A bipartisan group of House and Senate members has reintroduced the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, legislation intended to strengthen labor unions and increase their leverage in collective bargaining negotiations. In an update to previous American Action Forum research, Labor Market Policy Analyst Isabella Hindley walks through the PRO Act’s major provisions and estimates how they would affect each state.

Key points:

• The PRO Act would repeal right-to-work laws, reclassify independent contractors, and broaden the joint-employer standard.
• Many of the provisions ignore stated worker preferences and would likely harm the labor market by limiting worker freedom and increasing costs to small businesses, franchisees, and entrepreneurs.
• This state-by-state analysis of these provisions indicates that the right-to-work states that would be most harmed, through increased employment costs and risk of gross domestic product loss, by the PRO Act are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming.

Read the analysis