Support the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act

By To the editor:

The Mat-Su Borough is the fastest-growing census area in Alaska. Having served as an elected official on the Mat-Su Borough Assembly, I know this exciting trend does not come without challenges.

Two challenges I foresee, which are directly linked, are infrastructure and jobs.

As more families move into our communities, the need for infrastructure increases: roads, bridges, healthcare, schools, sanitation and waste removal facilities, telephone cables and mobile phone towers, etc.

Unlike other policy questions, infrastructure is inherently bipartisan. There isn’t a democratic, independent, or republican way to repair Knik-Goose Bay Road. The business community and Labor unions agree that infrastructure must be a priority. Support for families, good jobs and a stronger economy is a requirement of our growing community.

The jobs that come hand-in-hand with infrastructure investment and development must pay fair wages that can support a family and a middle-class life.

The best way to ensure this is through collective bargaining and trade unionism. Alaska is a union state. From statehood through the end of the 1970s, a union contract helped propel tens of thousands of families into the middle-class. The hard-working men and women of the Alaska Building Trades helped create a strong foundation for our state, literally.

In more recent decades, part of Wall Street’s war on Main Street was decimating organized labor by undermining workers’ freedom to organize granted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. Today, it is harder than it has been in nearly a century for workers to organize or join a union.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity to fix this problem. The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would restore the freedoms guaranteed to workers defined in the NLRA. Representative Don Young, a strong supporter of Alaskan Building Trades, supported the PRO Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. Later this year, the U.S. Senate will take up the PRO Act, and I urge our Senators to support it.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly unanimously supported an apprenticeship utilization rule that incentivizes young workers to build their communities up, and the PRO Act will increase the number of apprentices getting into the trades.

I want to see a Mat-Su that provides prosperity and opportunity for the next generation. The PRO Act will ensure that our local infrastructure projects support MatSu families by providing good-paying, middle-class jobs that provide healthcare, safe working conditions, and a dignified retirement.

Dan Mayfield,

Big Lake