Instead of embracing big government bills like the Warehouse Workers Protection Act, lawmakers should focus on other proposals expanding worker freedom.
Union bosses are a significant financial booster of the Democratic party, sending billions of dollars of union dues to Democratic candidates every campaign cycle.
To keep the gravy train rolling for the 2024 election cycle, Senate Democrats have introduced a new bill that would give bureaucrats and union bosses sweeping new power over workplaces. Republicans should continue their strong record of defending worker freedom by opposing this bill.
On May 2, Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) rolled out the Warehouse Worker Protection Act with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, legislation that enacts a host of new government mandates on workplaces. Like the failed “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” its end goal is to force more American workers into unions.
The bill targets companies that use so-called “quotas,” framing attempts by employers to evaluate employee performance as inherently anti-worker. Despite the scary narratives progressives peddle, tracking employee performance is a common business practice, and employers use these metrics to ensure employees are operating safely and efficiently.
The Warehouse Worker Protection Act treats “quotas” as one-size-fits-all, ignoring that performance metrics vary between companies.
It also grows the size and scope of the federal government, creating a new sub-agency within the Department of Labor called the “Fairness and Transparency Office.” The new entity will deploy bureaucrats to monitor workplaces that measure employee metrics.
A new labor regulator is redundant — at the federal level alone, employers are regulated by the DOL and countless other entities, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission.
The bill undermines decades of consensus by overturning Congress’s prohibition on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulating ergonomics in a manner “substantially similar to” the Clinton administration.
A bipartisan majority of lawmakers repealed the Clinton ergonomics standard in 2001 through a Congressional Review Act measure — including Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.), whose track record on labor issues was staunchly pro-union.
The Warehouse Worker Protection Act’s revived ergonomics standard would impose a massive financial burden on employers and allow union safety representatives to retrofit workplaces for maximum union benefit.
Several provisions of the act are blatant handouts to organized labor. In contrast to decades of employment law, the bill creates a new unfair labor practice charge for targeted employers that imposes an employee quota that “significantly discourages or prevents or is intended to significantly discourage or prevent” employees from exercising their rights to unionize.
This would lead to a slew of workplaces becoming unionized through card checks when paired with the National Labor Relations Board’s recent decision, which mandated that employers must recognize and bargain with unions without holding an election if the NLRB determines that the employer has committed an unfair labor practice.
Another provision imposes a “union walkaround” rule that will lead to further union infiltration of non-unionized workplaces. The new “fairness” sub-agency can inspect workplaces and privately interrogate employees. The bill would force employers to allow union organizers to tag along with government inspectors, even going so far as to allow the new subagency to “select representatives of a labor organization … to conduct outreach to workers about the investigation.”
Some provisions, like one that imposes restrictions on new technology that could improve workplace safety, are simply self-defeating.
Supporting the Warehouse Workers Protection Act would run counter to the Republican conference’s strong track record of defending worker freedom.
Republicans successfully passed a Congressional Review Act measure that would nullify Biden’s job-killing joint employer rule, a measure Biden vetoed.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) are building support for their measure to nix Biden’s independent contractor rule, which imposed stifling new restrictions on freelancing.
House Education and Workforce Chairman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) called on Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, the architect and enforcer of Biden’s anti-worker regulations, to resign at a recent hearing.
Instead of embracing big government bills like the Warehouse Workers Protection Act, lawmakers should focus on other proposals expanding worker freedom.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Rep. Rick Allen’s (R-Fla.) Employee Rights Act updates labor law to benefit all American workers, not union bosses. There would be broad Republican support for a Congressional Review Act measure to nullify OSHA’s new “walkaround” rule allowing OSHA inspectors to bring union organizers to workplace inspections.
The Warehouse Workers Protection Act represents unwarranted government micromanagement of workplaces. While Democrats will line up and vote for it to deliver for their union boss donors, there is no reason for Republicans to put their fingerprints on this massive expansion of government power.
Tom Hebert is director of Competition and Regulatory Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of the Open Competition Center.
