Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act
Summary
Limit the amount of time workers have for a union election campaign and require by secret ballot. Designed to weaken ability of NLRB to protect organizers from undue management influence.Details & Argument
H.R. 3094, the "Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act," is part of a multifaceted effort by conservatives in Congress to counter the decisions of the National Labor Relations Act. This bill would prevent union elections from being held until at least 35 days after a petition is filed, and expand ability of employers to file petitions designed to delay elections. It would also void an NLRB ruling that allowed smaller bargaining units to form unions. It would also curb the access of union organizers to employee contact information.
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 rule-making 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.
In a committee statement, Rep. Kline said that the NLRB is imposing sweeping changes on virtually every private workplace. "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."
The House passed 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
The middle-class position on this legislation is opposed. Strong unions are vital if workers are to share fairly in the profits and productivity that they help to produce. The decline in union representation over the last three decades has contributed directly to the stagnant wages of working Americans. 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.
The relentless, coordinated campaign by congressional conservatives and corporate CEOs to kill off union representation 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.
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.
