WASHINGTON — The U.S. House passed landmark pro-labor legislation Thursday that backers said could begin to reverse the country’s decades-long decline in union membership.
The bill passed largely along party lines by a vote of 224-194.
Colorado’s seven House members joined the party-line vote with Reps. Diana DeGette, Jason Crow, Joe Neguse and Ed Perlmutter voting yes and Reps. Scott Tipton, Ken Buck and Doug Lamborn voting no.
The measure, known as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would strengthen protections for workers who organize for higher wages, better benefits and safer working conditions.
Proponents said it would lead to a surge in union membership, increase workers’ standard of living and narrow the wealth and income divide.
“It is not a coincidence that as union membership has declined, income inequality has soared,” Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan said on the House floor Thursday.
“Unions helped build America’s middle class and continue to protect it,” Crow, a Democrat from Aurora, tweeted.
House Republicans disagreed — and charged Democrats with being in the pocket of “Big Labor.”
The bill is “one of the most anti-worker, anti-small business bills to be considered by Congress in decades,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, which has jurisdiction over the bill.
It is a “liberal Democrat wish list designed to enrich and empower union bosses and trial lawyers at the expense of rank-and-file workers and small businesses.”
In a tweet, Buck, a Republican from Weld County, said, “The PRO Act uses Hoffa-era union intimidation tactics that effectively increase campaign donations to Democrats. This bill is the Union Boss Wish List, overturning state right-to-work laws and forcing employers to handover private worker information to union organizers.”
Odds that the bill will become law this year are slim.
Trump veto threat
A companion measure in the Senate isn’t expected to pass the GOP-controlled chamber, and the White House issued a veto threat Wednesday.
The legislation would “hurt workers in several ways,” the Trump administration stated. It would kill jobs, destroy the gig economy, violate workers’ privacy, restrict freedom of association, repeal state right-to-work laws, and undo the president’s deregulatory agenda, it said.
But GOP opposition doesn’t deter its backers, who say the legislation sends a signal about what Democrats would do if they had more power in Washington.
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Nationwide, about 10 percent of the nation’s workers are members of unions, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about half the rate in 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available.
The decline comes as heavily unionized sectors, such as manufacturing, transportation and public utilities, make up a smaller portion of the economy than they did in the past.
Also credited is an uptick in recent decades in state “right-to-work” laws, which bar workers from being required to join unions to get or keep a job.
“The right to organize is rooted in the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said Thursday. But strong “union busting” efforts have eroded these rights in recent decades, he said.
Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, said at a press conference Wednesday that the bill would combat the “union-busting industry” and called it “the most significant piece of legislation” to come before the House this year.
Democrats on the presidential campaign trail also support the bill.
Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota have signed on to the Senate version of the bill. Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former Vice President Biden also support it, according to their campaign websites. Ex-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also backs the bill, according to a campaign spokesperson.
Business groups, meanwhile, have voiced strong opposition to the bill.
In a letter urging House lawmakers to reject the bill, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Suzanne Clark wrote: “The legislation would harm the economy in myriad ways be enacting a slew of harmful labor policies.”
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