Brandon Magner is a labor lawyer. He writes about unions and the law at his Substack, Labor Law Lite.
US labor law is so stacked against workers it allows companies to pack up and leave just to avoid dealing with a unionized workforce. We shouldn’t give employers this nuclear option — it completely undercuts working-class power.
The reason Amazon workers lost in Alabama is simple: Employers in the US are allowed to engage in brazen anti-union tactics throughout union elections. The PRO Act would change all of that, finally freeing workers from employer intimidation.
Yesterday was the final voting day for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama. We don’t know the results yet — but we do know that if the PRO Act was already law, Amazon wouldn’t have been able to resort to its dirty anti-union tricks.
Finally, it appears that the filibuster’s days may be numbered. This is good news, because the closer we get to scrapping the filibuster, the closer we get to passing major labor law reform like the PRO Act.
Some freelancers have come out against the PRO Act, insisting that the pro-labor bill threatens their livelihoods. But they needn’t worry: the bill would transform labor relations for the better, it wouldn’t “kill” freelancing.
Unions are pushing Congress to pass the most comprehensive labor law reform bill in decades, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. What exactly would it do? We spoke to a labor lawyer about how the act would help workers organize unions — and strengthen the power of those unions once they’re organized.
Reversing the damage wrought by Donald Trump’s NLRB is not enough. To boost workers’ bargaining power, Joe Biden’s labor board will have to overturn decades of precedents that hamstring organizing and trample on workers’ rights.