Hawley talks a big game on worker rights amid union strike. Do his votes match up?

On a sunny day last month, Sen. Josh Hawley showed up on the sidewalk of a busy road in Wentzville, trailed by journalists and staff, and stood with striking United Auto Workers.

Hawley was one of a handful of Republicans who visited a picket line shortly after workers at three of the country’s top automobile manufacturers – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, which makes Chryslers – voted to strike as they pushed for higher wages and better benefits.

He talked to workers who said they had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and said they wanted to be able to spend more time with their families.

And, like much about Hawley, his visit immediately sparked backlash.

Several Missouri union groups called it a symbolic gesture. Labor advocates and Democrats circulated a 2015 post from X, previously called Twitter, in which Hawley celebrated the legislative passage of an anti-union bill that forbids mandatory union membership.

“It was a slap in the face of the workers,” said Brandon Flinn, business manager of the Missouri – Kansas Laborers District Council. “He’s playing upon the favorability of unions currently and ignoring his past.”

Hawley is part of a wave of lawmakers trying to chart a new path for the Republican Party after former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election upended the status quo of conservative politics. For Hawley, that’s meant eschewing the traditional, business friendly stances espoused by Republicans in favor of the working class.

“I’ll say this until I’m blue in the face, I think working people are absolutely vital,” Hawley told The Star. “They’re vital to the country, the backbone of the country, and they’re going to be the backbone of our party or we will never be a majority party.”

A series of strikes across industries – from actors, to baristas, to health workers – has drawn attention to labor unions in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s, Hawley’s worker-first message has become central to his reelection bid in 2024.

But the space between Hawley’s rhetoric and actions has become a leverage point for the Democratic Party’s longshot attempt to defeat him in 2024. Democratic candidates are quick to call out what they say is Hawley’s false populism, as they attempt to win back working class voters who have increasingly turned to the Republican Party.

Hawley has given speeches railing against the loss of American manufacturing jobs but voted against a bill aimed at boosting manufacturing in the semiconductor industry. He’s walked the picket line with auto workers, but blames the Biden administration’s efforts to incentivize a transition to electric cars as the reason the companies aren’t paying workers.

He has failing grades from the AFL-CIO and the Communications Workers of America on his legislative scorecard and isn’t endorsed by a single union in the state.

“We’ve been to at least a dozen picket lines,” said Lucas Kunce, an Independence Democrat running for Senate. “Josh Hawley showed up to the one that’s in the most national news right now. That’s what the guy does. He’s just there for the cameras. And if you want to support workers, you’ve got to actually walk the walk, which he’s never done.”

Union membership has stayed relatively steady in Missouri over the past decade – 10.6% of employees in Missouri were represented by unions in 2022, compared to 10.1% in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it has fallen significantly since its peak in 1989, where unions represented about 15.5% of workers in the state.

As the percentage of people who belong to unions has declined, many former union workers are not getting communication from labor groups about the specific positions their elected officials are taking, said Bob Jacobi, executive director of the Labor-Management Council of Greater Kansas City, a nonprofit that works to build relationships between labor and management.

“They may be more open to looking at more symbolic signs of support as opposed to, you know, he voted this way on this issue or that way on that issue,” he said. “Clearly, there’s a perceived need by Republicans in Missouri and elsewhere to position themselves as pro-worker and to try to at least symbolically appear that way.”

Hawley said he has evolved on workers issues since he posted a tweet calling for an end to union-backed Republican politicians in 2015, but the evolution has resulted in an unconventional approach to labor issues.

His failing legislative scorecard from major unions generally comes from the fact that Hawley votes against most bills and nominations in the Senate. His method of getting legislation through Congress rarely involves working behind closed doors to rally support. Instead he favors forcing votes on either legislation or amendments on the floor of the Senate.

But Hawley has made some legislative efforts to back workers. He was one of the few senators who voted with rail industry workers by opposing a deal crafted by the Biden administration to avert a railway strike.

On Thursday, he was the only Republican to co-sponsor a resolution by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent, that calls for the Senate to stand in solidarity with striking UAW workers. But while he was eager to weigh in on behalf of the autoworkers and rail workers, he’s taken a more passive approach to striking workers in other industries, like the high-profile screenwriters strike that stretched through the summer.

He also makes a distinction between supporting public sector unions representing teachers, air traffic controllers and other government workers— about 33% of public sector workers are in unions, compared to just 6% in the private sector.

“I just think that public sector unions for a long time have held government hostage, held vital government services for people hostage, and that’s different,” Hawley said. “But when you’re talking about private sector unions that are trying to get folks bargaining power, these multinational corporations, particularly in the last 30 years, they’re really less and less tied to this country and less and less tied to American workers.”

Hawley’s role in the Senate is generally agitator instead of legislator. When he does get legislation passed, he tends to force it through with a vote on the floor of the Senate, rather than working behind the scenes to secure support. He’ll vote against large pieces of legislation, even if it contains provisions he pushed for, because it’s not what he would have written. He has voted against the majority of nominations Biden has sent to the Senate.

His hard-line approach has contributed to his low legislative scorecard among major unions – Hawley has a lifetime score of 12% with the AFL-CIO and an 18% with the CWA, in large part because of his votes against either nominees or large pieces of legislation the groups support.

Kunce, one of the Democrats running for Senate in 2024, has used Hawley’s hard-line approach to Congress as a way to try and pry away some of the white working class voters who support Hawley. He points out that Hawley is a banker who went to Rockhurst High School and calls him a “fraud” who is pretending to be a populist.

Kunce, in an interview with The Star, said unions were critical to his campaign, calling them the “state’s greatest election winning machine.” He said his campaign’s message — which includes the idea that unions are fighting to save America’s middle class — has resonated with organized labor.

So far, this approach has won Kunce the support of several unions in the state. In the most recent fundraising quarter, Kunce was supported by iron workers, machinists and the insulators union. Kunce has also specifically pointed to support from the Missouri State Council of Fire Fighters, a group that previously endorsed then-Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt in his successful bid for U.S. Senate last year.

Hawley has no known endorsements from union groups.

“We’re in a class war right now whether you like it or not,” Kunce said. “And the people who have initiated this war are trying to take everything away from us. They are truly buying off politicians and stripping our communities for parts and transferring our wealth to the shareholding class.”

Kunce has effectively been running for Senate since 2021. He lost the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2022, relying on a similar populist message. And while he’s proven to be a prolific fundraiser – Kunce brought in $1.5 million in the most recent fundraising quarter while Hawley raised about $1.7 million between his campaign account and his joint fundraising committee – his long campaign and financial advantage haven’t shown up in early polls.

Kunce has outraised other Democrats in the race by a 10 to 1 ratio.

In a recent poll conducted by Emerson College, Kunce fared slightly worse against Hawley than Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor who is also running in the primary. Kunce had the support of 32% of voters in a matchup against Hawley compared to Bell’s 34%.

“Missouri workers are good at figuring out who will actually fight for them and who won’t,” Bell said in a written statement. “Publicity stunts, and sometimes even endorsements, don’t always tell the whole story. The ballot box is usually a better guide of who they think is on their side.”

State Sen. Karla May, who is also running in the Democratic primary, said in a statement to The Star that she has been committed to standing with labor and touted her own union membership, including the Communications Workers of America and her leadership role with the St. Louis Chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

“Throughout my career, I have been committed to standing with labor and advocating for the rights and interests of workers,” she said.

While Democrats compete for support of organized labor groups – many of which rarely support Republican candidates – Hawley’s rhetoric may be appealing to some workers directly, particularly as he rails about conservative social issues that often overwhelm the national political conversation.

Lenny Jones, the president of the Missouri and Kansas branch of the SEIU, which represents service workers, said Hawley’s talk about workers has been able to peel off workers who may have once supported Democrats by using populist rhetoric. That messaging has tied together support for workers while emphasizing conservative stances on cultural issues.

“We need to be able to talk to our members, not to get fooled by the populist rhetoric of Trump and Hawley, but to remember that, you know, there are pocketbook policy issues at stake,” Jones said. “There are legislative demands at stake that we need a member of the U.S. Senate to move on once they get elected.”