Republican Senator Josh Hawley has circulated a document titled “A Pro-Worker Framework for the 119th Congress.” The document, available on Punchbowl News, lays out a set of proposals for labor law reform. The proposals, couched in broad terms and not in legislative language, include: requiring employers to post notices of NLRA rights and to affirmatively notify new employees of their NLRA rights; implementing safety and health reforms particularly for warehouse workers (presumably in line with the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which Hawley supported in the last Congress); banning captive audience meetings “while protecting free speech rights of business owners”; holding NLRB elections within 20 days (of a petition presumably, though this isn’t specified); requiring that initial contract bargaining begin within 10 days of a successful union election and requiring that unions and employers “execute their agreements within months, not years”; and enhanced remedies with a private right of action in certain cases.
It is unclear whether there is more detail available about Hawley’s ideas (Punchbowl has only the one-page document) and, without more detail, it’s hard to offer anything like a complete assessment of the framework. This document, moreover, is far from a bill and it remains to be seen how much traction Hawley’s proposals will get, including from the incoming Trump Administration. And, even if all were enacted, this slate of reforms would fall far short of what’s required to fix U.S. labor law. But these are proposals for significant changes that may scramble the politics of labor law reform. That too remains to be seen.
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