Is JD Vance Really A Friend Of Labor?

Earlier this year Senate Democrats penned a letter attacking Amazon over its labor practices, calling the retail giant’s 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 aren’t actually employees, and they are.”

Vance is part of a very small subset of Republican lawmakers who’ve 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 party’s longtime antipathy to collective bargaining.

The 39-year-old Vance’s place on the GOP ticket has accelerated talk of a GOP realignment on economic issues, one that could weaken the party’s ties with big corporations and maybe even allow for a functioning relationship with unions. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called for just that in an address at the Republican National Convention on Monday. O’Brien had praised Vance as being “great on