Sean Speer’s recent essay in The Hub presents a familiar conservative position: supporting workers while maintaining skepticism toward organized labour. His argument, framed as “pro-worker but not pro-union,” attempts to chart a middle course that preserves conservative principles while acknowledging contemporary working-class concerns. Yet, this formulation reveals significant theoretical and practical shortcomings that mirror broader challenges within twenty-first-century conservative thought regarding labour politics in an era of profound economic transformation.
Theoretical Foundations and Their Discontents
Speer’s framework operates within what might be termed “atomistic conservatism”—a perspective that conceptualizes workers primarily as individual economic actors rather than members of collective institutions. This view aligns with classical liberal traditions within conservatism, particularly Friedrich Hayek’s skepticism toward organized labour, which he regarded as a distortion of competitive markets. However, such theoretical grounding increasingly appears inadequate when confronted with the structural realities of advanced capitalism.
The central tension in Speer’s analysis is his attempt to reconcile concern for worker welfare with ideological antipathy toward the institutional mechanisms through which workers have historically secured that welfare. Political economists often frame this as a problem of “institutional complementarities”: pro-worker outcomes cannot be achieved in isolation from collective bargaining structures, training systems, and welfare institutions that coordinate between employers and employees.
Contemporary conservative thinkers such as Oren Cass (The Once and Future Worker) and Julius Krein (American Affairs) have begun grappling with these tensions. Their proposals for sectoral bargaining or worker councils aim to preserve some measure of collective power without succumbing to adversarial labour models. Speer’s analysis, by contrast, remains tethered to an older paradigm that treats individual and collective worker interests as necessarily antagonistic—an outlook that risks intellectual stagnation.
The AI Revolution and Labour Market Transformation
Perhaps the most striking omission in Speer’s analysis is his failure to engage with the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on labour markets. A growing body of empirical work, including Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo’s research on automation, demonstrates that AI is reshaping employment in ways that fundamentally challenge laissez-faire assumptions.
The displacement-versus-augmentation debate underscores the inadequacy of purely individualistic responses. While AI may enhance productivity in some occupations, it simultaneously threatens to displace large numbers of middle-skill workers—the very demographic that anchors conservative electoral coalitions. These workers cannot easily transition through atomized solutions like tax credits or training subsidies alone.
Historical precedent reinforces this lesson. From the Industrial Revolution to the rise of postwar service economies, successful adaptation to technological upheaval has required coordinated institutional responses. Modern models such as Denmark’s “flexicurity” system—which combines flexible hiring with robust social insurance—or Germany’s co-determination framework demonstrate that collective arrangements can help societies absorb technological shocks while maintaining competitiveness.
Political economy teaches us that such mechanisms amount to “social risk pooling”: spreading the costs and benefits of innovation across society rather than leaving individual workers to shoulder them. Speer’s conceptual framework provides no theoretical space for such arrangements, reducing “pro-worker” rhetoric to little more than an ideological slogan.
Trade Policy, Protectionism, and Worker Welfare
Speer also sidesteps the complex interplay between conservative trade policy and worker welfare. The Trump administration’s tariffs, now partially institutionalized, illustrate how protectionism generates concentrated benefits and diffuse costs—shielding certain industries while raising consumer prices and disrupting supply chains.
Research on trade adjustment assistance (Autor, Dorn, Hanson) demonstrates that workers in industries exposed to global competition often face lasting economic harm unless robust institutional support is provided. Without such mechanisms, tariffs risk degenerating into rent-seeking for favoured industries, imposing inflationary pressures on the broader working class.
Here again, the absence of collective labour institutions exacerbates the problem. Without unions or alternative representative bodies to aggregate worker preferences, conservative trade policy risks being captured by narrow industrial lobbies rather than reflecting the interests of the working class as a whole. Speer’s framework thus fails to address the collective action problems inherent in contemporary protectionism.
Conservative Philosophy and Institutional Evolution
Speer’s portrayal of conservatism as uniformly hostile to worker organization reflects a selective reading of its intellectual tradition. Edmund Burke’s emphasis on “little platoons”—the intermediate associations that mediate between individuals and the state—suggests that conservatives have long recognized the importance of collective institutions. Worker associations, properly conceived, could embody precisely this mediating function.
Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between “enterprise association” and “civil association” provides further conceptual nuance: worker organizations may be understood as elements of civil society rather than as distortive enterprises. Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community similarly warned against the dangers of excessive individualism, arguing that human flourishing requires durable collective structures.
More recent “post-liberal” conservatives such as Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) and Adrian Vermeule (Common Good Constitutionalism) explicitly challenge market fundamentalism, arguing that social order requires robust intermediate institutions—including reimagined forms of labour organization. Even within market-oriented traditions, scholars like Luigi Zingales have highlighted how unchecked corporate concentration can undermine genuine competition, thereby justifying countervailing powers such as worker associations.
Speer’s dismissal of unions thus overlooks the possibility that conservative philosophy, far from requiring their rejection, may actually demand their reform and renewal.
Alternative Models and Missed Opportunities
Speer’s binary framing—pro-worker versus pro-union—obscures the proliferation of innovative labour models emerging across the ideological spectrum. Conservative figures such as Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney have advanced proposals for “worker capitalism”, emphasizing employee stock ownership and profit-sharing as means of aligning capital and labour interests.
In the UK, the “Blue Labour” movement associated with Maurice Glasman has revived ideas of guild socialism, emphasizing worker identity, vocational pride, and community institutions over adversarial class conflict. Meanwhile, experiments in sectoral bargaining and professional associations suggest ways to provide worker voice without undermining market discipline.
Empirical evidence from the German co-determination model suggests that worker participation in corporate governance can reduce industrial conflict and enhance firm-level productivity—outcomes that should, in principle, appeal to conservatives committed to stability and efficiency. By ignoring such possibilities, Speer leaves conservative labour politics underdeveloped and reactive rather than innovative and principled.
Toward a More Sophisticated Conservative Labour Politics
A genuinely conservative approach to labour politics in the twenty-first century must recognize that worker welfare in advanced economies requires institutional pluralism. Purely individualistic policies cannot address the systemic risks created by AI, global trade disruption, or corporate concentration. Nor can traditional unionism alone meet the needs of fragmented, post-industrial labour markets.
What is required is a layered ecosystem of institutions: worker councils that address training and adaptation, professional associations that uphold standards, co-determination frameworks that balance firm-level power, and market-supporting policies that maintain competitiveness. Such arrangements need not contradict conservative principles; indeed, they may be the only way to preserve social order and political legitimacy in market societies under strain.
Conclusion
Sean Speer’s essay reflects the broader dilemma of contemporary conservative thought: the challenge of maintaining intellectual coherence while adapting to new economic realities. His “pro-worker but not pro-union” stance attempts to resolve tensions between free-market orthodoxy and populist demands, but it fails both theoretically and practically.
A more serious conservative engagement would recognize that technological disruption, trade fragmentation, and social fragmentation demand institutional innovation, not ideological retrenchment. Supporting workers in the twenty-first century requires conservatives to evolve their understanding of markets, society, and the role of collective institutions.
The stakes are not merely partisan. In an era of inequality, technological upheaval, and democratic fragility, the capacity of market societies to maintain both efficiency and legitimacy depends on reconciling individual freedom with collective organization. If conservatism is to remain relevant, it must provide more than slogans—it must supply the intellectual and institutional creativity required to sustain democratic capitalism itself. Speer’s essay, while well-intentioned, demonstrates how far that intellectual journey still has to go.
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