Press Releases

Yesterday evening, U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright (PA-08) voted to pass H.R. 2474, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, in the U.S. House, bold legislation to strengthen workers’ collective bargaining rights.

“The right to collectively bargain is a time-honored tradition in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but this tradition has been under attack,” said Rep. Cartwright. “For decades, large corporations and wealthy special interests have been working in the states and in the courts to erode the right to organize, causing wages for working people to remain stagnant even as the costs of housing, child care, and education rise year after year. The PRO Act puts the power back into the hands of workers and enables them to stand together to fight for higher wages, safer working conditions and better benefits.”

Research consistently shows that workers who are represented by unions earn higher pay, have safer workplaces and are more likely to have employer-sponsored health care and retirement plans. But, after years of attacks on workers’ right to organize funded by wealthy special interests, just ten percent of American workers are union members, the lowest rate on record.

Over the past thirty years, as union density declined from its peak of more than 30 percent in the 1970s, the average income for the bottom 90 percent of families stayed the same, while average incomes for the wealthiest one percent nearly doubled.

The PRO Act, of which Rep. Cartwright is a co-sponsor, makes comprehensive and necessary changes to protect and strengthen workers’ rights by:

• Protecting and expanding workers’ power to stand together and negotiate for higher pay, better benefits and safer working conditions, and closing loopholes that big corporations use to exploit workers;
• Strengthening workers’ access to fair union elections and requiring corporations to respect the results; and
• Holding companies accountable for violating workers’ rights.

Read more about the PRO Act here.