Pro-union, anti-worker
House Democrats rammed through the union-backed Protecting the Right to Organize Act Tuesday night on a mostly party-line vote. It’s said to be dead on arrival in the Senate, which is a good thing for American workers.
The bill’s name shows its pro-union bias. It would largely gut “right-to-work” laws, which permit workers to opt out of a union and not pay union dues if they so choose.
This right was enshrined in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which gave states the ability to enact such laws. Twenty-seven states have them, and workers in those states have the freedom to object to coercive unions in the most powerful way possible: the right to leave.
The PRO Act would allow unions to collect dues from these men and women regardless of whether they formally join the union. This would be a serious infringement on personal liberty, and it would remove an important check on abusive union leaders.
The measure would also deliver a blow to fair union elections. Labor law since the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935 has allowed employers to require elections with secret ballots to show that employees truly want to be represented by a union.
The PRO Act reduces this protection by forbidding employers from calling meetings at which they can present their views on unionization, and by allowing ballots to be cast off of company property. It’s not hard to see where this leads: Union organizers put the muscle on wavering employees not to attend employer meetings—and to vote “the right way” at unionstaffed, off-site locations.
The bill is primarily a 1930s solution to a 21st-century problem. Less-skilled workers have no doubt experienced stagnating or declining wages for decades. But unlike in the 1930s, when workers won the right to unionize and force their employers to bargain, the problem is not primarily one of employer greed.
Global free trade means U.S.-based companies have to compete against firms from other countries for consumers’ dollars. Unions often demand staffing rules and wage packages that effectively undercut those firms’ ability to compete. This simple fact is one of the major reasons unionization rates at U.S. companies have declined so much in recent decades.
Without measures to limit immigration and global trade, the PRO Act would likely shift jobs elsewhere, or encourage firms to replace U.S.born workers with immigrants who would find nonunion wages quite attractive.