A Democrat bill in Congress that would have made it easier to force workers to unionize — the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO Act — is likely dead on arrival, but a similar proposal, the “Pro-Worker Framework,” is still alive.
According to Vincent Vernuccio, president of the Institute of the American Worker, the Pro-Worker Framework has been largely lifted straight from the PRO Act.
“I mean, now I guess the question is, do you refer to most of these provisions as the PRO Act, or do you refer to them as the Pro Act and the Hawley framework?” Vernuccio said in a phone interview. “Because it looks like Senator (Josh) Hawley from Missouri is copying and pasting a bunch of sections into his new framework.”
Hawley, a Republican, introduced the Pro-Worker Framework in January.
According to an article at the Federalist Society, “Hawley released an ambitious proposal to reimagine federal labor law. Billed as a ‘pro-worker framework,’ the proposal quickly drew plaudits from labor advocates and Democratic senators.”
Vernuccio said only one bill related to this has been introduced so far — the “Faster Labor Contracts Act S.844,” which, among other things, deals with government-imposed contracts by binding arbitration — but the Framework has several other provisions indicating that the concepts are copied and pasted directly from the PRO Act.
Among those would be curtailing employers’ First Amendment rights, and depriving employees of hearing both sides of the story on unionization, something called employer meetings on unionization.
“There’s, unfortunately, quite a bit of overlap between the framework and the PRO Act itself,” Vernuccio said. “The Teamsters (Union) have been working very closely with Hawley on this and it’s essentially a very one-sided union wish list.”
When the PRO Act was voted on in 2023, multiple amendments offered by Republicans might have eased some of its more onerous requirements — such as prohibiting the release of private employee contact information to union officials, guaranteeing the right of a secret ballot, and prohibiting violence or intimidation during an organizing campaign.
Multiple amendments to the bill were offered by Republicans and all of them failed. Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall voted against nine of them.
The Sentinel made multiple attempts to get a statement from Marshal’s office, seeking comment on his role with the DOGE Caucus and about his stance on the PRO Act, but as of publication has received no response. Marshall is not a co-sponsor of the Faster Labor Contracts Act.
The PRO Act was recently reintroduced, and the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce said it should be called the “Pro-Union Bosses Act.”
“According to the American Action Forum, if the PRO Act becomes law, it would ‘increase weekly employment costs by anywhere from $21.5–$71.6 billion and put up to $2.6 trillion of gross domestic product at risk,'” the committee noted in a release. “Federal law already protects employees’ right to organize, and Republicans respect this right. Any reforms to U.S. labor laws should help workers, not union bosses. Unfortunately, the PRO Act infringes on the rights of workers and employers and will hurt the economy by making it more difficult and costly to invest in the American workforce.”
Among other provisions, the PRO Act would:
- Overturn right-to-work laws in 27 states like Kansas, where employees cannot be forced to join a union;
- Allow union elections to be held at locations other than the business being organized,
- Requires employers to hand over workers’ private, personal information to union organizers, including home addresses, cellphone and landline numbers, personal email addresses, and more—without the consent of workers;
- Take away workers’ right to vote by secret ballot in many circumstances by imposing a “card-check” scheme in which workers could be unionized without the union winning a secret ballot election and;
- Deny employers the opportunity to be heard before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on matters pertaining to union representation. Only unions would be allowed to speak before the NLRB in these instances.
