About 200,000 people in Wisconsin go to work under a union contract. At a voter event in Superior this month, Tom Tiffany was asked whether he cared about their support.

He said he didn't worry about their leaders.

"Those couple people that are kingpins, I don't worry about them."

In the same answer he said "who I'm after is the rank-and-file voter." Audio of the exchange was obtained by the Milwaukee Courier and reported by Civic Media on August 25, 2026.

It's a clean line — the bosses versus the workers, and he's for the workers. There is a way to check it. Congress votes, and the votes are public.

The vote he didn't cast

On March 9, 2021, the U.S. House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It's the biggest rewrite of labor law in decades: it would penalize employers who retaliate against workers for organizing, narrow the loophole that lets companies call employees "independent contractors" to strip their rights, and override the state right-to-work laws that let people opt out of paying for the union bargaining they benefit from.

It passed 225 to 206. One member of the House did not vote.

That member was Tom Tiffany.

Not one of a handful. Not part of a bloc making a point. Out of every member of the House, on the single largest labor bill to reach the floor in a generation, exactly one person's name has "Not Voting" beside it, and it is his. The roll call is on the Clerk of the House's own website. Anyone can open it.

Voting no would at least be a position. This is the rank-and-file voter he says he's after, asking where he stood, and the record answering: he wasn't there.

The vote he did cast

Eleven months later he was there, and it was worse.

On February 7, 2022, the House voted on the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Forced arbitration is the clause buried in a lot of employment contracts that says if something happens to you at work, you can't sue — you go to a private arbitrator the company picked, in secret, with no appeal. For years it was the standard way a company made a harassment complaint disappear. The bill said that clause can't be enforced against someone alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment.

It was not a close call, and it was not a partisan one. It passed 335 to 97. Every single Democrat voted yes. So did 113 Republicans — more than half the Republican conference.

Tiffany was one of the 97 who voted no. President Biden signed it into law anyway.

A month after that, on March 17, 2022, the House passed the broader FAIR Act, which would have banned forced arbitration clauses in employment, consumer and civil rights disputes generally. It passed 222 to 209. Tiffany voted no on that one too.

What this adds up to

Put the three next to each other and the pattern isn't about union leadership at all.

• The PRO Act protects the worker who wants to organize. He didn't vote.
• H.R. 4445 protects the worker who was harassed. He voted no, while 113 Republicans voted yes.
• The FAIR Act protects the worker who signed away her right to a courtroom on her first day. He voted no.

Two of the three have nothing to do with unions at all. All three are about what happens to an individual employee when the employer has all the leverage — which is the exact person Tiffany says he's after.

This is not new for him either. He cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10 as a state legislator. Associated Builders and Contractors, the construction lobby that fights union project-labor agreements, is on the list of top donors to his congressional campaign account this cycle, at $2,500 from its PAC. And he voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage — coverage a lot of those 200,000 union members bargained for.

The endorsement gap

Tiffany's Democratic opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, has picked up endorsements from nearly every local labor union. Asked about his own, Tiffany said: "As of now, I don't know that we have any labor union endorsements."

Crowley's response to the "kingpins" line was that Tiffany is "selling out hard-working Wisconsinites," and pledged to "always protect their right to organize and to fight for fair wages."

You don't have to take a Democrat's word for it. The roll calls above are on a government website, they take about a minute to read, and none of them has a union president's name anywhere in it.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany told a Superior audience he doesn't worry about the union "kingpins," only the rank-and-file. He was the only member of the entire U.S. House who did not vote on the PRO Act in 2021, the biggest labor bill in decades. He was one of 97 Republicans — against 113 in his own party who voted yes — to oppose ending forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims in 2022, and he voted against the broader FAIR Act a month later. Every one of those bills protects an individual worker, and two of them have nothing to do with unions at all. About 200,000 Wisconsinites work under a union contract, and by his own account he does not know of a single labor union endorsement.

Source

"Tom Tiffany says he doesn't care about labor union support: 'kingpins, I don't worry about them'", Civic Media, August 25, 2026, and "Tom Tiffany's anti-worker record includes votes weakening protections for sexual harassment victims", The Milwaukee Courier, August 25, 2026. Photo: Getty Images via Civic Media.