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Stop of PRO Act

By Kyle Reagan - DECCO, Chief Executive Officer | Oct 23, 2021

“Live Free or Die” is more than just our state’s official motto – it’s how many New Hampshire business owners prefer to operate. We are proud of our role in the community, what we do to employ hardworking Granite Staters and the contributions we make to the economy. The last thing we need – or want – is for the government to tell us how to run our businesses or force a pro-union agenda down our throats.

Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C., as nearly all Senate Democrats have banded together to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. This legislation goes too far in trying to prop up failing unions at the expense of the freedom of local businesses and hard-working Granite Staters that choose to work outside of a union. I urge Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen to rethink their support of the policies in this legislation.

Though the effort to pass what are known as “right-to-work” laws stalled out in the New Hampshire legislature, many manufacturing and welding shops like mine were supportive of these efforts and hopeful that they would be successful. Right-to-work laws would essentially prevent workers who did not vote for a union or do not support a union’s activities from being forced to pay union dues.

While each state is able to debate right-to-work laws, the PRO Act is just plain old government overreach. It would erase right-to-work laws completely, even in the states whose voters passed them. How can forcing workers to pay union dues when they don’t even want to be in a union be considered protecting their rights?

The PRO Act is so bad that the Democrats pushing it – and their big union allies – have realized it has almost no chance of passing on its own merits, so they’re now resorting to taking some of the most damaging penalties for businesses and inserting them into their budget reconciliation bill. This is typical for Washington, where you mandate policy through any means possible – even when you know you cannot democratically get what is proposed. Andrew Wilkow said it best “ideas so great and beneficial they have to be mandatory to be accepted.”

The PRO Act seeks to penalize and fine companies from $50,000 up to $100,000 for even the smallest, often unintentional, violations. These fines can be enforced even for things that have nothing to do with working conditions, but rather minor technicalities. This type of heavy-handed, Washington, D.C. meddling in our economy’s “business” is exactly what the country does not need – not now, not ever. As previous governors of New Hampshire, Sens. Shaheen and Hassan are keenly aware of the PRO Act’s federal power grab over our state and I ask them to think about the hardworking men and women in their home state, rather than the lobbyists in their D.C. offices.

The PRO Act would cripple an already staggered business environment. Our senators should be standing up for New Hampshire workers and assuring the damaging pieces of the un-passable PRO Act do not get thrown into a messy 50 vote reconciliation process where one party doesn’t require the other to pass what it wants. This is the type of governance the American people, and Granite Staters are sick and tired of.

Sens. Shaheen and Hassan: stand up for the businesses, employees and families do not want the PRO Act here in your home state. Please join the bipartisan groups of Senators who have not signed onto the PRO Act and keep those antibusiness provisions out of reconciliation.

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