The New Right wants to help workers. Its labor policy will hurt them

The concerns are real. Wages haven’t kept pace with major costs such as healthcare, housing, and higher education. In many places, it’s harder for younger people to buy a home and raise a family, particularly on one income. 

The Right’s renewed focus on workers is overdue. But policy prescriptions that call for more government intrusion misdiagnose the problems — and risk making them worse.   

Conservatives’ goals — good jobs, rising wages, and increased opportunities — haven’t changed. The fracture lines are the most effective means of achieving these goals. 

Because conservatism is grounded in the belief that society is too complex to be engineered toward specific outcomes, and that institutions such as families, civil society, and markets contain knowledge policymakers lack, it has long emphasized sound means as the surest path to desirable ends. 

The new Right’s willingness to engage in government planning to achieve their desired ends cuts to the heart of conservatism.

Traditional conservative means include: strong property rights and the rule of law; freedom of contract; free and open competition; limited and predictable regulation; and labor market flexibility, mobility, and access. When barriers are low and possible rewards are high, entrepreneurship thrives, and workers have the freedom and motivation to pursue upward mobility.

This commitment to free enterprise is central to American prosperity. The contrast is telling. Real average earnings in the United States increased by 28% between 2000 and 2024, compared to a 5% increase in Spain, a 2% decline in Italy, and a 6% drop in Greece — the latter three of which have some of the heaviest-handed labor interventions.

A truly pro-worker agenda prioritizes individuals over collective organizations and trusts competition over forced coordination. Yet many union-centered policies rely on exclusive representation, in which a single organization speaks for all workers, regardless of whether each worker supports that representation or the policies it negotiates. 

This tension highlights a broader mistake in the self-proclaimed “pro-worker” turn on the Right: conflating worker well-being with the expansion of centralized power, whether through government mandates or quasi-governmental labor unions. Historically, conservatism has been skeptical of concentrated power in all forms, recognizing that it often serves insiders at the expense of outsiders. Labor policy is no exception. 

Policies that privilege unions or impose one-size-fits-all standards risk locking workers into rigid arrangements that may benefit some, but leave many others with fewer opportunities, less mobility, and diminished bargaining power over their careers. This is particularly true for younger workers and those, such as caregivers and individuals with disabilities, who want something other than what the union negotiates. 

Moreover, many interventionist proposals misunderstand the root causes of workers’ frustrations. Affordability is driven by costs and earnings, and recent pressures are more closely tied to rising costs in major expenses such as housing, healthcare, and education. 

Government policy is largely to blame for these outsized cost increases. Zoning and land-use regulations constrain housing supply, and environmental regulations and property taxes further increase costs. Federal subsidies and third-party payment systems distort incentives in higher education and healthcare, driving up costs without improving quality. And occupational licensing limits competition and restricts entry into well-paying fields.

Layering additional labor mandates on top of these distortions doesn’t solve the problem; it compounds it. As (this author’s favorite) economist Thomas Sowell noted, “Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.” 

Wage mandates reduce employment, particularly among younger and less experienced workers. Sectoral bargaining risks cartelizing labor markets, reducing competition, and innovation. Legislation such as the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would impose binding arbitration on employers, and the Warehouse Worker Protections Act, which would dictate warehouse operations, may aim to help a subset of workers. But the actual outcome would be less growth, reduced flexibility, and a step toward central planning: a guaranteed way to suppress and impoverish workers — just ask the former Soviet Union and East Germany.  

The Right is right to care about workers, not just for the economic benefits, but because work is a primary source of human dignity. Offering up one’s talents in service to others provides meaning and purpose. 

But good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes, and history shows that when government replaces collaboration with compulsion, both workers and employers lose.   

Those who would abandon conservatism’s commitment to means — emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention — in an attempt to dictate ends — favoring command-and-control policies that concentrate power and constrain choice — risk undermining the very prosperity they seek to promote.

A genuinely pro-worker conservatism trusts in the capacity of individuals, families, and communities to make their own decisions, and seeks to create the conditions under which those decisions can lead to upward mobility and economic security. That approach may be less politically expedient than sweeping mandates or high-profile interventions, but it is more consistent with the principles that have historically driven both economic growth and worker advancement. And it is more likely to deliver lasting results.

Rachel Greszler is a senior research fellow at the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise at Advancing American Freedom Foundation