Meet the ‘Anti-Worker Extremist’ Now Running the House…

Mike Johnson — new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

By Steve Wishnia

New House Speaker Mike Johnson has an “atrocious” record on labor issues, major unions said after he was elected to the post in a strict party-line vote Oct. 25.

“It is absolutely shameful that every single Republican member of Congress voted for this unqualified, anti-worker extremist,” Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement Oct. 26. “Among other things, Johnson has called the PRO Act an ‘outdated way of thinking,’ co-sponsored the National Right to Work Act, endorsed overturning the ban on company unions, and proposed raising the retirement age and lowering COLAs for Social Security beneficiaries.”

“American workers must be empowered to control their own futures, so they are not subservient to the interests of powerful unions,” the Johnson-chaired Republican Study Committee’s American Worker Task Force declared in a 2020 report called “Reclaiming the American Dream,” released in 2020. The committee, which now has about 175 members, calls itself “the largest caucus of conservatives in the House.”

The panel’s 118 policy recommendations included prohibiting employers from recognizing unions voluntarily; repealing prevailing-wage laws for federal construction contracts; making it easier for employers to classify workers as “independent contractors” instead of employees; and promoting “alternative forms of labor-management cooperation outside traditional unions.” Those are currently illegal unless workers are represented by a union.

“Johnson's anti-labor record is so extreme that he actually endorsed overturning the provision of the National Labor Relations Act that bans ‘company unions’ that companies like T-Mobile have used to try and convince workers that they are represented on the job even without collective bargaining,” the CWA’s legislative team said.

Johnson’s positions on labor issues have become more hardline since Joseph Biden became President. He received a zero rating from the AFL-CIO in both 2021 and 2022, based on his votes on key legislation. (House Republicans overall averaged 10% in 2022 and 6% in 2021.)

In 2020, he got a 17% AFL-CIO rating, although that was based on his votes to curtail imports produced by forced labor in China’s Uyghur region and for two early coronavirus-response measures.

Last year, he voted against bills to give railroad workers seven days of paid sick leave; to give collective-bargaining rights to Transportation Security Administration workers and those in Veterans Administration medical facilities; and to end the requirement that the Postal Service pre-fund its retiree health-care benefits for 75 years in advance.

“On the issues that matter most to working people, Johnson has voted consistently with the most extreme elements of the Republican Party—and been a driving force behind resolutions that would cut trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. “He has voted against infrastructure packages to put Americans back to work, and opposed legislation that raises wages and helps workers join a union, and rejected bills time and again that would compassionately protect America’s workers, including veterans and pregnant workers.”

Johnson, who was one of the leaders of House Republicans’ efforts to nullify votes in states where Donald Trump was defeated in 2020, also voted against the Presidential Election Reform Act last year. That bill explicitly declared that the Vice President does not have the power to rule on disputes over electors, and that state legislatures cannot override the popular vote in their states.

House Republicans “have promoted an election denier,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “We hope Johnson doesn’t threaten the democratic fabric of this country and endanger the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of working families.”

Elected in 2016 from a district in northwest Louisiana — Shreveport is its largest city — Johnson is a more traditional right-winger on economic issues: Under the euphemism of “entitlement reform,” he advocates drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

In 2018, when Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that supports similar cuts, suggested that this was putting him on a “collision course” with conservatives of a “more populist bent,” Johnson responded that “we have to get back to it as a number-one priority.”

If public benefits are not scaled back, he added, “we’re going to lose our whole form of government.”

In January, the Republican Study Committee proposed raising the “full retirement age” for Social Security from 67 to 69, and replacing Medicare with a system where people would get vouchers to pay for either traditional Medicare or private insurance. In June, it proposed converting Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies to finite block grants to states, projecting that it would save more than $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families estimated that would slash the programs’ funding by more than half.

Johnson is also hardline on social issues — that is, government restrictions on other people’s sex lives. Last October, he introduced a bill called the ‘‘Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,’’ which would prohibit federal funding of schools whose sex-education programs discuss sexuality or sexual orientation with children under 10. He has supported Louisiana’s 2022 abortion ban, under which doctors can get up to 15 years in prison and the only exceptions are vague provisions about saving the life of the mother or if the fetus is not viable.

Sometimes that overlaps with his economic positions. Earlier this year, Johnson told a House Judiciary Committee hearing that legal abortion was undermining Social Security and other government benefits.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional coverage to the elective killing of unborn children in America. You think about the implications of that on the economy,” he said. “We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside-down and toppling over like this.”

Johnson has also denied that human carbon-dioxide emissions are the cause of the Earth’s temperature increasing. In 2019, his Republican Study Committee responded to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a “Green New Deal” — the idea that massive social transformation is needed to prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable, and that this transformation must be done in a way that creates good jobs — with a document titled “A Greedy New Steal.”

It said that switching to renewable energy would cost too much and not significantly reduce emissions; that “it is unfair to ask rural residents to endure the brunt of inconveniences required for renewable energy generation in order to provide electricity to those in urban areas”; and that overall, the idea was “a thinly veiled attempt to implement the policies that would usher in a new socialist society in America.”