OPINION:
In his State of the Union address, President Biden reiterated his support for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would rewrite a century of labor law for the benefit of union bosses.
Mr. Biden used this legislation, known as the PRO Act, as a red herring to distract from his pursuit of under-the-radar regulatory changes that organized labor is exploiting to jam more workers into unions. Republican lawmakers have done a commendable job pushing back against Mr. Biden’s end runs around Congress, but more work is left to do.
By all accounts, Mr. Biden’s legislative labor agenda has failed tremendously despite Democratic control of Congress in the first half of his presidency. Despite his best efforts, the PRO Act has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing the 118th Congress. Efforts to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour have fizzled in similar fashion.
Having failed to pass any significant labor reforms through Congress, Mr. Biden has turned his attention to proposing new rules that enable organized labor to expand its tentacles into new territory.
One example of this is a forthcoming rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that would allow OSHA inspectors to bring union representatives to work-site inspections. The union official tagging along with the OSHA inspector does not have to work for the company that is being inspected. Nor does the work site have to be unionized.
The OSHA “walkaround” rule flies in the face of a regulation that stipulates that people who accompany an OSHA inspector must be employed by the company under inspection. Under the proposed rule, OSHA representatives would have to simply state that a union official was “reasonably necessary” to the inspection to bring that individual to the site. The walk-around rule presents an opportunity for union organizers to collect information or otherwise infiltrate nonunion workplaces, a clear attempt by OSHA to give unions a leg up in organizing drives.
Another example is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s universal proxy rule, which forces companies to include management and dissident shareholder nominees on a single proxy card in contested elections. The rule enabled a coalition of our nation’s largest and most militant unions to extract new concessions from Starbucks by threatening to mount a hostile takeover attempt of the coffee company’s board. Unions will continue to exploit the universal proxy rule to bring other publicly traded companies to the table with threats of a hostile takeover.
The Biden administration’s end goal is to unionize workplaces without having to hold an election at all. The National Labor Relations Board’s recent decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific LLC made it easier for unions to achieve recognition without an NLRB-certified election. An organizer could force an employer to negotiate with an insurgent union simply by filing an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB.
Republican lawmakers in both chambers are pushing back against Mr. Biden’s end runs around the legislative branch. The House recently passed a measure that would overturn the Department of Labor’s new joint employer rule, which would break the franchise business model. Rep. Kevin Kiley, California Republican, is rapidly building support for his bill to nullify the Labor Department’s independent contractor rule that aims to unionize America’s freelancers by reclassifying them as W-2 employees.
A Congressional Review Act measure that overturns the forthcoming OSHA walk-around rule would have broad support and build on the great work Republicans are already doing to rein in Mr. Biden’s organized labor agenda. Passing the Stop Woke Investing Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt, Mike Braun and Ted Budd, would limit the unions’ ability to mount hostile takeover attempts of publicly traded company boards.
While the PRO Act may be Mr. Biden’s bright, shiny object, greater threats to worker freedom lurk under the surface. Fortunately for American workers, Republican lawmakers are fighting back.
• Tom Hebert is director of competition and regulatory policy at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of the Open Competition Center.
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