This Week, the House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. This bill was advertised as something that will strengthen workers' rights, but the provisions in the bill are a violation of employees’ privacy rights, a shift in power from workers to union bosses, and an affront to small businesses.
Key takeaways from the PRO Act:
- Forces employers to hand over mountains of personal information to unions, such as home addresses, cell phone numbers, and personal emails.
- Drastically decreases the minimum time required between announcing union elections and when they will be held to as little as 11 days.
- Takes away workers’ right to vote by secret ballot in many circumstances.
- In the event of a disagreement, unions are recognized even if the majority of workers did not vote for the union.
- Creates burdensome standards on defining joint employment and independent contractor status, which would be detrimental to the small business owners in the franchise industry.
Under this bill, the employer is forced to hand over the telephone number, the email, and the address of each employee to the union. I believe in the importance of protecting people’s privacy. To say that unions have the right to know every member’s home address and turn it over to who knows how many functionaries, I find very worrisome. I think many employees would find it scary if they came home at night to find someone waiting on their stoop to talk to them.
Another huge concern in this bill are the rules on how union elections are administered. These are not provisions that will help workers, they are gifts to union leadership that allow ambush elections. Here in Wisconsin, voters in state and federal elections are given two months’ notice from the time candidates have filed to the date of the election, which is guaranteed as secret-ballot. Under this bill, union leaders can call elections with as little as 11-days notice and in many circumstances, workers are not afforded the right to a secret ballot. It is appalling that those voting for this bill did not want to give union workers the same rights in their elections as voters have in elections for public office.
There are also unnecessary and burdensome changes to the joint employer rule. These changes will put miles of red tape on small business franchisees that would devastate the industry. Franchises fall under the umbrella of a corporation, but the franchisees are our local friends and neighbors. The changes this bill makes to the joint employer rule will burden these local store owners with liabilities that should fall on the shoulders of the corporation. This is another swipe at small business owners that will have a negative effect on our communities and will likely lead to the loss of jobs.
The Committee on Education and Labor, of which I am a member, has jurisdiction over the PRO Act, but was barred by House Democratic leadership from holding any hearings or markups of this bill. So, I was only able to offer one amendment to the bill during the House Rules Committee Markup. My amendment would have ensured people understand what joining a union means by requiring unions to provide all pertinent information on a union authorization card when presented to an employee, such as notice that the union will be the employees only collective bargaining representative and the dues and fees that will be charged by the union. Unfortunately, both this and several other amendments I supported that would have improved the bill were rejected by the majority party.
