The bosses of several large labor unions have endorsed Kamala Harris for President. In return, she has promised to give them unfettered access to your private phone number, email addresses, and even home address.
Kamala Harris is a key supporter of the radical “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” or PRO Act, having cosponsored the bill during her time in the Senate and recently reiterating her intent to sign the bill into law if she is elected as President. The PRO Act has a number of harmful provisions that would jeopardize the livelihoods of American workers: banning state right-to-work laws, codifying an overly burdensome joint employer standard, removing workers’ rights to a secret ballot election, and forcing independent contractors out of their jobs, to name a few.
One of the weirdest labor policies in Kamala’s PRO Act, though, is her proposal to hand all of your personal information over to union organizers so they can contact you anytime, anywhere, whether you like it or not.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Obama administration was the first to break decades of precedent by introducing a rule that would give unions access to a wide range of workers’ private information, including names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, home phone numbers, personal email addresses, work locations, job classifications, and shift schedules. According to the rule, employers would have just two days to collect, organize, and submit the private information of their workers to the NLRB, who would then forward it to the labor union seeking to organize that workplace.
The NLRB under the Trump administration in 2020 proposed a new rule to reverse parts of the 2014 rule. The 2020 rule aimed to protect the private phone numbers and email addresses of workers from being distributed to union agents, enhancing privacy protections for workers.
Now, however, Kamala Harris and congressional Democrats want to make the wider range of worker privacy violations permanent. The PRO Act would codify in statute the requirement for employers to hand over the names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, landline phone numbers, personal email addresses, work locations, job classifications, and shift schedules of their workers to organizers. The proposal goes even farther than the 2014 rule––not only because it would be placed into statute rather than a reversible administrative rule, but also because employers would now be forced to give the information directly to a labor union instead of using the NLRB as an intermediary.
With access to phone numbers, email addresses, work schedules, home addresses and more, union organizers are free to harass workers: calling them incessantly, flooding their inboxes, and even showing up on their front porches. These intimidation tactics are nothing new for Big Labor, whose on-the-ground agents are often willing to go to great lengths to unionize a workplace. There is also nothing in the law to protect the private information of workers from being distributed even more broadly to people outside of union leadership. Once a worker’s information is exposed in this unaccountable manner, there is no telling who will eventually gain access.
Americans get enough spam calls, junk mail, and unwanted visitors as it is. Kamala Harris shouldn’t make the problem worse by handing out your private information to her political allies. That’s just weird.
Stay tuned to ATR’s Kamalanomics.org for more updates.