"The PRO Act is a great place for us to organize workers in general, whether or not they're in a union". Interview with Jimmy Williams of IUPAT.

by Brendan O’Connor

On the night before the 2020 election, Joe Biden, who launched his presidential campaign from a union hall, promised to be "the most pro-union president you've ever seen." Now, there is plenty of reason to be skeptical that organized labor's enormous investment in the Democratic Party generally and Joe Biden specifically has bought it much more than the chance to be more-or-less left alone. But if organized labor in the United States is to survive, much less flourish, it cannot afford to be left alone; it cannot afford anything less than the complete transformation of labor relations in this country.

Such is the potential of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which Democrats are expected to reintroduce on Thursday. After House Democrats passed a version of this legislation last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rolled out an anti-worker propaganda campaign despite it standing no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate. Today, even with a Democratic-controlled Senate, the PRO Act won't pass without first abolishing the filibuster, which the Chamber and other business groups have long opposed.

"Prospects for major labor law reform under the Biden administration are directly tied to unions' and union federations' willingness to hold the administration’s feet to the fire," one former union organizer told Strikewave early this year. "They are not going to do it on their own—if we want it, we’re going to have to fight like hell for it." Leading that fight are unions like the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), whose general vice president Jimmy Williams we spoke to late last year about the PRO Act, labor's relationship to the Democratic Party, and the lessons of the Obama administration.

Strikewave (SW): What does the PRO Act entail? If it were to be passed, what might the short and long term effects be?

Jimmy Williams (JW): If passed, the PRO Act would be the first legislation to change the National Labor Relations Act in a meaningful way for workers since the passage of the act. Since 1937, it's been rollback after rollback, beginning with Taft Hartley. The PRO Act would reverse a lot of what has held workers back from organizing over the years: it would repeal “right to work,” which was passed through Taft Hartley, which is enormous and would be a huge victory for workers and unions in right-to-work states. It also clarifies what is really the long-term problem that the workforce has right now, which is worker misclassification.

Worker misclassification is one of the least sexy things and hardest for people to grapple with. But with the emergence of the gig economy, it's on display right now that workers that work in an environment where they are classified as independent contractors, with almost zero right to organize, the ability to collectively bargain, it's just harder.

Those two provisions are enormous. Other pieces of the Act: streamlined elections, mandatory contracts. In most union elections, when a union wins, the hardest part begins, which is trying to bargain the contract with an employer who has no real legal reason to bargain in good faith. A lot of times, they stall you out for the year. Workers leave with such a bad taste in their mouth—they went through all the pain and struggles of an organizing campaign, and you can't get that first contract. The PRO Act cleans that up.

And then it would make some unfair labor practices criminal in some cases, including once and for all doing away with closed door meetings that employers hold during elections. It would make that illegal during an organizing campaign. Those are some of the highlights. They would be enormous changes to the current labor laws of the country.

SW: As senators, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act. Then, in the White House, under the most favorable conditions, they just totally abandoned the legislation and labor. Why should workers expect anything different now, when it comes to the Biden administration and the PRO Act?

JW: I don't think workers should expect anything different. If we as unions and workers think Washington is going to pass this act out of the kindness of their hearts, we're crazy. We have to inform the public. We have to be out beyond labor's walls, educating workers in this country around how important passage of the PRO Act would be in order to hold all politicians accountable.

The Employee Free Choice Act should serve as labor's reminder that real social change requires real social movements. With the Employee Free Choice Act, we within labor, we kind of hoped that the politicians that we elected would take care of us. It doesn't work that way: we have to hold them accountable. I think we can learn from those mistakes.

Some of what led to a figure like Donald Trump winning amongst a big percentage of our membership (at least in the construction industry) was the inaction of the Obama administration—the inability to pass things like the Employee Free Choice Act. Politics may have dictated he only had majorities for the first two years, but I know for a fact our members are united behind things in the PRO Act, because we poll them: 79% were supportive of the worker misclassification piece, 88% supportive of doing away with right to work, but yet, we still have a good percentage of members that voted for Donald Trump.

SW: This legislation seems primarily geared towards workers who are not already organized into recognized unions. What are you doing to reach those workers who are not members, in order to say, “This is something that we want you to fight for with us.”

JW: Well, it's in the interest of gig workers and workers that are working in non-traditional sectors for organized labor. That's part of what I'm talking about when I say we need an outreach campaign that reaches beyond our walls. We have to—we get to educate. And then, obviously, we get to agitate.

When you look at what it would require, that's how new movements begin as well. The labor movement’s been organizing creatively—reaching into companies like Uber and Lyft, trying to educate and work with the workforce—but not on a massive enough scale. The PRO Act is a great place for us to organize workers in general, whether or not they're in a union or not, organizing them around the ideals.

If the PRO Act were to pass, it presents an opportunity for new organizations to emerge, for new ways of labor organizing to take place. The traditional labor movement would be the place to have and lead that discussion. And hopefully lead and foster new organizations as well.

SW: What does the composition of the transition team and other kinds of administration picks reveal to you about the Biden administration's orientation towards organized labor?

JW: First, we have to say that this transition team has been by far the most labor friendly transition team. By far. To have the amount of access and the ability to talk through some of these complex issues is an enormous opportunity. Sometimes we get hung up when we look at say, one person, over the fact that there was 19 or 20 labor folks—I think there was a labor person on just about every single review team for the different departments. What's more worrisome is that there's not enough discussion around the issues: things like worker misclassification and how the PRO  Act might fix it.

Prop 22 should serve as a huge reminder of what corporations are able to do within the Democratic Party, in a Democratic state. When corporations want to speak out against workers, they can do things like run a $250 million public campaign to push back on the gains that were made in California by AB5. That's why workers have to be diligent and the labor movement has to always remain diligent, both within the Democratic Party and towards the Republican Party, and maintain a position of, “we're going to hold our elected officials accountable, no matter what, whether it's Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi.”

SW: Uber and Lyft spent hundreds of millions of dollars defeating AB5 and passing Prop 22. Similarly, while there's internal reasons why Democrats like Barack Obama, let's say, dropped the ball on Employee Free Choice, there was also a huge effort from the bosses and from big industry to stop the passage of pro-worker legislation. Are you seeing anything similar now with respect to the PRO Act?

JW: The money being flown into the state of Georgia for these two Senate seats is the first indication of how much money would flow into the public sphere if and when there's a majority in the Senate. If Chuck Schumer was elected Senate Majority Leader, you're going to see the same tactics that were used to influence the Free Choice Act. The Chamber of Commerce ran commercials comparing union organizers to The Sopranos. All that stuff will come back to life for sure.

Being prepared and being early and knowing that fighting for labor law reform is not going to be a short term fight, it's a long term fight. Where labor fell short on Employee Free Choice is that we didn’t do enough to get out into the public sphere. Obviously, big corporations, big business have way more money than the labor movement does as a whole; however, I think we could do a better job of reaching into that coalition that has gotten Democratic majorities in the past and got Joe Biden elected, and just do a better job of educating about the need for [something like the PRO Act].

It's a broad-based coalition of folks that got Joe Biden elected. It wasn't just labor; it wasn't just the African American community; it wasn't just Latinos or the LGBTQ community. It was truly a broad-based coalition. Connecting our politics to our issues—converting what we know is very, very popular amongst workers into how we hold elected officials accountable—is what we got to figure out how to do.

SW: How can union members get involved putting pressure on their elected officials to pass the PRO Act? And how can non-union workers get involved in the struggle?

JW: It starts with educating yourself as a union member and as a worker. One of the easiest and best ways to do that is signing up for electronically right now for updates and information—we have a website, PassThePROAct.org. There's a lot of good information in there. But it's gonna take hitting the streets. In my opinion, the only way social change ever is made is you got to be seen. You got to be out there, you got to be visible. We got to be visible. We got to be vocal. It's a full fledged type of campaign that's going to be required. And we got to build towards that. It starts with getting educated and then being agitated, being activated and moving people where they need to move.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


Brendan O’Connor is a freelance journalist, Strikewave editorial collective member, and the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. You can find him on Twitter @_grendan.

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