The PRO Act restores crucial rights to workers

What’s happening

Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama are going ahead with a vote on whether to form a union, despite efforts by Amazon to block the election. All across the U.S., companies like Amazon employ a wide range of legal and illegal tactics to suppress the rights of their workers to form unions and collectively bargain with their employers. 

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, introduced in Congress last week, would close loopholes in current law that allow employers to get away with these shenanigans, and would restore crucial rights established 85 years ago under the National Labor Relations Act.  
Why workers need the PRO Act 
The PRO Act will restore workers’ ability to organize by protecting their right to negotiate for better wages, benefits, and fairness on the job. It will also promote greater racial economic justice by inevitably shrinking the Black–white wage gap. Here are the problems the PRO Act will address. Read the fact sheet »
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The PRO Act restores crucial rights to workers
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What we’re talking about
CBO confirms a $15 minimum wage will benefit workers and reduce COVID-19 economic shock
A higher federal minimum wage would significantly boost earnings and living standards for low-wage workers and would have direct and significant fiscal effects. Read the blog post »
We must go big on economic relief—or face the consequences
The risk of going too big on economic relief is trivial—a period of inflation that the Federal Reserve is well-equipped to neutralize. The risk of going too small is large—letting the unemployment shock from COVID-19 linger for years, says EPI’s Josh Bivens. Read the blog post »
Elevating the importance of social and emotional learning 
Empathy, resilience, and the ability to cope with anxiety must be emphasized along with algebra, history, social sciences, or foreign languages, says EPI’s Emma García and Elaine Weiss. Read the blog post »

Upcoming webinar
Actions the Biden administration and Congress can take to better protect farmworkers
Join us for a webinar highlighting an EPI report on how efforts to protect the wages and working conditions of U.S. farmworkers and temporary migrant farmworkers with H-2A visas have failed. Register for the webinar »
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What we’re reading and listening to
The Economist Placing Value on Black Women’s Overlooked Work
Every year women do trillions of dollars’ worth of unpaid household work. In the United States alone, that total amounted to roughly $1.2 trillion in 2019, a figure nearly the size of the New York State economy. Read more »
VinePair Podcast: Why Restaurants and Bars Should Welcome a $15 Minimum Wage
Among many other actions as our new president, Joe Biden has called to increase the federal minimum wage in the U.S. to $15 per hour and eliminate the concept of the tipped minimum wage. Listen to the podcast »
The Union Leader Who Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools
Randi Weingarten, the nation’s most powerful teachers union president, has a message: She wants to get students back in the nation’s classrooms. Read more »
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How we can protect workers’ most fundamental rights
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