Facts on the Republicans' H.R. 3094: The Election Prevention Act

While Americans across the country are rejecting the special interest attacks on workers’ rights and demanding action on jobs, Republicans in Washington are continuing their overreach against working families. Their latest effort to roll back workers’ rights is H.R. 3094, which should be called the ‘Election Prevention Act.’ The bill’s singular goal is to delay and ultimately prevent workers from voting in workplace elections.

The Republican agenda’s obsession with busting workers’ unions comes at the expense of rebuilding the middle class and getting America back to work.

• H.R. 3094 favors wealthy special interests at the expense of Americans’ rights in the workplace.
• These rights helped to create the American middle class in the last century. In recent decades, the erosion of these rights has helped to lower families’ paychecks, decrease health and retirement security, and widen the gap between rich and poor.
• A key to growing and strengthening our nation’s middle class is empowering Americans to bargain for more of the wealth they create, not stripping them of rights.

The ‘Election Prevention Act’ denies workers’ right to a free and fair election in three key ways:

• The ‘Election Prevention Act’ bill mandates delay, rather than minimizing undue delay in elections. The bill’s overarching concern is that workers’ choice be postponed with mandatory and arbitrary waiting periods. For instance, no election may occur sooner than 35 days after the filing of a petition. However, there is no limit on how long an election may be delayed. Delay gives unscrupulous employers more time to use any means, legal or illegal, to pressure employees into abandoning their organizing efforts.
• Rather than discouraging frivolous litigation, the Election Prevention Act encourages it. The bill incentivizes a mountain of litigation for the sole purpose of gumming up the election process and stalling any vote. This will create a massive backlog of cases, including frivolous ones, on the taxpayer’s dime.
• The ‘Election Prevention Act’ bill manipulates the procedure for deciding who is in a bargaining unit.  Employers would get an edge in preventing an election from ever being triggered by gerrymandering elections through stuffing the ballot boxes with voters who were never engaged by the organizing drive. And, although employers already have the information, this bill would require that voter information be hidden from those supporting a union until right before the election.