As House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced the PRO Act’s passage begins March 8, Freelancers USA Co-Leader Kim Kavin pierces through the platitudes, talking points, abstracts and bromides to get to the whole truth
At his weekly news conference, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D, MD-05) announced the House Education and Labor Committee would begin work on H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act during the week of March 8.
Quick refresher, the PRO Act will update the National Labor Relations Act to empower the Federal government with oversight to insure workers who want to organize into unions can do so, without businesses imposing impediments to unionize.
Components included in the PRO Act include:
- Overturn 28 states’ right-to-work laws which prevent compelling a worker to join a union, and/or pay union dues, against their will
- Provide unions with personal identifiable information (PII) of workers in a business where the union is petitioning to form a local
- Makes nationwide the “ABC test” to determine if a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, the latter including freelancers and gig economy workers who all receive 1099 forms for tax purposes
There are other components, and how the ABC test was first implemented in California in 2020, can be found in this McHenry County Blog article from February 6, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) commitment for any Federal action in the PRO Act to not repeat the issues in California with the ABC test going nationwide.
New Jersey-based Kim Kavin, a co-leader of Freelancers USA and a national leader of the “Fight for Freelancers” movement combating the threats to all 1099 workers with the implementation of ABC tests at the state and national level, sent out a 10-part tweet this morning, reacting to what her and other freelancers are hearing when discussing the PRO Act with congressional staffers.
Kavin practices something I admire, and I strive to do writing for McHenry County Blog. She gets past the platitudes, talking points, abstracts and bromides and tells the truth, all of it.
Here is Hoyer’s tweet from yesterday:
Here is Kavin’s, who’s a freelance writer by profession, Twitter thread, transcribed for ease of reading:
“So. There was quite the little dustup yesterday in the comments on this tweet from Majority Leader Hoyer about the Democrats’ intention to start trying to pass the PRO Act on March 8.
“Let’s discuss what these comments taught us.
“Proponents of the effort to outlaw most [independent contractor] IC work have one main talking point. It is the same exact talking point we have heard in calls with the staffers who work for the bill’s sponsors.
“These people are all reading from the same script in trying to defend the PRO Act
“This talking point is some version of, ‘The ABC Test in the PRO Act is only for the purpose of union organizing. It doesn’t affect wages, hours or terms of employment.’
“Here’s why they’re using that language, and why their argument is disingenuous.
“President Biden has clearly stated his plan to make the ABC Test from California the basis of all labor, employment and tax law. Here’s…the president’s own words…
“On a technical level, PRO Act proponents are saying the bill only uses the ABC Test for purposes of the National Labor Relations Act.
“That means labor law.
“In other words, this is step one in president’s plan.
“PRO Act is the labor part of ‘labor, employment and tax law.’
“When proponents say the bill doesn’t encompass wage and hour law, it’s because the PRO Act only adds the ABC Test to the National Labor Relations Act.
“It doesn’t also add ABC into the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA], for wage and hour.
“But again, the PRO Act is just step one.
“The bill for step two, to add the ABC Test into employment law (wage and hour) via the Fair Labor Standards Act, is already written.
“The same senator [Patty Murray (D, WA)] who is sponsoring the PRO Act also sponsored Bill No. 2 last year [in the last Congress]. Here’s the press release.
“So, when PRO Act proponents say, ‘this doesn’t affect wage and hour law,’ our answer is, ‘The PRO Act is step one in a plan to do exactly that by making California’s ABC Test the law of the land.’
“You can back that up with the documentation above.
“And then when they say, ‘but the PRO Act only uses the ABC Test for unionizing, not for wages or terms of employment,’ ask them this: ‘What good is having a union if it can’t do anything about wages or terms of employment?’
“(It’s no good, unless it’s part of the bigger plan.)
“The fact that PRO Act proponents resort to this mind-numbing legalese tells us they can’t defend the bill in plain English.
“We can be clear:
“California’s ABC Test law was a disaster.
“It cannot be replicated nationwide, as the PRO ACT begins to do.”
Kim Kavin Twitter thread 2/25/21, screenshot/link in her original thread replaced with McHenry County Blog reference articles from 6/29/20 and 9/27/20 conveying same information as her screenshot/link.
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McHenry County Blog has published numerous articles over the past 9 months on the issue of worker classification and labor laws like the California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) and the PRO Act.
Additionally, I’ve published articles about the Illinois Senate Resolution 1158 introduced in Illinois last year, which could lay the groundwork for an Illinois version of AB5, in event the PRO Act does not pass in Washington.
Reason is simple and two-fold:
- 59 million people, including here in Illinois, earn their total income, or supplementary income through 1099 work, and all of their livelihoods are at risk, as well as the businesses who mutually agree to this worker-client professional relationship
- In California in response to the AB5 law, righting this injustice brought people together, and bridged the unholy divisions in our country’s largest state, to the point that the same day Joe Biden carried California by a significant majority, CA Proposition 22 was approved giving app-based business workers an exemption from the AB5 law to continue to work as independent contractors, with the PRO Act as written ready to overturn Prop 22
Let your representatives in the U.S. House know, as is, H.R. 842, the PRO Act, will negatively impact 59 million workers across the country.
And freelance cartoonist Jim Thompson responded to House Majority Leader Hoyer’s tweet last night with something you’ve seen before, which is his handiwork.
Per
https://usafacts.org/articles/labor-union-membership/
“Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 14.3 million or 10.8% of US employees were in unions last year.
That’s just over half of the 20.1% in 1983, when there were 17.7 million employed, waged, and salaried workers in unions.
Notably, while the number of union members declined 321,000 from 2019 to 2020, the percentage of unionized employees increased by half a percentage point.
This suggests that most pandemic job losses were in non-union jobs, though it is important to note that the 2020 data is an annual average that includes months from before the pandemic was declared.
How has union membership changed since 2000?
Despite the change between 2019 and 2020, BLS data shows long-term declines in union membership in both the private and public sectors, regardless of industry or occupation.”
Steny Hoyer, a tired old whore.
Fifty years ago he’d be beaten to pulp, but the eunuchs of Maryland crowned him a prince,
He was President of the Maryland State Senate in 1976.