If, God forbid, the Democrats get their act together and pass their $3.5 trillion budget boondoggle, we’ll be ten years figuring out exactly what’s in it.
One thing we know that’s going to be in it is a payoff to Joe Biden’s big labor allies who see the bill as a potential bailout and an end to the decline of organized labor.
It’s called “Protecting the Right to Organize,” also known as the PRO Act, and it’s designed to capture millions of unsuspecting workers and put them in unions that don’t represent their interests and would take money from their hard-earned paychecks to help elect politicians who would advance policies they don’t support.
Democrats say this legislation only protects workers’ rights, but nothing could be further from the truth. For starters, the legislation violates worker privacy by forcing employers to give every scrap of information they have about employees to liberal activists. Don’t want Black Lives Matters protesters to know where you live? What your cellphone number is? Or your personal email address? Too bad. The PRO Act forces your employer to give activists all of this info.
The PRO Act also bans the secret ballot for union elections. Instead, it allows unions to obtain the power to bargain for an entire workforce through the so-called “card check” process. Under card check, activists are free to pressure workers at their homes and workplaces to sign cards indicating that they support forming a union. Once activists have signed cards from a majority of workers, all the workers must then submit to that union. Under card check, workers have no privacy protection from union intimidation.
If you think this sounds like a dream come true for unions, you would be correct.
Do you like living and working in a “right to work” state? Sorry, you’re out of luck if the PRO Act passes. The legislation would outlaw right-to-work laws in 27 states.
And if you like liberal activists boycotting businesses because of wrong thinking, you’ll love the PRO Act.
As if the losses of privacy, the secret ballot, and the right not to join a union weren’t bad enough, the PRO Act would also subject everyone to endless secondary strikes and boycotts. Under current law, a union is allowed to strike against an employer, but not to target companies that continue to do business with that employer. So, for example, a hotel workers union can picket the hotel where its members work, but it can’t then target the business that sells food to the hotel or the business that books a conference at the hotel. Those would be secondary strikes.
But under the PRO Act, unions could target whatever business they wanted for whatever reason. If you are tired of boycotts and protests by woke activists now, it would be a hundred times worse if the PRO Act became law. There would be no hiding from woke protests anywhere.
Unions complain that the pendulum has swung too far toward management and that the government has put roadblocks in their way to organize modern workers. Those roadblocks can’t be any worse than company goons bashing in heads of union organizers a hundred years ago. The fact is, as it stands now, there is a rough balance between labor and management and the PRO Act would place a thumb on the scale that would favor labor unions in collective bargaining and union elections.
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