One of the most significant bills to strengthen workers’ abilities to organize in the past 80 years passed the House on Thursday, the Washington Post reported. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, known as the PRO Act, would amend some of the country’s decades-old labor laws to give workers more power during disputes at work, add penalties for companies that retaliate against workers who organize and grant some hundreds of thousands of workers collective-bargaining rights they don’t currently have. It would also weaken “right-to-work” laws in 27 states that allow employees to forgo participating in and paying dues to unions. The House passed the bill with a vote of 224 to 194, mostly along party lines. The bill is unlikely to be taken up by the GOP-controlled Senate, as Republicans and business groups have argued forcefully against it, saying that it would hurt employers, violate privacy rights and be a major boon for national unions.
