Pro-Labor Legislators Can Fight Back Against What's Coming. Here's How.

Some state lawmakers want to enshrine Biden’s pro-worker reforms before they might be undone.

by Paul Blest and Jordan Zakarin, More Perfect Union

As Donald Trump prepares to assume office for the second time and his corporate allies prepare to wield much more power on issues of worker power, pay, and safety, lawmakers in some Democratic trifecta states say that their party should lead the way in enshrining Biden-era employee protections and beyond.

“It's pretty clear that the Trump administration is gonna be pretty serious about making sure that his wealthy buddies and that venture capitalist and that Silicon Valley can run amok, unregulated in this country,” Colorado Rep. Javier Mabrey told More Perfect Union. “So states need to step up and demonstrate that we have workers' backs.”

Mabrey, a second-term lawmaker from southwest Denver, is introducing legislation this year to make it easier for workers to form a union and bargain a contract. Although Colorado isn’t a “right-to-work” state that prohibits unions from automatically collecting dues from their membership, workers are required to win an additional second election with 75 percent of the vote in order to collect dues from all members who enjoy the benefits of the union.

If they don’t succeed, the union effectively operates as it would in a right-to-work state, where the environment is much more challenging for workers to strike and their unions to grow.

Dylan Smalls, a nurse for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, backs the repeal of that second election; after his workplace voted to unionize with SEIU in 2017, the nonprofit’s attempt to beat back the campaign didn’t stop there.

“By the time it came for our second election, we missed that 75% vote just by a couple of votes,” Smalls said. “Having union security gives you special contract rights where you can organize to withhold labor and actually make demands across the table that management has to answer to.”

In Maryland, state Del. Joe Vogel is introducing a bill to prohibit captive audience meetings. “We’re seeing captive audience meetings as a tool of choice for union busters here in our state and really across the country,” Vogel told More Perfect Union.

As union campaigns are ongoing, employers use these meetings to try to persuade their employees against unionization. Because the meetings are held during work hours, employees are compelled to attend in a way they wouldn’t be for pro-union meetings — and they can be punished for not attending. When Vogel introduced his bill last year, a Teamsters organizer testified before the state legislature that he was harassed during one of these meetings and fired shortly thereafter.

“When these meetings are deployed…the likelihood of successful union formation decreases significantly,” Vogel said.

A flurry of states including Minnesota, Maine, New York, Vermont, and more have banned this practice in the past few years, and in November the NLRB said the usage of captive audience meetings was prohibited under the National Labor Relations Act and thus illegal nationwide. If the NLRB during Trump’s first term is any indication, however, that ban could soon be rolled back.

Terri Gerstein, a former New York state labor official who now directs the Wagner Labor Initiative at New York University, said that “there’s a great need for state and local governments to get more involved in enforcing workers’ rights.”

“It's likely that [federal] enforcement will be done much less aggressively toward corporations that are violating workers' rights,” Gerstein said.

And for Mabrey and Vogel these actions can also serve as an opportunity to show that Democrats will fight for workers.

“The Democratic Party used to stand up and fight back hard against these big corporate interests that are dominating and breaking our economy,” Mabrey said. “The chickens are coming home to roost and the working class is feeling like they don’t have people on their side in government.”

We spoke to lawmakers and experts about these issues and more — because if the federal government retreats from protecting workers’ rights as expected, the role of state and local governments will become even more important. The right to form a union, bargain a contract, and enforce employee rights and safety on the job depends on it.