In The News

Statesboro Herald


U.S. Rep. Rick Allen, R-Georgia 12th District, visited Rolling Monkey Handcrafted Ice Cream in Statesboro last week and talked briefly about business concerns and labor-related legislation with the store’s entrepreneurs.

Garrett and Meagan Clark founded the company, which will have been in business four years as of November. The “rolling” part of the Rolling Monkey name reflects the fact that employees roll the special ice cream into cylindrical shapes after first spreading the liquid mix on a flat surface cooled to below freezing and adding flavors. This is done to order while customers watch.

“Monkey” was the early childhood nickname of the Clarks’ son Connor, who will soon be 16.

So far, Rolling Monkey has just the one shop, on Northside Drive East. But the Clarks also have a “headquarters team” officed in the Business Innovation Group facility at Georgia Southern University’s City Center on East Main Street.

“Right now we are looking at potentially a second location, which would potentially be the headquarters to begin to scale via franchising,” Garrett Clark said.

Allen, from Augusta, where he founded RW Allen Construction in 1976, now serves on the House Agriculture Committee and on the House Education and Labor Committee, where he is senior Republican on the Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee. He placed an order and watched Rolling Monkey team members behind the counter — store manager Isabell Duran and employees Rontae Jones and Jaylee Smith were on duty — fill his cardboard cup with hand-rolled ice cream.

He ate all but the cup and spoon while talking to the Clarks.

‘Employee Rights Act’

Speaking also to a reporter, Allen expressed his continued support for a piece of legislation entitled the “Employee Rights Act of 2022.” Allen introduced a version of it in the House last March as House Resolution 7194, while Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, introduced the Senate version.

Rolling Monkey currently has around 30 team members, about 22 of whom are part-time employees, while two, other than the Clarks themselves, are full-time and others are interns or apprentices or provide contracted services, Meagan Clark said. The Clarks are operating an internship program from the East Main offices while refining their business model for scalability.

“We have now a modern workforce,” Allen said. “The day of adversarial relationships between employees and employers is gone, and that’s the problem the unions are having. That’s why you’re seeing unionization continue to decrease in our country, and of course the public employees unions are just getting blasted because, you know, obviously, they’re government services.”

He said that unions also, like the federal government, face the problem of being “all top-down, one size fits all” and unable to adapt for localized conditions when “technology has made everything different.”

Among other things, H.R. 7194 would require a majority vote of all affected employees by secret ballot to unionize a work site or initiate a strike.

The bill would also prohibit labor unions from using or contributing any portion of an employee’s union dues “for any purpose not directly related to the labor organization’s collective bargaining or contract administration functions,” without an employee’s written permission. This would apparently prohibit union contributions to political campaigns without employees’ approval.

The bill has not advanced in Congress under majority Democratic Party control.

 Vs. the PRO Act

Allen contrasted this legislation to the bill called the “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” or PRO Act, which he has voted against. It passed the House as H.R. 842 in March 2021 with 225 yeas to 206 nays, with just one Democrat opposed and five Republicans in favor. But the bill has not become law.

“The Democrats have the PRO Act, and what they’re trying to do is unionize every business,” Allen said last week. “And they’re doing it the wrong way. It’s adversarial. In other words, they want to do away with secret ballots. The Employee Rights Act guarantees the secret ballot. The secret ballot is what has made this country what it is today.”

In this case, the ballots have to do with unionization votes supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, not elections for public office. Currently, in an alternative process that requires an employer’s consent, a showing of signed cards, which are not secret ballots, from more than half of a workplace’s employees can be accepted as votes to certify a union.

Full texts of both bills can be found online at /www.congress.gov/bill.

Allen is currently running for re-election in the Nov. 8 election, facing a challenge from Democratic nominee Elizabeth “Liz” Johnson of Statesboro, who was also Allen’s opponent in the 2020 general election.