After the midterm elections, Congress returns for a lame-duck session, where must-pass bills frequently attract policy riders. Two labor policy fights could be at issue during that time. One would expand union leverage at workers’ expense, while another would protect a path into the middle class and beyond.
The Railway Safety Act
The Railway Safety Act has been framed as the answer to the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio derailment. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to add its text to the five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill, and some lawmakers objected to a rail-union-backed provision requiring at least two crew members on every freight train, calling it unnecessary and costly. That provision is the problem. The crew mandate has long been at the top of rail labor’s wish list, and the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department has promoted it since 2013. The East Palestine train had a three-person crew. A mandate that wouldn’t have prevented the disaster it’s named for is a labor union wish list item dressed up as a safety measure.
This is the pattern FREOPP’s recent testimony in front of the US House Education and Workforce Committee on union politics describes: union leadership pursuing priorities that serve the institution rather than the workers it represents. Only 10 percent of American workers belong to a union, and just 5.9 percent in the private sector. Policymakers shouldn’t write union bargaining positions into federal statute and call it safety.
The bill also has an innovation problem. Freezing current safety practices into statute would block emerging technologies. Congress can impose penalties and hazardous materials standards without ratifying a crew-size mandate or stagnating progress on safety innovations. If proponents of the Railway Safety Act try to attach the bill to a lame-duck package, members of Congress should insist on stripping those provisions out.
The American Franchise Act
The American Franchise Act deserves the opposite treatment. It would treat a franchisor as a joint employer only if it exercises substantial, direct, and immediate control over essential terms and conditions of employment within the franchise. It helps protect a vital pathway to entrepreneurship and the middle class—one that exists vibrantly in every congressional district in America and has created and supported hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder. The House Education and Workforce Committee approved it in July, and the bill has roughly 140 bipartisan cosponsors.
The AFA ends the back-and-forth for the franchise industry in which every new administration rewrites the standard via regulation. Under the Biden Administration’s 2023 rule, an entity could be a joint employer merely by reserving the right to control a single essential term of employment. That makes franchising legally risky and discourages the ownership model through which so many people start businesses. A franchisor that truly directs employees’ pay or schedules would still be a joint employer. The bill removes liability based on control a franchisor could exercise but doesn’t.
A franchise owner who hires, schedules, and pays his or her own staff is the employer those workers deal with every day. Dragging a distant brand into that relationship doesn’t give workers a voice. It gives union organizers a bigger target. Our testimony from September makes the same point about the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would apply the same clear and sensible joint-employer standard to the entire economy and previously passed the House with bipartisan support: when outside decision makers gain power over workplace terms, workers lose it.
Franchising is a ladder of opportunity, especially for people without capital or connections. Clear rules protect the franchisees and workers who climb it. The American Franchise Act deserves to pass.
The Bottom Line
Real worker freedom means workers choose their arrangements, union leaders answer to members, and Congress doesn’t hand statutory advantages to either side. The lame-duck session is a chance to reject a union wish list item and pass a modest, bipartisan reform to protect workers and entrepreneurs alike.