Leaders of Arizona’s business community on Monday urged the U.S. Senate not to adopt the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO Act, legislation they say would harm job creation efforts.

At a press conference at the offices of the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors, the business group leaders said the bill would eviscerate Arizona’s right-to-work law, which makes union membership voluntary and not a condition of employment.

“The only thing hotter than the temperature is Arizona’s economy,” said Arizona Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­ of Commerce and Industry President and CEO Danny Seiden. “Why would we want to put that all at risk?”

Michelle Ahlmer, executive director of the Arizona Retailers Association, said her industry would be unable to continue recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic if the PRO Act passes.

“Before the pandemic, our industry had record highs in profits, wage growth, and employment. As we climb out from the last 18 months, we need every tool to get back on our feet,” Ahlmer said. “We simply cannot add to the challenging economic environment by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act is a harmful bill that would essentially give unions free rein to wreak havoc on local businesses.”

National Federation of Independent Businesses Arizona state director Chad Heinrich said the PRO Act’s independent contractor status test would hurt many Arizona small businesses, whose employees prefer the flexibility of working as independent contractors. 

“California adopted a strict three-part test to classify independent contractor status. This has been a significant problem for California small businesses,” Heinrich said. “When California first adopted this test, they had to immediately carve out dozens of exceptions because it was unworkable. The PRO Act has no exceptions.”

The bill, a priority of the organized labor movement and progressive activists, has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives on a party-line vote and President Joe Biden has supported the legislation. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’ll bring the bill to a vote in his chamber if it can secure 50 cosponsors. Arizona senators Kyrsten Sinema, D, and Mark Kelly, D, so far have refused to sign-on to the legislation.

“We’d like to thank Sens. Sinema and Kelly for being willing to listen to all sides on this issue,” Associated General Contractors Arizona chapter President David Martin said. “We’re grateful they’re taking a pragmatic approach to this very complicated matter that involves many employers and employees in Arizona.”

Polling data indicates the bill does not have broad support among the American public. 

A recent found that 63% of Arizona voters did not want unions to have more influence, and 74 % of them were concerned about losing right-to-work protections and forcing workers to pay union dues to obtain a job.

Right-to-work, which allows for employees to work without being obligated to join a union, has been protected by Arizona’s constitution since 1946. 

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 5.3 percent of Arizona workers are members of unions, less than half the national average.

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In partnership with the country’s leading business advocacy organization, business groups across Arizona have made defeat of the anti-employer PRO Act one of their top priorities for the remainder of the year.

The U.S. Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­ of Commerce is working with its partner organizations in Arizona to express their gratitude that the state’s two senators, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, continue not to support the legislation. 

Sinema and Kelly are two of only three Democratic senators who have not agreed to cosponsor the bill. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (New York) says he will bring the bill to a vote once it secures 50 cosponsors, which makes Sinema and Kelly’s position on the bill even more important.

The House version of the PRO Act passed along mostly party lines in March. All of Arizona’s Democratic congressional delegation members voted in favor of the bill. 

If the PRO Act were to pass, it would overturn decades of labor law, disrupting workplaces, weaking protections for employees and employers, and lead to increased litigation according to the U.S. Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­. 

At a special established by the group, there are tools for Arizonans to contact their senators and applaud their refusal not to join as bill cosponsors.

One of the most concerning provisions of the PRO Act is its elimination of states’ right-to-work laws, which protect workers from being fired if they choose not to join a labor union. Arizona is a right-to-work state. 

“If the PRO Act were to pass, it would do tremendous damage to Arizona’s workplaces and its overall competitiveness,” said David Martin, president of the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors. “We’re so fortunate to have a right-to-work law in Arizona that ensures that the decision whether to join a labor union is left up to the employee. Our workplaces are largely free of hostility and intimidation. We want to keep it that way.”

The bill also undermines the use of secret ballots in union organizing elections, allowing labor unions to use instead so-called “card check,” whereby workers sign cards to authorize a union rather than voting a ballot privately.

Among the litany of anti-employer elements, the PRO Act would also allow “secondary boycotts,” where one company is pressured not to do business with another company that is the subject of a labor action. Currently outlawed, this secondary activity would result in strikes and pickets against businesses with no direct role in a labor dispute, such as suppliers and vendors and even professional service firms like banks and accountants.

“If the PRO Act becomes law, business owners in Arizona could wake up on any given day to find picket lines in front of their business even though the dispute has nothing to do with them,” Tucson Metro Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­ President and CEO Amber Smith and U.S. Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­ Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley in a column last month. 

Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­s of commerce and other business groups across Arizona are increasing their communications with Sinema and Kelly. More than 50 business groups and chambers of commerce in April to the two senators urging them not to join the bill.

“We thank Senators Sinema and Kelly for not lending their support to this extremely damaging bill,” Martin said. “The Arizona economy is on much more solid footing today than it was a year ago and we’re poised for tremendous growth. Passage of the PRO Act would be a major step back and would do real harm to Arizona’s job creators and our economy.”

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Right-to-work laws first came about in response to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA),  which authorized labor unions to act as workers’ “exclusive bargaining representatives.” This meant individuals were not able to negotiate their contracts separately, even if they didn’t belong to the union. 

After the passage of the NLRA, unions began negotiating contracts that made paying union dues a condition of a worker’s employment contract. States that enacted right-to-work  statutes to counter union power saw this as ensuring workers an important right: freedom to choose. 

Recently right-to-work laws have been under attack through various bills proposed at a state and federal level. 

One such bill introduced in the U.S. House is the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. It was originally proposed in 2019 and would have effectively abolished all state Right to Work laws. Many free market organizations, including the Goldwater Institute, wrote a letter openly opposing the bill saying that, “invalidating these laws would hurt workers and employers, but would provide more dues to unions.”  

The bill has returned in 2021 with a number of changes that erode states’ right-to-work laws.

Glenn Spencer, the U.S. Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»­ of Commerce senior vice president of the Employment Policy Division the bill “strips workers of their privacy, threatens private ballots, imposes California’s disastrous independent contractor test, jeopardizes employers’ right to free speech, and threatens the loss of a job should workers choose not to pay union dues.” 

“While claiming to be pro-worker, we firmly believe today’s legislation is a grab-bag of harmful policies that would deprive millions of workers of their privacy and fundamentally alter our nation’s system of labor relations,” he said.

Missouri’s union blues

Protection against forced union membership is offered in 28 out of the 50 states in the form of right-to-work legislation. 

States like Missouri have had ongoing battles in their legislature as they attempt to provide the opportunity for workers to choose whether to join a union membership in different work environments such as construction. 

This issue was slated to be on the Missouri ballot in 2020. The state’s Republican Party submitted the ballot initiative in December 2018. In February of 2019, the secretary of state approved the initiative for signature gathering. However, petitioners did not submit signatures by the deadline. 

Economic competitiveness

Being a right-to-work state benefits an economy through more outside investment, lower cost of living, and higher economic productivity. 

According to Jeffrey Eisenach of NERA Economic Consulting, the economic benefits experienced by the

• Between 2001 and 2016 private sector employment growth of 27 percent, which was 12 percent higher than non-RTW;
• An annual unemployment rate that was 0.4 percentage points lower than non-RTW states. In terms of jobs, if non-RTW states had the same employment rate, 249,000 more people would be employment;
• Output in RTW states grew 38 percent from 2001 to 2016, whereas non-RTW reached 29 percent growth output;
• Another staple of economic productivity, real manufacturing output rose by over 30 percent in RTW states from 2001 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in non-RTW states.

The AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 American unions, right to work laws as a way to lower workers’ wages. However, while the wage averages in , the average cost of living in right-to-work states is below the national average as well. 

Arizona’s experience

In the state of Arizona, organized labor only accounted of wage and salary workers in 2019. Since 1989, when the data for states became widely available, Arizona’s union membership rates have stayed below the national average. 

As of November of 1946, the Arizona Constitution has had a provision for the state to be a right-to-work state. 

The constitutional amendment reads, “No person shall be denied the opportunity to obtain or retain employment because of non-membership in a labor organization, nor shall the State or any subdivision thereof, or any corporation, individual or association of any kind enter into any agreement, written or oral, which excludes any person from employment or continuation of employment because of non-membership in a labor organization.” 

Proposition 4 was an initiated constitutional amendment, which officially prohibited the requirement of labor organization membership for a person to be employed. The amendment passed in the 1946 general election by 55 percent. 

State lawmakers’ support for right-to-work policy derives from the economic benefits that are associated with these laws, including more attraction of outside investment. 

, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky said, “It sends a signal to businesses that, as a state, we are trying to make ourselves more open and friendly and [as] flexible as possible for businesses that want to locate here.”

The status of Arizona’s right to work could soon be up for debate again. With the defeat of pro-right-to-work Senator Martha McSally, there is a chance that Congress has the majority needed to pass the aforementioned PRO Act. 

As the National Right to Work Committee Vice President, Mary King , “Indeed, the Senate could potentially be Right to Work’s last firewall against not just the PRO Act, but an entire host of Big Labor power grabs.”

Among the PRO Act’s 209 cosponsors are Arizona Representatives Ruben Gallego, Raul Grijalva, Ann Kirkpatrick, Tom O’Halleran and Greg Stanton.

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