WASHINGTON—With strong union support, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., accompanied by other Democrats and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., reintroduced the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s top legislative priority.
But while the March 5 press conference turned into a parade of endorsements—led by Sanders, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.–its prospects are uncertain at best in the Republican-led Senate and virtually dead on arrival in the highly partisan Republican-led House Education and the Workforce Committee.
Even Sanders recognized the problem, by implication, when he mentioned that when he chaired the Senate Labor Committee in the last Congress, the panel approved it. What he did not say is that it was by a party-line vote.
Further, “sadly, it never came to a vote” on the Senate floor, Sanders said. Schumer, then majority leader, wouldn’t call it up unless Sanders could find enough senators to halt a planned Republican filibuster, orchestrated by the corporate class. Sanders couldn’t.
That won’t stop Sanders, the federation, House Education and Workforce top Democrat Bobby Scott of Virginia and their allies from trying again. After all, the story they heard from Kieran Cuadras, of Wells Fargo Workers United, a Communications Workers-aided campaign, spurred them on.
Cuadras works in the financial services sector. It’s one of the least unionized. As recent prosecutions, scandals, high interest rates charged to borrowers and low interest or none paid to depositors, it’s also among the most corrupt in its executive suites and trading arms.
Indeed, it was a massive scandal at Wells Fargo, where its traders fabricated accounts in customers’ names, then reaped the proceeds, that prompted the unionization drive. The Wells Fargo Workers United won, but with a struggle marked by rampant criminal labor law-breaking by the bank.
Cuadras, a 22-year Wells Fargo worker, as a teller, branch manager and investigator, helped lead the campaign. She’s familiar with unions, as her husband is a Laborer.
After the massive federal fine for the scandal “I’d like to say things have changed” at the bank, Cuadras said. “But I saw first-hand how Wells Fargo still uses shortcuts to create the illusion of fewer complaints” investigators must solve. “They’re closing too many investigations prematurely. Managers pressure workers on ‘meeting sales outcomes,’ which is just code (words) for sales quotas.’
“We chose to form a union to change the policies that led to the fake accounts scandal and to protect our jobs from being outsourced,” she said. Then the trouble began.
Wells Fargo pressured workers
Wells Fargo managers called workers into private one-by-one conference calls and quizzed them about the union. They held so-called “captive audience” meetings—now outlawed in several states–featuring anti-union harangues full of lies about how the union “would take their money.” Lawyers from a top union-buster, Littler Mendelson, led those sessions, NLRB records show.. Managers even threatened the workers would be fired.
And just before the union election last October, that’s what Wells Fargo bosses did. They fired, illegally, a dozen leaders of the organizing drive, Cuadras included. The union won anyway, but Wells Fargo is appealing the victory and refuses to bargain. And all the tactics it used, except the captive audience meetings, but especially the firing threat and actual firings, broke labor law.
“CEOs have got to be held accountable for their illegal union-busting” said Cuadras. Which is the point of the legislation.
The PRO Act is designed to halt those abuses and enact protections, including mandatory arbitration of first contract disputes, card-check recognition, and higher fines for labor law-breaking, though not jail terms for malefactors. It would be the most consequential pro-worker labor law rewrite in decades.
The abuses have mounted ever since the Republican-crafted Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 emasculated the original New Deal era National Labor Relations Act. It turned organizing drives into obstacle courses for workers seeking rights on the job. As speakers at the PRO Act session pointed out, it’s profitable for firms to break the law against their workers, because penalties are so light.
The Wells Fargo case is hung up again. Worker-hater and union-hater Republican President Donald Trump illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to not only sit on the NLRB but chair it. That deprived the board of a majority. Wilcox’s term extends through August 2028.
Wilcox sued in U.S. District Court in D.C., to get her job back. Judge Ana Reyes spent two hours hearing the case just before the PRO Act press conference. The judge spent a good part of it giving listeners a history of workers’ right to unionize and the struggles they’ve had doing so, going back to the 1930s and before. A board member can be removed only for cause. Trump’s lawyers admitted there was none.
AFL-CIO President Shuler declared the time is politically right to pass the PRO Act. Organized labor’s popularity—a 70%-71% approval rating in the last two yearly Gallup polls, is at an all-time high. “Every other issue splits right down the middle,” she noted.
Though Shuler didn’t say so, the mass and illegal firings of federal workers—union and non-union—by Trump and his puppeteer, Elon Musk, have driven union membership up since Trump took over.
The Government Employees set a goal of adding 25,000 new members, net, for this year. They exceeded it on February 10. And National Federation of Federal Employees President Randy Erwin reports his union, a Machinists sector, has added 10,000 members since Trump’s inauguration.
“Workers are seeing (corporate profits) go up and up,” Shuler said, prompting Sanders to say that in the last 52 years, not only has union density declined, due to corporate hate, but so have wages, adjusted for inflation. “A union member makes more money, has more power and has more of a voice on the job,” the AFL-CIO leader added. Corporate bosses hate unions so much “because they think we’re a threat” to their hegemony.
“Workers are unified,” she declared. “They see the rules are written for the richest and most powerful, and they want to stand up for fairness and opportunity.”
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