Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for the opportunity.

Mr. Chairman, if the majority believed its own rhetoric surrounding this legislation, it would have been a day one priority. Instead, they brought this legislation up in the shadow of impeachment to conceal the harm it would impose on working-class Americans.

This legislation explicitly eliminates the employer as a party in the election process determining whether the workplace is unionized, limiting the ability of workers to understand the full implications of any decision at hand.

Worse, it requires the employer to hand over the workers' private, personal information to organizers, including their home addresses, listed phone numbers, personal email addresses, et cetera, without the consent of the employee or the ability for employees to opt-out.

This information sharing subjects every single employee to the well- documented tactics of harassment, intimidation, and deception by union organizers. Just consider the presentment in the recent Pennsylvanian case that included The Helpful Union Guys. That is an acronym. Figure it out. There were charges of racketeering, assault, and arson.

Making matters worse, the bill vastly restricts the right to secret ballot elections in favor of the organization by card-check process, providing the union leaders with access to a list of all employees who did not support organization efforts and all of their contact information.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle held up the USMCA deal to ensure the right to secret ballot union elections for Mexican workers but, just weeks later, are voting to strip those same rights away from American workers. What is good for Mexican workers is not good for American workers, apparently.

This bill rewrites the definition of ``employee'' and ``employer'' so that they completely eliminate the gig economy, independent contractors, and the franchise model, and it will disproportionately impact small businesses.

The estimated combined cost of the provisions in this bill is $47 billion annually on employers, necessarily resulting in loss of jobs, reduction of wages, and higher consumer costs.

Yet again, the majority is placing special interests of union bosses above the American people.

Mr. Chairman, as a person who went to vocational and technical school and worked manual labor jobs, I urge a ``no'' vote for this bill.

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