Workforce

As a senior member of the Education and Labor Committee, Rep. Petri has worked to further strengthen the rights of workers. He has consistently supported an increase in the minimum wage, and in 2008, with Rep. Petri's support, the President signed into law the first increase in the minimum wage since 1997.

Rep. Petri has also been a longtime advocate of workplace safety and privacy. That is why he is the lead cosponsor of the Employee Changing Room Privacy Act, legislation that would prohibit the video or audio monitoring of an employee in any area on an employer's premises where an employee changes clothing.

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.

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.