The US House of Representatives officially approved a comprehensive bipartisan labor bill, the Law on the Protection of the Right to Organize (PRO). Applauded by unions and loathed by companies, the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate without an obstruction reform.
The bill passed the House on Tuesday night with a vote of 225-206. The bill won the support of five House Republicans and was co-sponsored by three Republicans: MPs Brian Fitzpatrick from New York and Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew from New Jersey.
If made into law, the PRO Act would be one of the most dramatic changes in US labor law in decades. One of the bill’s most significant provisions is a policy that would override state labor rights laws that weaken unions by allowing unionized workers not to pay their contributions. It would also create tougher penalties for employers who interfere with employees’ efforts to unionize.
If these penalties worked as planned, they would remove a major barrier to union membership, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told Vox in a recent interview.
“It is the workers who face an uneven playing field when trying to assert their right to form a union,” said Appelbaum. “The employer has all kinds of opportunities to intimidate workers and interfere with their desire to have a fair choice.”
Finally, the project would give independent contractors and concert workers the right to negotiate collectively with employees. There has been some resistance to this willingness on the part of companies – and the independent contractors themselves, who fear that this may restrict their ability to continue working as freelancers. But House Democrats argue that the bill does not restrict the flexibility of independent contractors.
“It is a serious problem when employers misclassify employees as independent contractors to prevent their workers from organizing,” Bobby Scott, chairman of the House’s Education and Work Committee, told Vox in a statement. “The PRO Law closes this gap by giving qualified freelancers and concert workers, who are classified as employees, the right to decide for themselves whether to form a union. Or not.”
Scott added: “Anyone who makes absurd claims that this project would mean the end of freelancing or restrict workers’ flexibility is mistaken or deliberately misrepresented the facts.”
The approval of the project occurs at a time when adhesion to private sector unions is very low. Only 6.3 percent of private sector workers belong to a union, according to the Secretariat of Labor Statistics, while workers’ membership in public sector unions is more than five times that number, about 34.8 percent.
In addition to this bill, union organizers are seeing glimpses of hope, however. On the one hand, a study by the progressive Economic Policy Institute found that union workers were less likely to be fired than their non-union colleagues during the Covid-19 recession, arguing for more union representation. On the other hand, President Joe Biden’s government is positioning itself as much more friendly to organized work than even previous Democratic governments.
What’s in the PRO Act, explained
The PRO Law has many parts, but its main objectives are to facilitate the adhesion of workers to a union and its existence.
The biggest reform would be to allow workers to overturn the right to work laws that 27 states (plus Guam) currently have in place. The PRO Act would allow employers and unions to enter into a contract that allows unions to charge fair participation fees to cover the costs of collective bargaining and administration of the agreement.
With the support of pro-business groups, labor law laws have proliferated from the southern states to the midwest with a more robust union history since Republicans changed state legislatures en masse in 2010. The laws undermine labor unions. creative but debilitating way: They do not prohibit employees from joining a union, but they do give employees the option of not paying union dues or agency fees that collectively help pay the costs of negotiating or negotiating a contract . With fewer workers paying off debts, it has been harder for unions to support themselves.
As Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote for Vox in 2019:
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, attributes the right to work laws to a 3.1 percent drop in wages for unionized and non-unionized workers after accounting for differences in the cost of living, demographics and labor market characteristics.
In addition to overturning state labor rights laws, the bill takes a number of other measures to strengthen unions, including:
- It would authorize “significant” penalties for companies and executives for violating workers’ rights and would allow the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to assess monetary penalties for each violation.
- If a company is retaliating against an employee, the bill requires the NLRB to immediately seek an injunction to reinstate the employee while their case is pending. The bill gives the NLRB the power to enforce its own decisions, rather than waiting for a decision from the Court of Appeals.
- The bill prohibits employers from requiring workers to attend so-called “captive audience meetings”, where the employer tries to dissuade employees from voting to join a union.
- The project facilitates the first contracts between newly certified companies and unions, requiring mediation and arbitration to resolve disputes.
- The project would implement an “ABC test” to determine whether independent contractors or self-employed workers can be considered full-time employees. While this has raised some fears that this legislation could harm freelance journalists or concert workers, Democratic advisers say the project will not limit someone’s ability to work freelance or hire a company, but simply give them the option to negotiate collectively. with regular employees.
Even if the legislation was passed by the House with three Republican co-sponsors, it is unlikely to win much – if any – Republican support in the Senate.
“The PRO Act is not and should not be political or controversial,” Republican MP Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the Republicans who co-sponsor it, told reporters on Tuesday.
Although five Republicans voted in favor of the act, the vast majority of House Republicans objected. Most Republicans voted in line with business and industrial groups that are fiercely opposed to unions.
“The bill would make radical changes to a well-established law, diminish employees’ rights to privacy and threaten entire sectors that fostered innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation,” said Kristen Swearingen, president of the Coalition for a Locality. Democratic Work – a group representing 600 major industry organizations, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation.
The PRO Act, like many other bills that the House is about to pass in the coming weeks, is likely to end in the US Senate 50-50. The bill has no support among Senate Republicans and cannot reach the 60-vote limit to lift the obstruction. There were some preliminary discussions on ways to incorporate parts of the bill into the next Senate budget reconciliation package, but the entire bill cannot go through reconciliation.
In the absence of any obstruction reform in the Senate, the PRO Act is unlikely to reach Biden’s table in the next two years. That is why some of the country’s largest unions, such as the AFL-CIO, are currently deciding whether to publicly support the elimination of obstruction.
Biden is seen as favorable to the unions, but there is not much he can do
Recently, the White House released a video statement de Biden unequivocally endorsing the right of workers to bargain collectively and referring to an ongoing vote in Alabama to decide whether Amazon workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, will join a union.
“Everyone knew what he was referring to,” said Appelbaum, president of the union that would represent Amazon workers if they unionized. “The only organization he was referring to was the organization in Alabama, and the workers clearly understood what the president was saying.”
Bessemer’s struggle has attracted national attention and could prove to be a crucial battle for modern labor movements. Appelbaum said the PRO Act would give workers tools to react against the intimidation of Amazon, which is strongly urging its workers to vote against forming a union.
But in addition to upholding labor laws to boost unions, there is much that Biden can do at the White House to encourage union growth. One of his first acts as president was to dismiss Peter Robb, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board appointed by Trump; he appointed NLRB’s longtime lawyer, Peter Sung Ohr, as Robb’s replacement.
This measure was seen as an effort to ensure that the Biden administration and its agencies can enforce current wage laws and that their NLRB is more favorable to unions. Labor historians have noted that Biden’s union statement is impressive – both in his strong reaction against employers who interfere with employees’ union attempts and in his time in the middle of a crucial union vote.
“It’s basically unprecedented in American history,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies labor rights, recently told Vox. “Even FDR did not actually intervene at the time of a union election with a direct statement for a given group of workers.”
But ultimately, Biden still needs Congress to expand existing labor laws in the United States. The Chamber took the first step, but the Senate would probably need to get rid of the obstruction if this bill had any chance of being passed.