Providing for Consideration of H.Res. Expressing Disapproval of the Trump Administration's Harmful Actions Towards Medicaid; Providing for Consideration of H.R. Protecting the Right to Organize Act of and Providing for Consideration of H.R. Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief and Puerto Rico Disaster Tax Relief Act, 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I want to thank Mr. DeSaulnier for his leadership. I rise in very strong support of the PRO Act because it will restore the constitutional and civil rights of American citizens seeking to organize a union.

We have to remember that the right to organize is rooted in the First Amendment of the Constitution which protects the right of the people to speak, to assemble, and to petition for a redress of grievances.

All of these rights have been under severe attack over the last several decades of union busting and interference with the right of the people to organize into unions.

There are three specific provisions I want to mention that will restore the constitutional rights of the people to organize.

The first treats the violation of the right to organize like a violation of any other civil right in America. If your civil rights are violated based on race or based on gender, you have a right to go to court to sue for enforcement of your rights and for compensation for violation of those rights.

This PRO Act will give the same right to workers to go to court to enforce their labor organizing rights. Right now, they have got to go through the National Labor Relations Board which has been stifled with bureaucracy and red tape. And right now, under the PRO Act, if it passes, you will have the right to go to court as well as to go to the NLRB in order to enforce your right to organize.

Secondly, the PRO Act will end so-called captive audience speeches. Those are already illegal right now. Employers cannot herd all the workers into a big room and tell them why they have to vote for Donald Trump for President at the risk of perhaps earning the disfavor of the employer, being fired or demoted or whatever. But they can herd you into the room to tell you why unions are bad and why unions are a bad choice and predicting that the company will have to leave or lay off people if a union is voted in by the workers.

This ends captive audience speeches. The union doesn't have the right to herd all the workers into a room to propagandize them for the union; the employers should not have the right to herd all of them into a conference room to propagandize them against a union.

Finally, the PRO Act will restore the First Amendment rights of workers organizing a union or in a union to support boycotts, strikes, and other labor actions by workers in other places.

Amazingly, under the Taft-Hartley provisions and the way the labor law has grown up now, it is against the law for workers in a union to engage in secondary support and secondary boycotts and so on. This is a naked violation of the First Amendment rights of workers. Unionized workers should have every same right to support boycotts and strikes of their fellow workers as anyone else.

Madam Speaker, I do strongly support the PRO Act.

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