Opinion | The Small-Business Tyrant Has a Favorite Political Party

Despite the blue-collar affectations of some of its most visible leaders or the populist rhetoric of its most vocal cheerleaders, it has never been more obvious that the Republican Party is the party of the boss, and in particular the party of the small-business tyrant.

Who or what is the small business tyrant? It’s the business owner whose livelihood rests on a steady supply of low-wage labor; who opposes unions, resents even the most cursory worker protections and employee safety regulations, and who views those workers as little more than extensions of himself, to use as he sees fit.

The small-business tyrant is, to borrow an argument from the writer and podcaster Patrick Wyman, an especially reactionary member of America’s landowning gentry: local economic elites whose wealth comes primarily from their ownership of physical assets. Those assets, Wyman explains, “vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina.”

To look at Republican politics at the state level is to see an economic agenda dominated by the worst of this particular class.

Last summer, for example, in the midst of a dangerous heat wave that put thousands of lives at risk, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law nullifying local rules requiring water breaks for outdoor workers. The law targeted provisions passed by officials in Austin and Dallas that gave construction workers a 10-minute break every four hours. “For too long, progressive municipal officials and agencies have made Texas small businesses jump through contradictory and confusing hoops,” said Dustin Burrows, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill. Burrows, it should be noted, is a small-business owner himself.

More recent is a Florida bill, signed into law this month by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that similarly forbids local governments from setting heat exposure rules for workers. Backed by business groups, the law also prevents governments from “maintaining a minimum wage other than a state or federal minimum wage.” Even if a city wants one of its vendors to provide a higher wage than the statewide minimum of $12, it can’t. “Small business owners don’t have the time or the resources to navigate a confusing and contradictory array of local ordinances that go beyond” what “the state already mandates,” said Bill Herrle, Florida director of the National Federation of Independent Business.