National Review Online
Thursday, March 11, 2021
The Biden administration is committed to applying
the freshest thinking of the 1930s to contemporary challenges, while
congressional Democrats are keen on mandating that all 50 states adopt what is
worst and most destructive in California practice. These two tendencies come
together in the PRO Act.
The PRO Act, which already has been passed by the House,
is being sold as a measure to make it easier for American workers to join labor
unions. What it is, in fact, is a measure that would make it much harder for
workers to stay out of unions when they want to, by overriding state
right-to-work laws and adopting California’s so-called ABC test to treat
certain independent contractors as employees.
The union bosses went to bat for Joe Biden in 2020, and
this is their payoff. Joe Biden takes a rosy view of unions, and it probably is
easy to be sentimental about blue-collar work when you have been in elected
office since the early 1970s. Nobody named Biden has lifted anything heavier
than money in decades.
Why would a worker want to avoid joining a union?
Wouldn’t they prefer to have someone looking out for their interests? That
might be the case — if American workers were naïve enough to believe that the
Teamsters and the other unions are looking out for their interests, rather than
looking out for the interests of, say, a union boss’s brother getting paid a $42-an-hour wage on a New York
City construction site while operating a coffee concession. There are, as it
turns out, a great many blue-collar workers not much interested in paying for
the privilege of enriching politically connected labor leaders who do no real
work.
Beyond the corruption and the desire to be free of union
politics, other workers have practical, bottom-line reasons for wishing to
remain free of union entanglements. For instance, owner-operators involved in
long-haul trucking cut their own deals with their clients, working on their own
terms rather than on terms set by a union boss. They can do that even where a
union already is present. Under the PRO Act, some of these independent
operators would risk being reclassified as employees — meaning reclassified out
of business. That is because of the second prong of the ABC test insists that
independent contractors must be engaged in incidental work rather than core business
activities — owner-operators who do drive for trucking services (as opposed to
contracting with a farm or a construction company) wouldn’t pass the test to
qualify as independent contractors.
Right-to-work laws, which have been passed in the majority
of states, do not restrict voluntary union activity. What they do is forbid
unions from forcing workers who do not wish to belong to the union to pay dues
anyway as a condition of employment — which is to say, they forbid a
particularly nasty form of extortion. Anybody who is not a union
official who demands a kickback out of workers’ wages as a condition of
employment is considered to be engaged in racketeering. The PRO Act
would (probably unconstitutionally) supersede laws duly enacted by the state
legislatures, making such extortion a mandatory business practice from coast to
coast.
Other measures in the act are political power grabs of
questionable constitutionality: for example, transferring power from the
federal appeals courts to the National Labor Relations Board in certain cases,
and limiting employers’ free-speech rights to keep them from arguing against
unionization.
The economy dominated by lunch-bucket jobs and assembly
lines is a thing of the past and has been for some time, which is why only a
very small share of private-sector workers (concentrated in highly regulated
services work such as health care, utilities, and transportation) are union
members, while 40 percent of government workers at the municipal level and 30
percent at the state and federal level are unionized. Nine days out of ten, the
American labor movement is not working to improve the position of American
factory workers — it is working to keep the public schools closed at the behest
of unionized teachers who don’t want to go back to regular work. In return for
this political favoritism, they keep Democratic campaign coffers full. That is
the corrupt bargain at the heart of the PRO Act.
Senate Republicans may be able to stop this — or
Democrats may take this opportunity to nuke the filibuster. The Democrats are
in a radical mood, and the nation risks paying a very high price for
Republicans’ unnecessary failure in throwing away their Senate majority.
Sometimes, obstruction is just the right thing, and this is one of those times.
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