The Republican platform says that the party will support right to work laws at the state and federal level, as well as roll back stringent regulations adopted by the Obama administration.
The GOP adopted a series of labor reforms on Monday that the party says will update labor standards to the modern workplace. The 2016 platform pledges to "challenge the anachronistic labor laws that limit workers’ freedom and lock them into the workplace rules of their great-grandfathers." Labor policy, it says, "should encourage cooperation between management and workers, not conflict."
One of the chief means that Republican insiders will use to update labor law is the passage of right to work laws at the state level, which would prevent companies from forcing workers to pay union dues as a condition of employment. Such laws have passed in 26 states, including union strongholds such as Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
An effort to end nationwide coercive unionism for public sector employees ended in deadlock in the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The GOP says that it is committed to federal legislation to achieve that goal.
"We support the right of states to enact Right-to-Work laws and call for a national law to protect the economic liberty of the modern workforce," the platform says.
The proposed Democratic platform rejects right to work laws and seeks to ease the path to unionization through card check legislation that would allow a petition gathering process to replace secret ballot elections. Patrick Semmens, spokesman for the National Right to Work Foundation, said that the platforms provide voters with vastly different visions of the future workplace.
"The draft version of the Democratic platform not only rejects right to work laws to protect workers from forced union dues, but also calls for passage of the Card Check bill that would effectively eliminate the secret ballot election and give federal bureaucrats the power to impose forced dues union contracts on businesses and workers," he told the Washington Free Beacon in an email. "If so many Democrat politicians weren’t dependent on union bosses for contributions passage of right to work might well be in both major party platforms."
The differences do not end with right to work. Republicans plan to roll back several policies and legal interpretations established by President Obama’s appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and Department of Labor, one of whom is on presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s short list for the vice presidency.
The NLRB, the nation’s top federal labor arbiter, has implemented a series of controversial rulings, upending decades of precedent. Republicans singled out the board’s treatment of franchise restaurants as indicative of its effort to stymie workplace flexibility and reward labor organizations. The board ruled in 2015 that franchise corporations could be held liable for the actions of independently controlled franchisees. On July 11, the board went further, reversing a standard that said temporary workers could not seek to join unions that represent direct employees at their placements.
"Instead of facilitating change, the current administration and its agents at the National Labor Relations Board are determined to reverse it," the platform says. "They are wielding provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act from the 1930s, designed to fit a manufacturing workplace, to deny flexibility to both employers and employees."
Not every labor watchdog was pleased with the platform.
Richard Berman, executive director of the Center for Union Facts, said the GOP should incorporate support for the Employee Rights Act, which would mandate secret ballot elections, ease the process for union decertification votes, among other changes to current union organizing provisions. Republicans have repeatedly introduced the legislation over the years without passing it.
"While the Republican platform gets a lot of things right—from responsible minimum wage laws to national right-to-work legislation—the omission of the Employee Rights Act (ERA) is a glaring one," Berman said. "It’s unfortunate the Republican National Committee failed to embrace labor legislation supported by 80 percent of Americans."
Greenaway echoed these sentiments, saying that the Employee Rights Act would provide a more comprehensive legislative path for repealing the NLRB’s "Ambush Election" rules, as well as accomplish the other goals laid out in the platform.
"We also believe the Employee Rights Act is very consequential legislation which addresses many of the overreaches on the part of the Obama administration," Greenaway said. "While the GOP platform certainly takes steps in the right direction, there is clearly much more work to do in this area."