as well as a bipartisan bill Vance co-sponsored aimed at stopping the overseas outsourcing of airline maintenance jobs.

Vances GOP colleague, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, published an essay the next day titled, The Promise of Pro-Labor Conservatism. Thousands of Americans have voted to unionize in elections but can never get a contract done, often due to corporate tricks. How can we let that stand? Hawley asked. (Hawley and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas were the two other Republicans to sign that Amazon letter, alongside 25 Democrats.)

The idea of a pro-union dawn in the Republican Party is complicated by a few things first and foremost, Trumps patently anti-union record as president, as well as the voting records of ostensibly union-friendly Republicans like Vance. Policy experts whove spent years thinking about how to rebuild unions (in 2023, membership dropped to just 6% in the private sector ) are leery of conservative ideas for reform, and doubtful of whether the pro-labor positions of people like Vance will extend much beyond economic nationalism and tariffs.

I would say my skepticism runs deep, said Celine McNicholas, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and former special counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that referees union matters in the private sector.

She noted that although Vance visited striking auto workers in Ohio last year, he has not gotten onboard with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act , Democrats sweeping proposal for labor law reform. The legislation would, among other things, prevent companies from permanently replacing strikers.

Vance may do a little bit better on the rhetoric, but there isnt a ton of daylight between the vice-presidential nominee and Trump, McNicholas said.

A Broader Rejection Of Market Fundamentalism

At the forefront of the conservative collective-bargaining talk is Oren Cass, a veteran of the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign who now runs a think tank called American Compass. The group seeks to steer conservative thinking away from growth for its own sake to widely shared economic development that sustains vital social institutions.

Cass said in an interview that Vance was among the first to endorse American Compass mission, and called him somebody weve worked with a lot since the organization launched in 2020.

We do want to have thriving free markets, and we want the purpose of those to be to deliver good outcomes for workers and their families. If thats the case, for capitalism to work well, you need workers to have power, Cass said.

There must be a mechanism of governance that supports workers solidarity and gives them influence in the labor market, Cass went on.

Conservatives should obviously want that, and prefer that way of achieving it to just kind of taxing and redistributing on the back end, he said.

There are things a guy like Cass likes about unions in particular, the social structure they provide, a bridge between workers and families embodied in the union hall. What they like a lot less: the way unions have become hitched to the Democratic Party a natural outgrowth of decades of conservative post-Reagan hostility to labor and the adversarial nature of organizing and bargaining in so many American workplaces.

Vance told the New Statesman earlier this year that he endorses a form of European-style sectoral bargaining, where wages and working conditions are set through a collective bargaining agreement that covers a broader industry, as opposed to a single employer. Sector-wide bargaining is a mainstream idea embraced by many on the labor left who believe the U.S. system of enterprise bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act unionizing one Starbucks at a time, then spending years fighting for a contract is broken.