Rep. Summer Lee, Colleagues Reintroduce Bill to Protect Workers’ Right to Organize
**For Immediate Release**
Rep. Summer Lee, Colleagues Reintroduce Bill to Protect Workers’ Right to Organize
WASHINGTON, D.C. – March 6, 2025 — Congresswoman Summer Lee (PA-12), a member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and her colleagues reintroduced the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a comprehensive proposal to protect workers’ right to come together and bargain for higher wages, better benefits, and safer workplaces.
Large corporations and the wealthy continue to capture the rewards of a growing economy while working families and middle-class Americans are left behind. From 1979 to 2023, annual wages for the bottom 90 percent of households increased just 44 percent, while average incomes for the wealthiest 1 percent increased more than 180 percent.
Unions are critical to increasing wages and creating a strong economy that rewards hardworking people. Through the power of bargaining, the typical union worker earns 16 percent more than the typical non-union worker.
“From our hospital workers to our steel workers to every other worker in between, everyone deserves the right to organize and fight for better working conditions and better wages. As the representative for the great union city of Pittsburgh and all of PA-12, I am proud to reintroduce this bill to ensure that is a reality,” said Rep. Lee. “Our labor movement is stronger when we are organized, and the power of the people should always be greater than the people in power.”
According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions—remaining at near record highs. Despite growing support for unions, billionaire- and special interest-funded attacks on workers’ unions and labor laws have eroded union density and made it harder for workers to organize. The share of American workers who are union members has fallen from roughly one in three workers in 1956 to a new low of 9.9 percent in 2024. The PRO Act restores fairness to the economy by strengthening the federal law that protects workers’ right to join a union and bargain for higher pay, better benefits, and safer workplaces.
The PRO Act protects the basic right to join a union by:
- Holding employers accountable for violating workers’ rights by authorizing meaningful penalties, facilitating initial collective bargaining agreements, and closing loopholes that allow employers to misclassify their employees as supervisors and independent contractors.
- Empowering workers to exercise their right to organize by strengthening support for workers who suffer retaliation for exercising their rights, protecting workers’ right to support secondary boycotts, ensuring workers’ unions can collect “fair share” fees, and authorizing a private right of action for violation of workers’ rights.
- Securing free, fair, and safe union elections by preventing employers from interfering in union elections, prohibiting captive audience meetings, and requiring employers to be transparent with their workers.
For the bill text of the PRO Act, click here.
For a fact sheet on the PRO Act, click here.
For a section-by-section summary of the PRO Act, click here.
Congresswoman Summer Lee serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Committee on Education and the Workforce. Since taking office in January 2023, she has delivered historic levels of federal investment totaling over $2.4 Billion brought back to Western PA, including over $580 million for infrastructure, over $110 million for affordable transit, over $500 million to keep clean energy manufacturing at home in Pennsylvania, and over $55 million on clean energy efforts in and around schools to help keep our kids and communities safe. These investments will help improve Western Pennsylvania’s infrastructure and transit, ensure cleaner air and drinking water, lower housing costs, fund research institutions, fuel clean manufacturing, fund STEM innovation and entrepreneurship, boost workforce development, and create thousands of good paying union jobs. Lee and her team have also delivered casework and constituent services to over 3,000 constituents with issues ranging from helping our seniors and disabled community access Medicare and social security to helping folks secure housing and helping families with immigration support and passports.
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