News from associated
builders and contractors

During his first term, then-President Donald Trump promised to veto the Protecting the Right to Organize Act were it to come to his desk for his signature. Thankfully, it never garnered the support to come to the Senate floor for a vote—even in a Democrat-controlled Senate. Yet there seems to be amnesia in Congress, among both Democrats and Republicans, about the tenets of the PRO Act and just how harmful it is.

This job-killing legislation includes dozens of provisions that would violate workers’ free choice and privacy rights, force unions on employees who have voted against union representation, cost millions of American jobs and threaten vital supply chains—all at a great cost to the economy.

Some of the PRO Act’s most detrimental provisions:

• Violates worker privacy: Mandates employers provide union organizers with employees’ personal information without prior approval from the employees themselves. This includes home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, work shifts, job classifications and work locations. Employees would not be able to opt out of this requirement and would not have a say in which information was provided, exposing them to potential harassment, intimidation tactics, stalking and even bullying on social media.
• Encourages coercion, picketing and boycotts: Rescinds all NLRA restrictions that currently make it unlawful for unions to impose economic injury on neutral third parties that are not involved in an underlying labor dispute, including consumers, companies or other unions that do business with a company involved in a dispute. The existing restrictions against “secondary” coercion were adopted and strengthened by large bipartisan majorities in Congress in 1947 and 1959, after unions engaged in tactics that were deemed excessive, abusive and harmful to the economy. Allowing secondary boycotts—or “blackmail” strikes—would permit unions to target companies for anticompetitive reasons that have nothing to do with labor disputes, exposing all consumers, unions and businesses to coercion, picketing, boycotts and similar tactics.
• Strips away employees’ right-to-work protections: Requires workers to pay union dues as a condition of employment even in the twenty-seven states that have enacted right-to-work protections.
• Limits opportunities for the self-employed and gig economy: The PRO Act would import into the NLRA the California Supreme Court’s recently adopted and failed “ABC test” to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. The ABC test makes it very difficult to qualify as an independent contractor; the change will, therefore, result in many workers losing independent contractor status and the freedom and flexibility that comes with it, such as determining their own hours, what work they choose to do and how they perform that work.
• Favors large corporations over small and local businesses: Changes the legal standard for joint-employer liability, reducing opportunities for our country’s small and local businesses through subcontracts, licensing and franchising.
• Strips businesses of attorney-client confidentiality: Violates employers’ right to attorney-client confidentiality on complex labor law issues, making it harder for businesses, particularly small businesses, to secure legal advice during a union organizing drive.
• Imposes government control over private contracts: Eliminates freedom of contract by mandating compulsory, binding arbitration on employers and employees if they can’t reach a collective bargaining agreement within the first 120 days of negotiations. Under the PRO Act, an arbitrator unfamiliar with the business’ operations would impose binding terms upon both parties, even if one or both find those terms unacceptable. Employees are not even provided with the opportunity to vote on whether they approve of their new contract.

Supporters of the PRO Act are attempting to implement labor law policies that have previously been rejected by the judicial system, opposed on a bipartisan basis in Congress, and/or withdrawn by the agencies that prior administrations tried to use to implement the policies unilaterally. A vote for the PRO Act is a vote against the continuing success of the American construction marketplace.