The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, filed by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-VA) has moved at breakneck speed in the US House over the past two weeks. The bill, which was filed by Chairman Scott and a host of co-sponsors in the House on May 3rd, was heard by the full committee on Wednesday of this week. Among its many egregious provisions, the PRO Act strengthens and expands workers’ right to strike, authorizes the NLRB to assess additional financial penalties against employers for each individual violation of the National Labor Relations Act and imposes liability on corporate directors who fail to prevent a violation of the NLRA. The proposal also attempts to implement a number of highly contentious policies that have been struck down by courts, opposed on a bipartisan basis in Congress or abandoned by the federal agencies charged with implementing them. Some of these provisions include banning right-to-work laws, mandating union representation, reinstating the “ambush election” and “persuader” rules as well as barring employer standing in union election cases and reinstating “card check” union authorization, by which a majority of workers only have to sign a card to create a union rather than hold a full union representation election. An identical version was also filed in the Senate but we would not expect any movement in the upper branch.
