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richard trumka
Sanders, Democrats, and a Lone Republican Revive PRO Act to Strengthen Workers' Rights
"We need to hold CEOs accountable for flagrantly violating labor laws, illegally firing pro-union workers, and closing down pro-union shops."
Feb 28, 2023
Following a year in which strike activity surged and public approval of unions reached its highest point in nearly six decades, Sen. Bernie Sanders joined Democratic lawmakers and a lone Republican on Tuesday in reintroducing legislation that would strengthen workers' organizing rights and crack down on corporate union-busting.
Named after the late labor leader Richard Trumka, the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would, among other changes, give unions and employers the ability to override state-level "right to work" laws, enhance strike protections, ban anti-union "captive audience" meetings, and empower the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to impose monetary penalties on companies that violate workers' rights.
"At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when too many workers are falling further and further behind, we need to make it easier for workers to exercise their constitutional right to form a union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions," said Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
"We need to hold CEOs accountable for flagrantly violating labor laws, illegally firing pro-union workers, and closing down pro-union shops," the Vermont senator continued. "If we are going to reverse the 40-year decline of the middle class, reduce the widening gap between the billionaire class and everyone else, and take on the unprecedented level of corporate greed in America, we have got to rebuild the trade union movement. That is what the PRO Act is all about and I am proud to be introducing this bill in the Senate."
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who led the bill's reintroduction in the House, said that "Congress has an urgent responsibility to ensure that workers can join a union and negotiate for higher pay, better benefits, and safer workplaces."
"Passing the PRO Act is the most critical step we can take this Congress to achieve that goal," said Scott, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee. "I urge my House and Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in advancing the most significant update for workers’ labor organizing rights in more than eight decades."
Even amid high public support for unions and successful organizing drives at Starbucks and other prominent companies across the nation, the percentage of U.S. wage and salary workers who were union members last year was just 10.1%—a historic low that experts attribute to inadequate labor protections and relentless union-busting by corporations.
"While unionization levels increased in 2022, the share of workers in a union decreased despite a substantial amount of union activity and extremely high union popularity, and that drop is part of a decades-long decline in unionization," Heidi Shierholz, Margaret Poydock, and Celine McNicholas of the Economic Policy Institute wrote earlier this year.
"The decline is occurring not because workers don't want unions, but because our current system of labor law is broken," they argued. "Recent worker organizing efforts send a clear message that workers want unions. We must therefore adopt policies that make it easier for workers to form unions. At the federal level, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act provides a comprehensive set of reforms that would strengthen private-sector workers’ right to form a union and engage in collective bargaining."
"With CEOs spending $340 million a year on union-busting tactics to intimidate and silence workers seeking to form unions, the deck has never been more stacked against workers speaking out."
The PRO Act passed the House in both 2020 and 2021 but never reached the floor for a vote in the Senate, where the legislative filibuster requires at least 60 votes to pass most bills. Last year, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and Senate Republicans refused to back the bill, which is furiously opposed by corporate lobbying organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
"The PRO Act is how we level the playing field," AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said in a statement Tuesday. "It is how we stop the intimidation, the lies. This is how we let workers, not wealthy corporations, decide for themselves if they want the power of a union."
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) was the only Republican to join Sanders and congressional Democrats in reintroducing the PRO Act, which received just five GOP yes votes—including Fitzpatrick's—when it passed in 2021. The bill's legislative hurdles are likely even steeper in the present with Republicans in control of the House.
Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation (TCF), nevertheless applauded lawmakers for reviving "one of the most ambitious and comprehensive attempts to fix our broken labor laws to date."
"Not only does the legislation ban the most commonly used union-busting techniques, it strengthens workers' fundamental right to strike and ensures that millions of workers currently excluded from labor law protections due to misclassification have an equal right to join a union," said Zuckerman. "Perhaps most importantly, the PRO Act would treat labor rights as civil rights—an idea that TCF has helped push into the mainstream for years."
The Worker Power Coalition, an alliance of national labor, climate, and progressive groups representing 24 million workers, also applauded the bill's reintroduction, calling the PRO Act "the best opportunity in generations to unrig our economy for working people."
"As
Starbucks and Amazon union campaigns have sparked a national wave of worker activism with new union elections up 58 percent in just the first half of 2022, there has never been a more urgent time to ensure workers have an even playing field by fixing our outdated, broken labor laws," the coalition said. "With CEOs spending $340 million a year on union-busting tactics to intimidate and silence workers seeking to form unions, the deck has never been more stacked against workers speaking out."
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The Untimely Tragic Death of Labor's Best Friend
If an institution is the extended shadow of its head, Richard Trumka was the AFL-CIO.
Aug 08, 2021
The first time I met Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO who suddenly died this past Thursday, was in early 2008. I had only been president of the Writers Guild of America, East, an AFL-CIO union, for a short time, and he was then the labor federation's secretary-treasurer.
"There would be no finer tribute to the life and work of Richard Trumka than to pass the PRO Act."
We and the Writers Guild West were still in the throes of an historic, nerve-wracking but ultimately successful 100-day strike against the Hollywood film and TV conglomerates and I had traveled to Washington, D.C. with our executive director to see Trumka about an issue involving a conflict with another union. He had arranged for a mediation and the problem quickly was handled in a spirit of conciliation and with efficiency and tact. It was impressive.
As was he: a big, mustachioed, funny but tough and smart guy who knew how to define the heart of any issue and get things done. Part of that was his legal and organizing experience, the rest was pure Trumka. "A truculent fighter who didn't give up easily," was how my friend, that knowledgeable labor journalist Steve Greenhouse, described him, and that was so. "A powerful orator who knew how to mobilize workers."
When we first met for that mediation, I'd been told that Trumka's office windows opened out on a panoramic view of the nearby White House but on this weekday afternoon the heavy curtains were closed. I asked him why and he growled, "I'm not gonna open them again until that son-of-a-bitch George Bush is out of there."
Significantly, one of the first to respond to Trumka's death was Bush's successor Barack Obama. He tweeted:
From the coal mines of Pennsylvania to the halls of Congress, Rich Trumka was a fierce advocate for working Americans. He loved this country, and he never missed an opportunity to remind us what we can be. Thinking of his family, friends, and federation on this difficult day.
Trumka, who at one time had been the United Mine Workers' youngest president (he was 33)--and who worked his way through school as a third-generation coal miner himself--performed a remarkable service for Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, making a heartfelt pitch not only for the election of the Democratic candidate but also doing his part to chip away, for a while at least, some of the deep-set racism that endangered an Obama victory. Rich traveled around the country talking to blue collar union workers, many of whom were reluctant to vote for the first Black American president.
He told them: "We can't tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there who just can't get past this idea that there's something wrong with voting for a Black man. Those of us who know better can't afford to look the other way." Obama was the best choice for all working men and women, Trumka said, and there was "only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that's because he's not white."
In his Washington Post obituary of Trumka, Harrison Smith told the story of Trumka meeting a woman in his Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, hometown who said she couldn't trust Obama because he was Black. Rich said to her:
Look around this town. Nemacolin's a dying town. There's no jobs here. Our kids are moving away because there's no future here. And here's a man, Barack Obama, who's going to fight for people like us, and you want to tell me that you won't vote for him because of the color of his skin?
Are you out of your ever-loving mind, lady?
Two years after we met for that first of many times, I was senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and Trumka was a guest. I teased him about the capitalist cravat he wore, a dark red, Brooks Brothers special emblazoned with their Golden Fleece logo. But his necktie was just a minor concession to the inside-the-Beltway crowd. "There are two economies in this country," he told Bill. "There's the real economy that makes things. And there's the financial economy that was supposed to provide them with the capital to make things...
Somewhere along the line, that got turned on its head. And the financial community became the master. And they actually started sucking money out of the real economy... So, it's up to us to correct that imbalance. To make it so that the real economy is actually the dominant economy. And the financial economy is a servant to enable them to do their job.
Rich Trumka was helpful to and supportive of our union on many occasions, showing up when most needed, just as he was there for almost every other union in the AFL-CIO. But he also campaigned on behalf of virtually any and all groups that worked for working men and women whether they were unionized or not.
I will never forget accompanying him one early Friday morning in October 2011 when we visited the activists of Occupy Wall Street. They were just crawling out of their sleeping bags when we arrived and many of them didn't know who he was, but they could sense his interest and support as we quietly walked through the encampment at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan's financial district. He spoke with everyone, including some hardhat-wearing workers from New Jersey who had come across the Hudson just to see what was going on and to offer their support.
From 2009, in the dozen years he served as AFL-CIO president, another friend, The Nation's John Nichols wrote, "Trumka worked to forge a more inclusive, and visionary, labor movement."
Said Nichols:
He was the first to say that there was more work to do. And he was willing to do that work--as when he positioned the AFL-CIO in clear opposition to Donald Trump's presidency; as when he championed Black Lives Matter protests, after the murder of George Floyd Jr., in 2020; as he did in the spring of 2021 with his "Immigrant Rights Are Worker Rights" advocacy.
During the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, a year before Trumka became AFL-CIO president, there was a meeting of union presidents at which we were told that the party and Barack Obama's pledge to us was passage of EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation which, as Rich described it, "takes the choice of having a union away from the employer, which is where it is right now, and gives it to the employee." It would have been a major shot in the arm to the labor movement.
EFCA never happened during the Obama years, but it lives on in the Protecting the Right to Organize Act--the PRO Act--passed by the House and currently before the U.S. Senate. "To Mr. Trumka's mind," Steve Greenhouse writes, "the PRO Act was an essential tool for adding millions of workers to union rolls. It would make it easier for workers to join unions. It would limit management's ability to propagandize workers and would create hefty fines for when corporations break the law in battling union drives, for instance, by firing outspoken union supporters."
Almost every Democratic senator and Rich Trumka's friend President Joe Biden are behind the bill (although passage may be next to impossible until the filibuster is wiped out). Those curtains in the AFL-CIO offices have been flung back, showing off the view of a White House occupied by the most pro-labor president in a long time.
There would be no finer tribute to the life and work of Richard Trumka than to pass the PRO Act. And here's an added dividend: it would drive Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, most of the other GOP legislators--and their deep-pocketed corporate funders--out of their ever-loving minds.
Rich Trumka would love that.
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'This Fight Is Far From Over': Amazon Union Vote Shows Exactly Why We Need the PRO Act
In the face of intimidation by one of the largest companies in the world, Alabama workers bravely spoke out about the need for greater labor protections.
Apr 12, 2021
Following one of the most high-profile union votes in history, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama--led by Black organizers--ultimately rejected efforts to form a union by 71 percent, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
But for labor advocates, this fight is far from over.
"The Amazon workers who voted for a union in Bessemer are already winners," Rev. William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign said in a statement. "This is just the first round. Amazon did things to intimidate and suppress the vote. The workers are filing complaints, and they will continue to stand up. They have set a fresh trend in the South, and the echoes of their bold action will reverberate for years."
Nearly all of the union-busting tactics deployed by Amazon would be banned and enforced under the bill.
While the outcome may not have resulted in a union, there is no doubt that the Bessemer union drive is just the beginning of a re-energized national labor movement--a movement driven by the systemic inequality that has allowed Jeff Bezos to become the richest man in the world while his employees are forced to forgo breaks and urinate in bottles in order to meet demands from management.
Inspired by the fight in Bessemer, Amazon workers at other fulfillment centers in Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland, Denver, and southern California have all begun exploring ways to form unions at their own Amazon facilities.
"The American public is now hyper-aware of what Amazon warehouse workers and drivers are forced to go through: Grueling hours with impossible demands," said Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice. "But now that these stories are finally being told, thanks to the organizing of the Black workers in Bessemer, Amazon workers nationwide are finally feeling safe and supported enough to start organizing their own warehouse."
Given the state of organized labor in the United States, every unionization drive is an uphill battle. And while support from the public for unions is generally positive -- polling from the AFL-CIO showed that an overwhelming 77 percent support a union for Amazon workers in Bessemer--current federal labor law isn't strong enough to thwart corporate union busting.
Throughout the entire voting period, Amazon used dubious tactics to mislead and intimidate workers. From attempts to delay the vote multiple times, to creating a "Do It Without Dues" campaign (despite Alabama's "right to work" rules, which prohibit mandatory union member dues), and restricting mail-in ballots, it's clear the cards are stacked against the workers.
"Americans want to organize unions," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "And it should never be this hard to do so."
The Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which helped organize the drive in Bessemer, has announced that it is contesting the results of the election, alleging Amazon interfered with the right of Bessemer employees to vote in a free and fair election--a right protected under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
"Working people deserve better than the way Amazon has conducted itself during this campaign," said RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum in a statement. "This campaign has proven that the best way for working people to protect themselves and their families is to join together in a union. However, Amazon's behavior during the election cannot be ignored and our union will seek remedy to each and every improper action Amazon took. We won't rest until workers' voices are heard fairly under the law."
Going forward, a clear way to ensure fair, democratic union elections is for the U.S. Senate to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. The PRO Act, which passed the U.S. House in March, would add real teeth to existing federal labor laws. Nearly all of the union-busting tactics deployed by Amazon would be banned and enforced under the bill, including:
- Forcing workers to attend meetings where supervisors promote anti-union messaging without competing views.
- Disrupting the election process by delaying or stalling the vote.
- Retaliating against workers for organizing for better conditions.
- Fining employers up to $100,000 for NLRA violations.
While it will take weeks for the NLRB to review the potential election violations committed by Amazon, the results are a clear indication that if the law had already been in place, this would have been a much more transparent process. Union drives are not stopping. It is up to Congress to ensure that workers in the future are protected from corporate greed.
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