Providing for the Expenses of Certain Committees of the House of Representatives in the 114th Congress, and Providing for Consideration of S.J. RES. 8, Providing for Congressional Disapproval of a Rule Submitted by the National Labor Relations Board
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule and the underlying resolution, Senate Joint Resolution 8, the resolution to overturn the National Labor Relations Board's election rule.
The other bill I support, H. Res. 132, which provides for the expenses of the committees of the House. The House Committee on Administration's bipartisan work should be commended because, as we all know, committees that we individual Members of the House are members of play a very important role in the work we do every day.
Now, I think it is unfortunate that this bipartisan bill has been packaged with a partisan bill to repeal important, commonsense reforms that were done at the National Labor Relations Board, and they have been wrapped up with a controversial bill.
The NLRB's function, as you know, is both to investigate and prosecute unfair labor practices and to provide a legal framework for employees and employers where employees may be seeking to organize in their workplaces for better wages and working conditions. Both of those functions are required of them by the National Labor Relations Act, which has been in place since 1935.
The work that the NLRB is doing is important. It is precisely what is required by the National Labor Relations Act. Holding a vote on this resolution will get in the way of the NLRB's pursuing its mandate successfully. Instead of focusing on important issues like shrinking the wage gap and growing the middle class, instead, the Republicans are spinning their wheels to score points by going after the National Labor Relations Board and commonsense reforms to make it function more effectively.
The President has already released a statement vowing to veto this resolution, so it is another example of spinning our wheels. It is obvious that neither the Senate nor the House will have enough votes to override this veto, so I ask simply: Why are we wasting our time on this misguided legislation when there are plenty of challenges that our country faces, whether it is balancing the budget, growing the middle class, or dealing with use of force abroad? Instead, we are discussing legislation which won't become law. While we are 3 months into this Congress, I can't even count the amount of hours we have spent on the floor discussing legislation that, as everybody knows, won't become law because we have a President in the White House who said he will veto it.
Mr. Speaker, this piece of legislation uses the Congressional Review Act, which is a rare legislative tool that allows the majority to rush through legislation with little debate. In the Senate, normal rules of debate and cloture are not even required, but it does require the President's signature.
Now, keep in mind, the Congressional Review Act is used to undo rules that have been promulgated by the executive branch through the Executive Office. So why would a President sign something that undoes his own rules? He simply wouldn't have made those rules in the first place if he didn't want them done.
So here we are, without two-thirds of this body, going through these motions on something that we know isn't going to become law. The Congressional Review Act has only been used once to overturn a rule in the entire history of the United States and is there for emergencies. This bill is far from an emergency. Instead, it is packaged with a closed rule--an extreme and unnecessary procedural action--rather than allowing for amendment and discussion of ideas from both sides of the aisle.
This resolution would overturn the new and improved election rules at the NLRB which are simply modernizing an antiquated system. The current rules were done before email existed, as an example. And we talk about how important privacy is; we are only talking about email addresses that the employer has. So if employers can use them to lobby their employees one way or the other in a vote, the organizing campaign should also be able to use those same email addresses. If neither side has access to them, that is fine; but if one side has access to them in an election, the other side needs to have access under similar terms.
We in this body have a responsibility to protect workers' rights and to provide employers with predictability and an expeditious processing of organizing requests in the workplace. Under the current archaic rules prior to this change, it was far too easy for bad actors to endlessly delay workplace elections.
In our committee that Dr. Foxx and I serve on, we got to hear the testimony of a nurse from California who had engaged in an effort in her workplace to organize the nurses that had been delayed time and time again, more than a year before a vote was finally held. Oftentimes, if a year or 2 or 3 go by, there might be different employees, people come and go, the groups of employees change, and often some of these involved in the organizing are subsequently fired. Employers are able to do this by appealing time and time again on issues that have no bearing on the election simply to delay, delay, delay.
The modest, commonsense reforms of the election rules truly go a long way in balancing the system and making it work more efficiently. They are standardized practices that are already common through many parts of the country to allow workers to make their own decisions without manipulations, threats, or intimidation from either party.
Under current rules, what happens all too often is employers continuously appeal an election with unwarranted litigation so they have time to threaten, coerce, and, far too often, fire workers. By the time the election occurs, workers have moved on, voluntarily or involuntarily, to other jobs or have been threatened so many times they feel they have been forced to vote ``no.''
There is a proven direct and causal relationship between the length of time it takes to hold an election and illegal employer conduct. In other words, bad actors stall the election process and use the system they have to do whatever it takes to win the election. There are hundreds of examples of unscrupulous actors using the current system in this way.
The nurse that I mentioned earlier decided that she and her coworkers wanted a better workplace environment and began to organize, but the employer delayed the action multiple times so they had time to threaten the workers via text and email. They even held mandatory meetings with employees to threaten and coerce them into voting against organizing. They even did this under the guise of education. In the end, the nurses were too scared to form a union.
Another unfortunate, but telling, example we talked about in committee is a Mercedes-Benz dealership that delayed and stalled an election at every opportunity. The entire process wound up lasting 428 days. With the new rule, the process would have taken 141 days. What I can't understand is how some people think that 428 days is reasonable and that somehow 141 days is an ambush election. I think 428 days for a union election is inexcusable. It is harmful to our families and the economy and harmful to the businesses, the lack of predictability that that brings.
The average resolution for an election is 38 days. And we are not dealing with the average here; we are dealing with the outliers. One in 10 election cases are still unresolved after 100 days. There is no excuse for that. It is unthinkable. It is these 10 percent of employers and organizing efforts that this election will impact. The other 90 percent work well. The current NLRB processes work well. We don't need to change their methods.
I keep hearing arguments that employees are losing the rights to privacy, but I want to address these points because they are completely false.
The companies have work schedules, email addresses, and phone numbers. They often use these to threaten and coerce employees at all hours of the day and night. Those who are organizing already have access to home addresses, but that is all they have. Without work schedules, they might show up when an employee is sleeping or when they are not home. This new rule provides the same information to employers and organizers. If you ask me, a home address--which they already have--is far more intrusive than an email or phone number, and I think that these reforms will, therefore, further the privacy of workers.
The rules simply modernize the disclosure requirements, because the last time they were updated people didn't have cell phones and emails. All they had were home addresses, which is why the union organizers currently have access to home addresses.
Employers also indicate that they might be surprised by an election. The timeline the employers are referring to of 11 days is essentially impossible in the real world. Moreover, in essentially every case, the employer is fully aware that organizing is occurring long before the petition is filed. Under the new rule, employers will have plenty of time to make their cases, and employees will have plenty of time to make an informed decision.
It is important to note that if the resolution were to actually pass and somehow be signed by the President--which it won't be--it would forever prohibit the NLRB or any agency from enacting a substantially similar rule.
That means the simple modernization efforts that I hope we could all agree upon, such as allowing parties to file election documents electronically, as this rule does, will be forever off the table, forcing both businesses and workers to use an antiquated and costly system.
Mr. Speaker, for these reasons, I oppose the rule and the underlying bill.
I reserve the balance of my time
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The Export-Import Bank ensures that American businesses remain competitive in foreign markets, and reauthorizing it would create certainty for business across this country and is fully permissible under WTO rules.
Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to allow for consideration of legislation which would reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for 7 years.
Mr. Speaker, to discuss our proposal, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Washington (Mr. Heck).
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If somebody else shows up, I might yield to him; but with that understanding, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a little bit about the Export-Import Bank and what they do and why it is so important.
First of all, there are a lot of forms of subsidization that are not permitted under trade rules or the WTO. However, there are certain safe harbors for things that are allowed, and all of our major trading partners have something like an Export-Import Bank.
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Mr. Speaker, what this discussion really comes down to with regard to the NLRB is whether or not bad actors should continue to get away with abusing an antiquated system for their own advantage.
I truly believe--and I hope my colleagues do, too--that employers and employees should have a level playing field with an updated and expeditious processing mechanism. Employers should not be able to endlessly delay and appeal elections and abuse a process that was put in place just as much for them as it was for employees.
Organizing has a long and important history in America. Unions and collective bargaining have made sure we have a weekend to spend with our families, a 40-hour workweek, and made sure women are paid fair wages.
Organizing has made sure workers are safe from all types and forms of workplace dangers. Countless studies show that the proportion of workers in labor organizations tracks very closely with income for middle class Americans.
Critics of this rule don't want a level playing field for labor organizations to fight for the middle class. They want a process that is open to delay and manipulation. Rather than letting workers choose for themselves whether or not they want to join a union, bad actors would prefer to delay or prevent the choice from ever being made at all. This new rule reduces the opportunity for bad actors to play games with the process and applies new technological updates to the process as well.
The Republicans, time and time again, seem to want to waste time on,grandstanding instead of legislating. This is a perfect example of another bill that won't become law. The Republicans want to tilt the economy toward the wealthy, toward big business, toward CEOs.
We were sent here to do the people's work. The new rule for the NLRB is entirely consistent with the legislative intent of the creation of that agency, and it is for the advantage of people who live in our towns and cities. It improves the economy, raises up the middle class, helps give everybody a fair shot at the American Dream.
When we talk about the pathway to the American Dream, the pathway to success in our country, the organized labor movement has and continues to make enormous contributions toward making sure that Americans are earning livable wages, that they can support their families and live the American Dream. It is not only the weekends and 40-hour workweeks that they have given us. The organized labor movement continues to fight for the middle class and to fight to grow the middle class and to address some of the increasing trend of income disparities that are threatening our country.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question, and then we will bring forward the Export-Import Bank clean reauthorization that does create jobs for middle class Americans and in manufacturing. Some of those plants will be union and some won't be. That is the choice of the workers. The NLRB bill facilitates that choice. It doesn't presuppose that every workplace will want to organize nor that no workplaces will want to organize. It simply has a fair set of rules in place--fair to businesses, fair to employees, fair to labor, fair to everybody--that allows a decision to be made regarding organizing in the workplace.
What is even more important about the effort Mr. Heck talked about is it will allow workers and business owners to participate in a bigger pie. That is what we all want. By reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, we are creating jobs in our country and the export sector; and that means that the owners of the companies will do well; it means the employees of the companies will do well; it means the management will do well; it means the line workers will do well.
So let's participate in a growing pie by passing a clean reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank rather than trying to divide the pie to take more away from working families and the middle class and give more to big businesses.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question. I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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