Workforce
As a senior member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rep. Petri has worked to further strengthen the rights of workers. He has supported increases in the minimum wage, and in 2008, with Rep. Petri's support, President Bush signed into law the first increase in the minimum wage since 1997.
Over the past years, Rep. Petri has also consistently voted in support of Davis-Bacon, which requires that contractors engaging in certain federal construction projects pay workers not less than the locally prevailing wage for comparable work. Rep. Petri has also cosponsored and voted in support of legislation that would require all states to provide minimum collective bargaining rights to their public safety employees in whatever manner the state chooses. The legislation would put all firefighters and law enforcement officers on equal footing with other employees and provide them with the fundamental right to negotiate over such basic issues as hours, wages, and conditions of employment.
OSHA Voluntary Protection Program
Rep. Petri, along with Rep. Gene Green, introduced the bipartisan Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) Act. The VPP Act would make permanent one of the federal government's most successful workplace health and safety programs. The same legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and Senator Mary Landrieu.
This legislation would codify a successful program, the Voluntary Protection Program, operated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that recognizes and rewards employers who voluntarily work to improve the health and safety of their worksites. The program is currently operating but has never been authorized in law and was proposed to be cut by the Obama administration's fiscal year 2011 budget. While the administration backed away from those cuts in its fiscal year 2012 budget proposal, this legislation would put the program on a more solid foundation by specifically authorizing it in law.
Since the VPP was created in 1982, it has grown to include more than 2,200 worksites and more than 921,000 employees. A 2007 report noted that federal VPP worksites saved the government more than $59 million by avoiding injuries and that private sector VPP participants saved more than $300 million. Participating workplaces have an illness and injury rate that, on average, is 50 percent below that of their industry.
Employee Free Choice Act
Rep. Petri believes our federal labor policies should allow employees to exercise their rights to organize free from unfair coercion by either their employer or union organizers. In the 110th Congress, Rep. Petri voted against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would require employers to recognize the use of "card checks" in lieu of a secret ballot election, to be considered as a formal vote of employees in favor of unionization. Eliminating the secret ballot will only put workers at further risk of intimidation and harassment. Rep. Petri believes that the right to a federally-supervised private ballot election represents perhaps the greatest protection American workers are afforded under federal labor law.