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National Review
Employee Rights Act Puts American Workers, Not Union Bosses, in the Driver’s Seat
by Grover Norquist
Labor laws were originally enacted to protect workers from their employers. Soon the laws shifted during the New Deal to force more workers to pay union dues. That cash was then redirected into the political structures of the Democratic Party.
It worked well for a while. In 1954, fully 34.8 percent of American workers were paying union dues. But workers noticed that their interests came second, or third, to the goals of union bosses and Democratic precinct workers. Workers avoided unions. Left them. And by 2021, only 10.3 percent of total workers belonged to a union — 33.9 percent of government workers and only 6.1 percent of workers in the rest of the economy.
Union bosses became angry at workers who fled their tender care, and they began working with Democratic politicians to drag workers back under their control.
Their solution: a law with the Orwellian title of the “Protecting the Right to Organize” (PRO) Act, a grab bag of hard-left policies that would expand Big Labor’s power at the expense of worker freedom.
Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and Representative Rick Allen (R., Ga.) are shaping the conservative labor-reform agenda by introducing the “Employee Rights Act,” a version of which was first introduced in the House in 2011.The bill already has over 20 Republican Senate co-sponsors.
While the nature of work has evolved with technology over the past half century, our nation’s labor laws have remained stagnant since 1947. For a century, labor law has existed to benefit union bosses at the expense of workers. Democratic “reforms” like the PRO Act would only give unions more power to take dues from workers and spend them on progressive candidates.
In sharp contrast to the Democrat-led PRO Act, the Republican bill updates labor law to benefit workers, not union bosses. The Employee Rights Act puts workers in the driver’s seat with a slate of provisions designed to protect worker freedom and choice in the workplace.
The bill strengthens worker privacy by ensuring every vote to unionize a workplace or go on strike is cast with a secret ballot. Under current law, union organizers can hold elections via “card check,” where workers have to declare their support or opposition to unionization in front of organizers as opposed to in the privacy of a voting booth.
In practice, card check amounts to a union representative walking around with a clipboard asking workers to sign in the “yes” or “no” column. Workers that dare to oppose unionization open themselves up to harassment and intimidation from organizers. While the PRO Act essentially codifies the card-check system into law, the Employee Rights Act ensures that workers have the right to cast a ballot privately.
The Employee Rights Act contains several other provisions to protect workers from union intimidation. The bill criminalizes union threats in the workplace and bans unions from using personal employee data for anything unrelated to campaigns, taking Big Labor’s most aggressive and unethical tactics off the table. The bill also prohibits union “salting,” a tactic where a union pays an individual to apply for a job within a company that has not yet been unionized. Instead of becoming a productive employee, the “salt” is there to organize a union and be Big Labor’s mole on the inside.
The bill strengthens the National Labor Relations Act to prohibit union bosses from coercing workers out of exercising their right to sign decertification petitions. Just as an employer cannot fire a worker for attempting to unionize, union members who work to decertify a union should be protected.
The Employee Rights Act closes a loophole created by the Supreme Court in United States v. Enmons (1973). In Enmons, the Court held that strike-related violence in pursuit of “legitimate union objectives” is exempt from federal prosecution under the Hobbs Act, an anti-extortion statute. Stripping this immunity from union organizers would go a long way toward ending union violence in the workplace.
The Employee Rights Act also protects business models that workers rely on to make a living. One provision would protect the franchise business model by codifying that two or more employers must have “actual, direct, and immediate control” over employees to be considered a joint employer. Another provision would allow companies to offer benefits, like retirement incentives, to independent contractors without reclassifying them as W-2 employees.
Suffice it to say, the Republican bill is jam-packed with provisions that protect worker freedom and choice in the workplace. Instead of catering to union bosses like the PRO Act, the Employee Rights Act puts workers first.
For the benefit of every American worker, Congress should move swiftly to pass the Employee Rights Act into law.
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