News

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Congressman Todd Rokita (IN-4) today introduced the “Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees (RAISE) Act”, a bill to amend the National Labor Relations Act to allow employers to give merit-based compensation increases to individual employees, even if those increases are not part of a collective bargaining agreement.  If enacted, the RAISE Act would essentially make wages set in union contracts a minimum floor, while giving employers the flexibility to reward diligent employees for their hard work.

“The RAISE Act would help American workers earn more money by letting employers give them merit-based pay raises and bonuses without first having to clear it by union bosses,” said Rubio.  “Our free enterprise system thrives when hard-working Americans have the freedom to earn more money for a job well done. This can’t happen as long as union bosses have more power than job creators when it comes to giving raises and bonuses to people that earn them, but the RAISE Act would stand with America’s working class and end this injustice.”

“Nearly eight million Americans are now prohibited from ever getting a performance-based raise, no matter how well they do their jobs,” said Rokita.  “We can’t expect American businesses to be competitive in a globalized economy under a system that forbids individual raises and discourages hard work, and the RAISE Act would change that.”

Under current law, unless it is specified otherwise in a collective bargaining agreement, the wage specified in the union contract is both a minimum and a maximum.  This amendment would apply to 7.6 million American unionized workers, 2.8 million of whom are women.