The
U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Protecting the Right to
Organize (PRO) Act, with 42 House Democrats from Southern states as
cosponsors.
The
bill is one of the most ambitious attempts to strengthen the rights
of workers and unions in decades. Its centerpiece is a provision that
would override so-called “right-to-work” laws by allowing
unions to collect dues from represented workers in states with such
laws even if those workers have not joined the union.
“Unions
benefit all workers, but especially women and workers of color,”
Rep. Nikema Williams, a Georgia Democrat who cosponsored the bill,
said in a statement after its passage through the House.
Right-to-work
laws proliferated across the Midwest in the mid-2000s. But their
roots
are in the Jim Crow South,
in the milieu of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism wielded by rich
white Southerners and their Northern allies to maintain an economic
system built on racial division and cheap labor.
In
1944, Arkansas and Florida became the first two states in the country
to enact right-to-work laws. As labor historian Michael Pierce wrote
in 2017, the anti-union measures were meant to prevent what
industrialists and planters in both the North and South saw as
interracial organizing’s threat to the racial and economic
order. The Christian American Association, a group founded by Texas
oil industry lobbyist Vance Muse in 1936, worked to pass anti-strike
laws and spearheaded right-to-work campaigns in Texas, Arkansas,
Florida, and California.
The
campaigns to get those laws passed by ballot initiative - in a time
where many Black voters were blocked from the ballot - were
explicitly racist in tone and substance. Pierce writes:
During
the Arkansas campaign, the [Christian American Association] insisted
that right-to-work was essential for the maintenance of the color
line in labor relations. One piece of literature warned that if the
amendment failed “white women and white men will be forced into
organizations with black African apes . . . whom they will have to
call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” Similarly, the
Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation justified its support of
Right-to-Work by citing organized labor’s threat to Jim Crow.
It accused the CIO of “trying to pit tenant against landlord
and black against white.”
Most
Southern states, with the exceptions of Kentucky and West Virginia,
implemented their right-to-work laws during the mid-20th century. The
Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress in 1947, gave these laws federal
backing.
West
Virginia passed a right-to-work law in 2016 and Kentucky in 2017. The
measures have done what they were intended to do: No Southern state,
with the exception of West Virginia, has a union membership rate over
10%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s most
recent figures.
South Carolina has the region’s lowest union membership rate at
just 2.9%.
Right-to-work
laws financially hamstring unions by preventing “union shops,”
where all employees in a unionized workplace must pay union dues
and/or join the union. The PRO Act would weaken these laws by letting
unions collect dues even from employees who do not join, but who
still benefit from the contract negotiations and collective
bargaining done by the union.
“We
have a generational opportunity to make America’s economy and
democracy work for working people again,” North Carolina State
AFL-CIO President MaryBe McMillan said in a statement. “The PRO
Act does that by ending misleading and racist ‘right to work’
laws and creating meaningful consequences for employers that
retaliate against workers for simply exercising their right to
organize.”
The
legislation includes a number of other provisions that would bolster
workers’ rights to organize and could make union drives - like
the ongoing one at an Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama - more
feasible. These provisions include
banning employer interference in union elections, such as what are
known as “captive audience” meetings, a tactic used
against
organizers in Bessemer. Employers who violate the National Labor
Relations Act (NLRA) could face civil penalties, which they currently
do not. Corporate directors and company officials could be held
personally accountable for violating labor law. Union elections would
be set by the National Labor Relations Board and employees and not be
subject to the whims of employers. And workers could file a civil
action against their employer if the employer violates the NLRA.
The
Biden administration has come out swinging in support of the PRO Act,
and in support of workers’ rights to organize. President Joe
Biden released a video
signaling his support for the union drive in Alabama, and the White
House sent out a statement calling for the PRO Act’s passage.
“As
America works to recover from the devastating challenges of deadly
pandemic, an economic crisis, and reckoning on race that reveals deep
disparities, we need to summon a new wave of worker power to create
an economy that works for everyone,” Biden said in the
statement. “We should all remember that the National Labor
Relations Act didn’t just say that we shouldn’t hamstring
unions or merely tolerate them. It said that we should encourage
unions. The PRO Act would take critical steps to help restore this
intent.”
The
bill was first introduced in Congress last session when the Senate
was still led by Republicans. With Democrats narrowly controlling the
Senate this year, it theoretically stands a better chance - but will
likely be stymied by the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote
supermajority to break. Just one senator from the South has signed on
to sponsor the bill to date - Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Discussions
are underway
in the Senate about reforming the filibuster, which itself has a long
history
of being used to block civil rights legislation.
This
commentary was originally published by FacingSouth.org
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