ATR Applauds Reintroduction of the Employee Rights Act

Congressman Rick W. Allen (R-Ga.) recently introduced the Employee Rights Act (ERA) of 2025 to promote “growth, freedom, and innovation—while also ensuring our laws protect workers and guarantee unions are acting in the best interest of union members.” The bill empowers workers across the country, ensuring that unions operate more fairly with transparency and accountability.

The ERA includes a comprehensive list of provisions that aim to fix several issues for workers involving union overreach. First among these are elections. As it stands now, there exist some risks in ensuring secret ballots for all union elections after the Biden NLRB issued a ruling in 2023 allowing for greater use of “card check” and forced bargaining with unions instead of the traditional secret ballot process. The bill provides for election integrity by guaranteeing secret ballots and ensuring “that employees who vote in union elections are United States citizens or legal aliens who are lawfully authorized to be employed in the United States.”

Additionally, the bill would restore longstanding legal precedent by codifying the Trump administration’s definitions of independent contractors and joint employers. The independent contractor provision grants workers greater flexibility to classify themselves as independent workers rather than being forced into an employment relationship that the worker may not desire. The joint employer provision protects small businesses like those which use the franchise model and their employees from onerous legal frameworks, saving billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. These provisions allow for more worker freedom and independence. 

Lastly, the bill adds provisions to protect employees from predatory union practices. As of now, unions engage in electoral worker harassment during work hours. Furthermore, they abuse union dues for politicking without worker permission. Even worse, employers are currently forced to share the personal contact information of workers with unions during organizing campaigns. The ERA helps solve these issues by allowing for workplace anti-harassment disciplinary actions as well as mandating opt-ins and opt-outs for using dues for politicking and for sharing personal contacts with unions. 

While this act has been introduced in years before, Congress now has a real chance of passing worker protections with a Republican majority and a pro-worker, pro-business, and pro-freedom president. Americans for Tax Reform encourages Congress to act to pass the Employee Rights Act and deliver it to President Trump’s desk to protect the American worker.