Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2587, Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Let's be clear. Let's talk about South Carolina for a second. No one has mentioned this. South Carolina is a right-to-work State. What does that mean?

It guts the ability of workers to organize and to form unions to fight for higher wages and safer workplaces. Why do you think Boeing was going to South Carolina? Because they thought it was going to be worse for them or better for them? A right-to-work State that guts unions, that's why they went.

Millions of Americans are working today and they're looking for work. They're struggling to keep their homes. They are out of work. They're not working. And yet we are debating legislation that tries, once again, to eviscerate unions, accelerate that race to the bottom.

This bill does nothing to create good, well-paying jobs here in America. It guts the regulatory powers of the National Labor Relations Board. It legalizes runaway shops. It allows companies to fire employees trying to start a union. It's a right-to-work State, and actually makes it easier to ship jobs overseas.

None of this is what our economy needs right now. It's like what we have seen from Republican governors in States like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana. This legislation represents yet another front in the majority's ideological assault against workers' rights all across the country.

I represent a community where the right to organize was hard won at the dress shops, where my mother sewed collars for pennies, at the gun factories, the aerospace industry, the government offices, and the great universities of my state.

The families of my district know from hard-won experience that labor unions fight for employee rights, higher standards, greater equality, security in work and retirement. They help ensure that workplaces and politics are driven by the dreams and the aspirations of working people, not by corporate power and the narrow agenda of the elites.

Unions were instrumental in forming the broad-based middle class in this country, and thanks to decades of systematic efforts by companies to deny their rights, as well as misguided trickle-down policies that never do trickle down, union membership has fallen in our country.

Middle class workers have been squeezed. Their wages have stagnated, their benefits cut, their job security weakened, their wage and hour protections have been violated, and all the while, income inequality has steadily risen in this Nation, to the point where even as over 15 percent of the population today lives in poverty, 1 percent of people now make 23 percent of income in America.

This Republican majority is trying to go for the killing blow. They, once again, attempt here to make a bogey man of the NLRB.

The Board's function is only to defend the rights that we consider fundamental, the right to form a union, the right to be represented by that union in dealings with employers, and the right to be free from retaliation from doing so.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.

Mr. McGOVERN. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 1 minute.

Ms. DeLAURO. The Board also enforces laws that protect employers and third parties against practices by unions considered to be unfair or harmful. In fact, the NLRB charter and structure were amended to meet Republican concerns in 1947 by the Taft-Hartley legislation.

Today the NLRB is simply doing its job, finding fair remedies for employees and employers in workplace disputes and prosecuting violations when they occur. Nothing radical about the NLRB.

What's radical is the anti-union message that this majority continues to try to foist on the American people. They've tried to slash funding for the NLRB. They've tried several times to repeal Davis-Bacon. They're trying now to severely limit workers' fundamental right to organize collectively.

The bill is not a serious attempt to restore jobs, restore economic growth, or address budget deficits. It's about marginalizing the labor movement--and with it the capacity for working people to find fairness in the workplace. It will harm middle class families already dealing with a tough economy. It will grease the wheels for companies to move jobs overseas.

I urge my colleagues to stand with American workers and vote against this rule.

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