The right to work bill passed the Indiana House yesterday.
The final vote was 54-44. The bill gives workers the freedom to choose whether or not to financially support a union. It states that an employee cannot be forced to join to financially support a union in order to get or keep a job.
House Bill 1001 was heard on third reading yesterday after the majority of the Democrat Caucus boycotted the first few weeks of session by failing to show up to work. Members of the House Republicans attempted to address right to work last session, however the Democrats denied the House a quorum by fleeing to Illinois for five weeks. The issue was tabled and further studied in the Interim Study Committee on Employment this summer.
The bill passed out of committee over two weeks ago and on Monday, the bill was heard on second reading. After nearly five hours of debate, nine amendments were heard and two amendments adopted.
“There should be shame on anybody that wants to take away the living wages of families and really without them having a say in the election,” said Democratic Leader B. Patrick Bauer after the vote. “There’s no question they didn’t want the people to have a say. They skipped the election. They didn’t have it as an issue. They did everything they could to cut down the referendum, even though they have referendums on buildings, township trustees, gambling, and every kind of thing you can think of. They just didn’t want the people to have their say.”
“There was a lot of damage done to this process and to this institution the way they did it and to our State Constitution. We were able to restore much of it, but we weren’t able to restore amendments into the process of committee hearing. We weren’t able to restore testimony in the committee hearing because they did that slam, bam, shut the door on the people.”
