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.