(The “Protecting the Right to Organize – Tragic Republican Alternative Proposal”)
For four years now, Big Labor has been demanding passage of the so-called “PRO Act” – a massive smorgasbord of virtually every bad idea the union bosses have dreamed up, ever since the “Taft-Hartley Act” put a few limitations on their power way back in 1947.
And although they’ve put all their muscle behind it, and made it a litmus test for gaining union boss support among Democrats, Republicans have consistently blocked it.
Unfortunately, today Republican Senator Josh Hawley (MO) is circulating a framework for his Tragic Republican Alternative Proposal version of the PRO Act (the PRO-TRAP).
Rather than advancing ideas to free workers from the shackles of compulsory unionism, the PRO-TRAP is merely a subset of the terrible ideas in the original PRO Act, as if taking its ideas a few at a time makes them less awful.
Literally every provision is designed to increase Big Labor’s coercive power over employees and their workplaces.
A Solution in Search of a Problem
Over 94 percent of private sector workers are non-union. Of those non-union workers, Gallup polling found that 58 percent of Americans are “not interested at all” in joining a union, and 89 percent rated themselves as something other than “extremely interested.”[1]
Unable to convince American workers to voluntarily choose to unionize – which the workers can already do under existing labor law – union bosses have turned to politicians to change the law to make it easier for unions to impose themselves on non-union workers and harder for those workers to ever escape it.
The PRO-TRAP calls for doing just that: Enacting one-sided changes to labor law that rig the process to favor union officials over individual workers.
Ambush Elections to Install Unions, But Not to Remove Them
The PRO-TRAP calls for giving union officials the power to call for ambush elections that give targeted employees a maximum of 20 days to decide whether to vote for unionization.
Granting union bosses the power to call for quick-snap elections at the time of their choosing disadvantages employees who want to campaign against the union or who want to learn more about it before voting.
Employer speech during a union organizing drive is already fraught with traps, perils, and steep penalties. Under the ambush election framework, an employer may not even have time to find and hire legal experts to advise him what he’s allowed to say before the quick-snap election takes place.
This guarantees that employees only get to hear one side of the story – Big Labor’s propaganda. This is the exact opposite of a free and fair election. Imagine running for office but not being allowed to talk to voters, while your opponent is free to tell any lies he wants. That’s not a free and fair election.
And tellingly, the PRO-TRAP framework does not give employees any right to a timely election when trying to remove an unwanted union – i.e., to decertify it.
This is despite the fact that current federal labor policy makes it exceedingly difficult for employees to obtain decertification elections by barring the elections during most times and allowing union officials to easily block the election.
This scheme exacerbates that problem tenfold.
Depriving Employees of Information About the Downsides of Unionization
As if giving union officials the power to call for ambush elections were not bad enough, the PRO-TRAP framework does even more to deprive employees of information about the downsides of unionization prior to the vote.
It does so in two ways.
First, it would make it unlawful for employers to hold mandatory meetings (even during paid work hours) to explain the downside of union monopoly bargaining.
This attempt to censor employers’ freedom to speak to employees likely violates the First Amendment. It also undermines employees’ ability to receive information about the union and potential downsides of unionization.
That is the point of this censorship: To ensure employees only hear one side of the story during an organizing campaign – that spun by union officials.
And of course, the PRO-TRAP framework contains no similar restriction on union speech and meetings.
- Unions and employers will still be able to force employees to compulsory “union orientation meetings,” at which they can be flooded with union boss propaganda and pressured to sign dues deduction authorizations.
- Employees who want to decertify a union will continue to have no venue in which to communicate with and organize their colleagues.
Second, the PRO-TRAP framework empowers the National Labor Relations Board to censor employers, while doing nothing to curb union abuses.
If enacted, the NLRB would have the power to impose radical civil penalties on “employers” if the agency finds they violate federal labor law. This proposal is unconstitutional because it would violate the Seventh Amendment’s jury trial guarantees.
The PRO-TRAP framework completely ignores union bosses’ own campaigns of lies, distortions, threats, and outright violence.
The one-sided nature of the framework reflects special interest politics at its worst: It proposes granting one political interest group (union bosses) special legal privileges and exemptions to the detriment of others (non-union employees and their employers).
It would hand one of the most politicized and partisan agencies in our nation far greater power to coerce businesses to censor their speech about unions and capitulate to union demands.
During its term, the Biden NLRB enforced the most repressive regime of government censorship in the nation, doing all it could to stop employers from informing employees about unions and the negative consequences of unionization.
Giving this agency the power to fine those who dare to speak against union officials and their agenda is a recipe for even worse government censorship in the future.
The PRO-TRAP framework is a blatantly one-sided attempt to rig organizing campaigns in favor of union officials and against individual workers who oppose Big Labor’s agenda.
Binding Contract Arbitration
Arguably worst of all, after a union wins an ambush election, the PRO-TRAP framework calls for requiring the employer to execute a union contract “within months.”
The only way to mandate a contract in a few short months is to bring in a government arbiter to look over both sides’ proposals and then impose a contract. This approach is:
- Very likely unconstitutional;
- Extraordinarily ugly, as federal bureaucrats with no stake in the future of the company will be imposing contracts on employers who may not be able to survive them, and on employees who oppose or would be harmed by them.
The process of negotiating a contract takes time for two reasons.
First, literally everything about the terms and conditions of employment must be negotiated, set in writing, and made permanent for the next three years, regardless of changing market conditions. Care is called for, and rushing the process is a recipe for bankruptcy, putting the entire workforce out of their jobs.
Second, it has been a bedrock principle of federal law that neither party can be compelled to agree to any particular contract term. This can and does lead to lengthy negotiating delays, if one side greatly desires a provision that the other side greatly desires to avoid.
And of course, in non-Right to Work states, government-imposed union contracts will almost certainly include forced-fee clauses that compel non-union workers to pay union fees as a condition of their employment.
As a result, the PRO-TRAP framework will have the federal government directly involved in forcing workers to tithe a portion of their wages to union bosses or be fired.
There are countless other reasons rank-and-file employees may object to in a union-demanded and arbiter-imposed contract, such as:
- Inefficient work rules;
- Bans on merit pay;
- Mandatory contributions to financially unstable union trust funds.
Nothing in the PRO-TRAP framework protects the interests of workers who oppose having to work under these and other unfavorable union contract terms. They would have no say, much less a vote, on the union contract that will control their working lives.
Quick-snap contracts will further quash workers’ ability to change their minds and remove the union that the ambush election process imposed on them.
That’s because NLRB policy prohibits decertification elections during the first three years of a union contract. The PRO-TRAP framework puts union self-interest in imposing their contract on workers above individual workers’ freedom to control their working conditions.
* * *
Senator Hawley’s PRO-TRAP is a collection of old, failed ideas that Big Labor has been promoting, and indeed demanding, for decades.
Republicans have been consistently (and nearly unanimously) opposing these ideas for a similar number of decades. Any Senator or Congressman that values freedom over coercion should steer well clear of this Tragic Republican Alternative Proposal to the so-called “PRO Act.”
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx