ALEC Pushes State Anti-Labor Agenda for 2025

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill-mill, has laid out its priorities for this year’s state legislative sessions.

ALEC’s Essential Policy Solutions for 2025 provides a roadmap for advancing a state-based, pro-corporate agenda that mirrors Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s notorious playbook for how the current Trump administration should dismantle federal departments, agencies, and regulations. 

Where Project 2025 envisions unchecked executive power and weakened federal regulatory authority, ALEC’s 2025 playbook outlines strategies for lawmakers to actualize this vision in their own states by preempting local regulations, bolstering favored industries such as fossil fuels, undermining public education, curtailing voting rights, and much more. 

And, when it comes to labor, ALEC’s 2025 Essential Policy Solutions proposes model bills for defunding public sector unions, preempting local labor laws, eliminating occupational regulations, and entrenching precarity for workers by expanding the ranks of independent contractors. 

Among the anti-labor model bills ALEC is pushing this year are the “Union Recertification Act,” first adopted in 2018 to make it harder for public sector workers to keep their unions; the “Fair and Accountable Public Sector Authority Act,” adopted in 2021 to ban public sector collective bargaining; and the “Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act,” adopted in 2023 to prohibit businesses that sign neutrality agreements with labor organizations from receiving state economic development incentives. 

The relative lack of new ideas promoted by ALEC is a sign of the organization’s successes: evergreen ideas are still popular — and even more destructive than ever. 

A highly restrictive bill passed in Utah earlier this month completely outlaws collective bargaining rights for public sector workers — an idea promoted in ALEC’s “Fair and Accountable Public Sector Authority Act” model bill from 2021. Both of the bill’s sponsors are active ALEC members. Arizona lawmakers are currently considering HB 2285, an ALEC-style prohibition on mandatory neutrality agreements. 

Right to work legislation inspired by ALEC bills was introduced in New Hampshire (HB 238), where it has already been defeated after significant outcry from organized labor; Maine (LD 187), where the lead bill sponsor is an ALEC member; and Montana (SB LC4333). In Virginia, lawmakers are considering adopting right to work policy as a constitutional amendment. 

Bills outlawing automatic dues deductions — an idea promoted by ALEC since at least 1988, and already successfully implemented in Florida, Arkansas, and Kentucky, among other states — have been introduced this year in North Carolina (SB 47) and Montana (SB 277). Two of the three bill sponsors in North Carolina — State Senators Ralph Hise (R) and Todd Johnson (R) — are ALEC members. The sponsor of the Montana bill, State Representative Matt Regier (R), has admitted to working with the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity on bills in the past, but has claimed not to have worked with ALEC on other bills he has introduced. 

Model bills like those developed and promulgated by ALEC serve a dual purpose: they both advance a cookie-cutter, pro-corporate agenda at the state level and create avenues for impact litigation whereby state laws are strategically implemented in order to generate court cases that can force a reshaping of federal regulations and protections. A recent study found that model bills produced by ALEC have a staggeringly high probability of ending up before the U.S. Supreme Court: 17% as opposed to an average of 1% of other cases. 

The authors of the study found that through impact litigation ALEC has proven to be “successful in constraining federal power.”

This year’s focus on the states may, after all, be the shortest route for the group to continue to reshape the federal government.