The middle class opposes.
Bill Statistics
The Middle Class Position
How They Voted
43% with middle class
54% against middle class
2% did not vote
Grades
House
The House receives a grade of D for its support of the middle class on this piece of legislation.
188 Representatives voted for the middle-class position; 235 voted against.
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See how each member voted on this bill:
(H.R. 3094) Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act
Introduced:
10.05.2011 [House]
10.05.2011 [House]
Sponsor:
Rep. John Kline [R-MN]
Rep. John Kline [R-MN]
Placed on the Legislative Calendar: 12.16.2011
2011 House Roll Call #869:
Yea-235, Nay-188
The Legislation:
H.R. 3094, the “Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act,” would amend the National Labor Relations Act for two purposes. One is to set parameters for National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) decisions of which employees in a company need to be included in a bargaining unit that is seeking union representation. It would also give employers a minimum amount of time to respond, and counter, worker unionization efforts.
The legislation was sponsored by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, in response to two NLRB rulings in 2011 that union leaders said would make organizing efforts fairer. A June proposed rulemaking set forth a set of procedures designed “to reduce unnecessary litigation, streamline pre- and post-election procedures, and facilitate the use of electronic communications and document filing.” An August ruling would allow a bargaining unit in a health care facility to be based on a “community of interest” of employees with the same or closely related job functions, and would make it harder for employers to dilute a union organizing effort by including employees with unrelated jobs.
The legislation would undo the impact of those NLRB rulings. For example, it would prohibit the exclusion of employees from a bargaining unit that is seeking union representation unless the group’s interests are deemed sufficiently distinct from those of other employees to warrant the establishment of a separate unit.
The legislation also would override the NLRB’s latest attempts to streamline employer challenges to a unionizing effort. It would, for example, require the NLRB to hold a hearing no less than 14 days after the filing of an election petition for collective bargaining representation, and allow either party to “raise independently any relevant and material pre-election issue or assert any relevant and material position at any time prior to the close of the hearing.”
Finally, H.R. 3094 would direct an election by secret ballot no less than 35 calendar days following the filing of an election petition, and would require that a list of eligible voters be distributed to both sides in the union election at least seven days after the NLRB’s final determination of the eligible bargaining unit.
In a committee statement, Rep. Kline said that the NLRB “is imposing sweeping changes on virtually every private workplace. Labor policies that have served our nation well for years are being torn down in a desperate effort to expand the power of union leaders. As a result, an employer’s right to communicate with his or her employees will largely be denied. If the NLRB has its way, workers may have as little as 10 days to decide whether or not to join a union, crippling their ability to make a fully informed decision. And micro-unions will proliferate across the country, driving up labor costs and undermining freedom and opportunity in the workplace.” He said that his legislation, by contrast, “ensures everyone can participate in a fair election process” and “provides workers the resources they need to make an informed choice.”
Education and the Workforce Committee ranking member George Miller spoke out against H.R. 3094 in prepared remarks during the markup of the bill. “This ‘Election Prevention Act’ would deny workers a right to a free and fair election to form a union. It does this by adding months or years-long delays and encouraging frivolous appeals to gum up the election process. It effectively blocks attempts by the NLRB to eliminate avoidable delays in current law. Those delays are used by unscrupulous employers to frustrate workers until they give up on having any union election. The “Election Prevention Act” also gives employers the ability to gerrymander elections. It does this by stuffing the election lists with voters who were never engaged by the organizing drive or never expressed interest in a union. This gives employers an edge in preventing an election from ever being directed in the first place.”
On October 26, 2011 the Education and the Workforce Committee voted 23-16 in favor of the bill along party lines, with Republicans for and Democrats against the legislation. The full House voted on November 30, 2011, in favor of the legislation, 235-188. with 229 Republicans and six Democrats voting in favor; eight Republicans and 180 Democrats voting in opposition. Four Republicans and six Democrats did not vote.
The Middle-Class Position:
For the better part of the past decade, the National Labor Relations Board failed to fulfill its mandate "to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy." Now that the NLRB is once again seeking to do its job on behalf of workers, conservatives want to neuter the NLRB again, egged on by such organizations as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, so that employers are free to obstruct efforts by workers to bargain for better pay, working conditions and benefits.
H.R. 3094 would allow employers to continue to use the NLRB hearing process to essentially filibuster a union organizing effort by raising frivolous or meaningless issues, up to the final stages of the hearing process. During this period of delay, employers would have full access to workers with their anti-union message while the union would not have access to the workers on-site to counter the message.
Workers would also lose their ability to determine which employee positions—in labor law parlance, their “community of interest”— would be included in their bargaining unit. A common tactic used by employers to undermine union organizing drives is to attempt to involve employees with unrelated job functions in an effort to dilute support for the union. The NLRB had ruled that a health care facility that attempted to use this tactic to prevent nursing assistants from joining a union was out of bounds. This legislation puts this tactic back into employers’ anti-union toolbox.
H.R. 3094 would set aside the NLRB’s expertise and decades of case law and replace them with new and untested processes that would cause uncertainty, delay elections and prevent rather than encourage collective bargaining.
It is not a coincidence that as union representation has fallen to 7 percent of the private sector workforce today from 33 percent of the workforce in the 1940s, workers are receiving a declining share of the nation’s economic growth. According to a 2011 Economic Policy Institute study, between 1979 and 2009 U.S. productivity increased 80 percent, while workers’ median hourly wage increased only 10 percent. Just between 2009, the official end of the last recession, and the end of 2010, national income rose by $528 billion, with $464 billion going to corporate profits and $7 billion to wages and salaries.
This is a direct consequence of the relentless, coordinated campaign by congressional conservatives and corporate CEOs to kill off union representation that has had a major role in the shrinkage of the middle class. Passage of H.R. 3094 would enact policies that are the antithesis of workplace democracy and fairness; the bill would give free reign to the forces that have pushed down wages and the quality of life for middle-class and working-class households for the past three decades.
