Delgado Co-sponsors Bill to Protect Workers' Rights and Strengthen Unions

Press Release

U.S. Representative Antonio Delgado (NY-19) signed on as an original co-sponsor of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2019, which protects and enhances workers' rights by authorizing meaningful ways for workers to seek remedies in response to employer violations, strengthens available negotiation tactics, and closes loopholes in federal labor laws while increasing transparency.

"Attacks on labor laws, often funded by special interest groups, have eroded union membership and impeded their ability to protect the rights of workers," Delgado said. "This comprehensive bill will help restore fairness within our economy by combatting harmful Right to Work laws, reforming labor and employment statues to better protect workers from unfair labor practices, and ensuring the right to organize a union in order to negotiate for higher wages and better benefits. I'm very pleased to sign on as an original cosponsor."

From 1980 to 2014, income for the bottom half of wage earners grew by one percent, while income for the top one percent of earners grew by 205 percent. Enabling unions to organize and negotiate are critical steps to increasing wages and addressing widespread income inequality.

The purposes of this bill are to strengthen protections for employees engaged in collective action, to expand coverage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to more employees, to facilitate a process by which workers and employers can reach a first collective bargaining agreement, to provide for stronger remedies for employees whose rights under the NLRA have been violated, to provide for penalties against employers who violate those rights, to safeguard the right to strike, to repeal prohibitions on collective action, to permit fair share fee arrangements, to improve the purchasing power of wage earners in industry, and to guarantee more effective enforcement of the NLRA.

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