Family Labor

Oren Cass comes to the “labor question” from the leafy environs of well-to-do Massachusetts. He completed a degree in political economy at Williams College — a major focused on economic thought rather than quantitative economic modeling — and then earned a law degree at Harvard. From there, he worked as a management consultant for the Boston-based Bain & Company before working on former Bain CEO Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, developing the campaign’s “jobs book.” Reflecting on Romney’s defeat during an interview at his undergraduate alma mater, Cass described how the Republican Party’s “blind faith in free markets” left it unable to win elections, much less address the gnawing social (and moral) crises left by decades of austerity, deregulation, and privatization. Following his stint on the Romney campaign, Cass joined the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and wrote his 2018 book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass’s book rejected the conventions of the neoliberal consensus that mass prosperity trickles down by slashing taxes, crushing unions, and cutting regulatory red tape. “The alternative is to make trade-offs that instead place the renewal of work and family, sustained by a healthy labor market, at the center of public policy.”

Putting the “renewal of work and family” at the center of conservative policymaking became even more urgent as the scale and scope of the COVID-19 pandemic brought long simmering conflicts over social policy priorities to the fore. “The massive economic policy interventions of 2020, like of 2008, were Janus-faced,” writes economic historian Adam Tooze, imposed from above to preserve financial markets but in ways that exploded the common sense of neoliberal governance. The first Trump administration and Republicans in Congress vacillated over how to respond to the unprecedented disruptions to the circuits of global capitalism, especially in terms of how (and whether) to deliver direct aid to people facing sudden unemployment, hunger, and disability; the Democratic Party under Joe Biden (along with center-left parties the world over) proposed to speed post-pandemic recovery through renewed investments in manufacturing and infrastructure, but also social services, infrastructure, and education. The result drew a predictably furious response from a Republican Party still bound to the Reaganite consensus on austerity, but also gave new traction to Cass’s argument that conservatives need to undertake positive reforms for those “left behind” by the wrenching economic transformations of the neoliberal order. The opening of those horizons also reinforced Cass’s insistence that pandemic recovery could not become a Trojan Horse for more sweeping social-democratic reforms, especially at the level of the family.

American Compass returned to the neoconservative question of how to construct a policy ensemble necessary to promote the nuclear family form — the most basic unit of capitalist social reproduction — without either undermining the compulsion to undertake waged work or by foisting the “public” market on the “private” space of the home. In 2021, while households still reeled from the aftershocks of the pandemic, Cass and American Compass issued a policy proposal calling for an “expanded social compact for working families.” The proposed Family Income Supplemental Credit (FISC) calls for supplemental Social Security payments of “$800 per month to pregnant women beginning in fifth month of pregnancy, $400 per month from birth until the child’s sixth birthday, and then $250 per month until the child’s eighteenth birthday” to wage-working families with children (with a 20 percent boost for legally married couples). The FISC follows much the same framework as the “welfare reforms” of the 1990s: it is means-tested, time-limited, and comes with waged-work requirements. Yet, the design of the FISC amends those old nostrums of austerity with what Cass and his coauthor Wells King describe as “a major financial commitment . . . to shore up the economic and cultural foundations on which people build their lives.” They present the FISC as a form of “reciprocal social insurance” paid out to working families who will eventually pay that support forward when (or if) their economic situation improves. At the same time, they explicitly contrast the FISC to more generous forms of direct public assistance such as cash transfer payments or a “parenting wage.” They take the familiar position on the Right that cash payments undermine the “self-sufficiency” that supposedly comes from performing waged labor, while insisting that public monies cannot (and ought not) pay for “private” familial labor. Along those same lines, they also reject the neoliberal “natalist subsidy” for making the decision to have and raise children a “utility-maximizing decision.”

The institutional and ideological parameters of American Compass’s new social compact illuminate the contradictions inherent in conservative welfare state building. The design of the FISC recalls the abortive Family Assistance Plan (FAP) put forward by the Nixon administration which also called for at once dramatically expanding the provision of social welfare to working couples with children while dramatically limiting how much they could claim and for how long. Much like the FAP, the FISC frames the skyrocketing cost of living as a moral as much as a material crisis threatening the long-term reproducibility of the nuclear family, itself the cradle for reproducing labor productivity and discipline. Both programs also understood that capital was shirking its share of responsibility for meeting this basic biopolitical objective. Indeed, in the 1970s, the FAP failed precisely because organized industry and employer groups lobbied hard to convince legislators that any benefit, no matter how paltry, threatened to not only drive up wages (especially among the lowest paid and most desperate workers) but weaken their power over workplaces.

While Cass and King took pains to address those concerns in the twenty-first century, prospective conservative welfare state builders — just like their Keynesian rivals — still face the almost implacable hostility of employers to anything that might undermine their unilateral power on the job. Since the FISC only provides for a small childcare subsidy, the bulk of the money needed to hold together the nuclear family still needs to come from higher wages in the labor market.

“A Seat at the Table”

While employers covet such absolute authority on the job, Cass argues that the purpose of public policy is to ensure that managerial prerogatives do not come at the expense of social stability or economic efficiency. In American Compass’s founding letter, Cass drew on classical liberalism to sketch a political economy that allowed for some measure of social struggle to force through necessary changes. The founding principles of the United States’ Constitutional order, he writes, “ensure that prospective competitors can enter our markets, our civil society, and our politics, so that entrenched incumbents face constant pressure — and when some do snap rather than bend, replacements stand ready to fill the void.”

For American Compass, that pressure needs to be carefully managed and calibrated to preserve the proper and ostensibly harmonious nature of capitalist markets. A 2020 open letter from American Compass signed by J.D. Vance, then US senator Marco Rubio, former US attorney general Jeff Sessions, and a host of conservative economists and policy analysts concluded: “In a well-functioning and competitive market, participants meet as equals able to advance their interests through mutually beneficial relationships.” That language betrays the contradictions bedeviling any political project to reform capitalist social relations. Who is empowered to decide what constitutes a “mutually beneficial” relationship, and what does it actually mean to “meet as equals” at the point of production and in the corridors of power? Unlike other voices on the Right, American Compass makes clear that there needs to be pressure applied on capital to ensure that people earn enough to reproduce themselves as diligent and efficient laborers.

Bringing the appropriate amount of bottom-up pressure to bear on the workplace requires significant labor law reform, as unions and their partisans have long argued. American Compass urges amending the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to allow for more “cooperative” deliberative arrangements such as works councils and electing worker representatives to company boards. While the NLRA originally outlawed such setups to prevent employer-dominated bodies from frustrating genuine worker organizations, American Compass’ Chris Griswold argues the Magna Carta of US labor law instead reinforced an inherently “adversarial” collective bargaining regime. Allowing for more “collaborative” bargaining would create more efficient and less antagonistic workplaces, not to mention increase workers’ ability to win higher wages and better working conditions. That all depends on ensuring that workers’ “voices” are in fact represented and heard, not shunted into company unions.

Much like the Family Income Supplemental Credit, giving workers a “seat at the table” demands a tense dance between expanding and containing worker organizing. American Compass recently partnered with YouGov and announced growing public support for unions in general — including barring captive audience meetings and expediting contract negotiations — but not for reforms to enable greater organizing such as card check authorizations, sharing personal contact information with union organizers, or an end to state right-to-work laws. In op-ed pieces, Cass has also denounced unions’ electoral politicking as an impediment to collaborative workplace relations and claims that workers only want apolitical unions.

These proposals, as well as claims about what working people want, come as growing numbers of workers are organizing themselves on the job, taking great risks, and winning some important victories. Industrial workers have recently taken to the picket lines at John Deere, Kellogg’s, and the Big Three auto plants to reverse decades-old concessions to management on pay and benefits; Amazon workers are fighting digital Taylorism in warehouses and baristas are fighting the petty tyranny of store managers enforcing corporate discipline as a form of union-busting in Starbucks stores, teachers and nurses have fought to expand gains won over the past decade, while writers and actors recently took on the Hollywood conglomerates in a dual strike. These dramatic work stoppages took place alongside more quotidian (and far-reaching) refusals of onerous and poorly paid work that in turn forced employers to improve pay in care, food service, and retail jobs. At this militant conjuncture, American Compass is busy articulating a preemptive policy program to channel and control workers’ self-activity. After all, without it, workers’ own organizing may well force more expansive reform or win victories beyond the scope of law and legislation.

There are also those in ranks of organized labor who might prefer American Compass’s version of labor law reform. Take, for instance, David Rolf, the former president of Service Workers International Union (SEIU) Local 775 who is now listed as a “Compass Advisor” on the think tank’s website and described reading Cass’ The Once and Future Worker with delight. In the early 2000s, Rolf presided over Local 775’s successful organizing campaign among nursing-home workers in the Seattle area, one driven almost entirely by top-down negotiations with employers. Rolf’s model of organizing dovetails with the kind of conservative labor movement envisioned by American Compass, one devoid of strikes or political mobilization. Rolf’s success bringing nursing home operators to the table came through establishing a miniature version of the “sectoral bargaining” common to Western Europe whereby tripartite institutions negotiate wages and benefits across entire industries or regions. In a friendly public debate with Rolf, Cass remained skeptical of sectoral bargaining, because it reminded him of the industry-wide “pattern bargaining” between the United Automobile Workers and the Big Three that he believes doomed the domestic auto industry (and that historians have identified as a crucial part of the mid-century movement for building an American social democracy).

American Compass’s congressional allies are attempting to find ways to increase workers’ bargaining power without rebuilding a labor movement capable of leveraging contract negotiations with some of the world’s largest corporations into political action. Following Trump’s reelection, Missouri senator Josh Hawley introduced the Faster Labor Contracts Act to force employers to agree to a contract within ninety days of workers winning union recognition. Hawley’s bill is endorsed by the Teamsters and cosponsored by Democrats Cory Booker (NJ), Gary Peters (MI), and Jeff Merkley (OR). Hawley’s bill directly confronts the management stonewalling that ultimately beat back the big private-sector organizing wins of the 1970s. Yet the very language of the Faster Labor Contracts Act does not address the many other antiunion tactics that employers have developed over the last half century to keep workers from even having their union recognized. Thus, American Compass’s vision of pro-worker labor law reform remains torn between giving workers a “seat at the table” but without threatening managerial prerogatives over the workplace or in politics.

Targeting Workers, “Tightening” Labor Markets

To square the circle of how to improve the working conditions and living standards of workers without wholly alienating employers and investors, American Compass falls back on the “populist nationalism” long championed by Steve Bannon and that still resonates in the broader Trumpist coalition. It is that organized xenophobia driving Trump’s promise to execute mass deportations by masked federal agents supported by active service military personnel and the courts. This terror has many uses, but one is to accomplish a reversal in the declining fortunes of the “American Worker.” As political scientist Benjamin Braun and economist Cédric Durand point out, Trump’s electoral base after his 2024 win now “expects rising living standards and secure jobs delivered via a tariff-led revival of U.S. manufacturing and a deportation-led tightening of the labor market.” Delivering on those promises without further agitating globally oriented financial markets, not to mention industries dependent on immigrant labor, is its own incredibly tenuous balancing act. At this tense inflection point, American Compass provides the policy language for how to translate mass deportations into raises for a nativist working class.

For American Compass, instituting mandatory E-Verify to severely punish employers who hire undocumented workers offers “one simple trick” to force employers to abandon “cheap labor.” By aggressively policing workplaces and imposing “catastrophic and criminal penalties” on firms who routinely hire undocumented labor, American Compass argues, US employers will confront a “tight labor market,” especially in service and manual labor jobs, and thus will have no choice but to hire documented workers and pay them what they consider fair wages. “Rather than lament all the ‘jobs Americans won’t do,’ which exist only because the law provides non-Americans to do them, policymakers should leave employers no choice but to create jobs Americans will do.”

This argument belies the ways that this kind of anti-immigrant policing empowers capital on the job by providing new technologies and capacities for the Department of Homeland Security to (re)classify those who have standing as citizen-workers. Imposing mandatory E-Verify procedures threatens to eliminate any remaining vestiges of New Deal–era industrial citizenship but also the protections of political citizenship for working people. As the political scientist Michael Macshler warns, “workplace enforcement complements rather than contradicts the larger project of making labor into a malleable and cheap commodity.” The Cass coauthored sections of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” calling for “a more cooperative model run jointly with management that focuses solely on workplace issues,” overlaps with specific proposals to eviscerate or make meaningless a whole sweep of labor and workplace regulations and protections. “It may be that the undocumented worker is not a relic of the past, but a model for the future in which all workers are expendable, perhaps even deportable, with no protections whatsoever.” This could provide the opening to leverage state police power against not only the unorganized but also the organized.

Building a Conservative Labor Movement

American Compass’s vision for building a “conservative labor movement” challenges many of the right’s long-held assumptions about the proper relations of power on the job in the United States. Only by giving workers a “seat at the table,” Cass, his colleagues, and supporters argue, can the country reverse decades of wage stagnation and restore the efficiency of domestic production, strengthen national security, and rebuild the nuclear family. American Compass’s labor and social policy program suggests a way to plan for a nativist working-class nationalism, even as it navigates the contradictions of achieving this within the coalitional and institutional bounds of Trump’s Republican Party. Reading between the lines of American Compass’s program also betrays a nervousness about the capacity of the Right’s extant policy program to contain the percolating militancy of workers hard-pressed by decades of wage stagnation and austerity. It is imperative that working people and their organizations find ways to exploit those tensions, rather than buy into their false promises, to confront the authoritarian drift we now find ourselves in.