Labor unions are targeting a tool in Congress’s tool belt to fight against ill-advised federal regulations. They want the bureaucracy to enshrine their policy priorities with no pesky interference from elected officials and the people they represent.
Some of the biggest labor unions in the nation are urging Democratic lawmakers not to work across party lines to advance legislation that undoes labor regulations they have fought for.
The problem is that the new regulations Big Labor wants to protect would leave regular workers and professionals worse off. Big Labor pretends to fight for workers, but their policies destroy worker freedom.
What happened
The Service Employees International Union (SEI), National Nurses United, AFL-CIO, and dozens of labor unions sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to reject the use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn President Joe Biden’s labor policies.
The unions included a laundry list of policies that the CRA has been used to overturn, including prevailing wage requirements for construction workers, labor standards for farm workers, restrictive franchising regulations, and new restrictions on classifying independent contractors.
These last two issues are particularly relevant to women and are regulations that IWF has been fighting alongside many organizations. Self-employed people and small businesses face uphill battles in the current regulatory environment. Using the CRA to overturn these regulations has been important for Congress to do.
Labor unions don’t see it that way. Instead, they chide these congressional efforts and falsely label them as driven by special interests saying:
Plainly, the CRA has become the latest weapon in a war on workers waged by special interests. Each of the above resolutions, some of which have already passed Congress, carries the threat of permanently undermining critical gains for working people across the country.
… Each vote for one of these CRA disapproval resolution is a vote against labor.
We ask that you not allow private equity, the financial industry, multinational franchisors, unionbusters, or other special interests to use this tool to undo the progress that workers are making via federal rulemaking.
Mom-and-pop franchisers and small business owners are fighting these regulations, not special interests. The real deep-pocketed special interest groups are the labor unions.
What it means
The Biden Administration’s aggressive pro-Big Labor agenda has ben enacted through new rules from federal agencies because they are too partisan to advance Congress.
Conservatives, who control the House of Representatives, have used the Congressional Review Act recently to attempt to overturn these regulations. CRAs are effective tools that Congress can use—short of new legislation—to prevent agency regulators from going too far. In some cases, CRAs have been supported on a bipartisan basis.
However, liberals currently control the Senate and have opted not to even bring some House-passed CRAs up for a vote. A CRA that advances through both houses must survive a presidential veto, a likely outcome given that the policy being overturned is part of his agenda.
The CRA empowers Congress to check the power of the regulatory agencies, which tend to overstep their congressionally-defined authority, to enact policies that Congress did not explicitly greenlight or would support.
The Supreme Court just overturned the Chevron deference, an understanding of federal regulatory authority that agencies have used to enact wild and far-flung policies well beyond the scope of authority Congress ever envisioned. This opens the doors to more federal regulations being challenged as invalid even if Congress doesn’t overturn them.
Now, more than ever, it’s time for Congress to take its power back from federal regulatory agencies. The American people elect members of Congress to enact policies they support. They don’t want unelected bureaucrats making decisions over their lives with no accountability, especially when propped up by partisan special interests such as Big Labor.
Historically, labor unions delivered critical wins in the workforce for Americans. However, the dwindling private-sector union membership, which has fallen to an all-time low, signals that unions do not provide the same value to workers as they did in the past.
A growing share of our labor force is beyond union reach. Freelancers or independent contractors, which comprise about 45% of workers, are not employees and, therefore, cannot be unionized.
Bottom Line
Instead of winning over non-union workers, Big Labor aims to use the government to force as many Americans into labor unions as possible—even if it means that individuals lose their choice, rights, and independence.