The big, glaring problem here is that there’s nothing particularly new, or pro-worker, about this sort of narrowly focused, nonconfrontational association with no ability to bargain or negotiate. If anything, these “employee involvement organizations” are a close cousin to “company unions,” which, well, already exist. Explicitly intended to undermine traditional unions, company unions were deployed in the first decades of the 20th century to defang and co-opt labor militancy.When, in 1933, the federal government first recognized the right of workers to bargain collectively — under Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act — employers responded with a significant expansion of company unionism. According to a 1937 survey of nearly 600 company unions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited by the historian Irving Bernstein in “The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941,” “The great majority were set up entirely by management. Management conceived the idea, developed the plan, and initiated the organization.” Of the 96 cases for which information was available on the employer’s motives, Bernstein notes, “50 were in response to the N.I.R.A., 13 to a strike, and 2 to a desire to improve personnel relations.”Widespread hostility to company unions among labor supporters in and out of Congress — who argued, correctly, that company unions impeded the ability of workers to organize across an entire industry — produced Section 8(a)(2) of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which states that, “It shall be an unfair labor practice” for an employer to “dominate or interfere with the formation or administration of any labor organization or contribute financial or other support to it.”After the N.L.R.B. ruled against one company’s “action committees” but made it clear that employee organizations were still legal, Republicans in Congress passed the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act of 1995 in an attempt to sidestep Section 8(a)(2). The Rubio and Banks bill is, in its essence, a version of the one that President Bill Clinton vetoed in 1996. And, like its predecessor, the new bill reflects the Republican Party’s deep-seated opposition to organized labor.If an “employee involvement organization” cannot bargain and cannot negotiate, and can be dissolved at any point by the employer, then what purpose does it serve other than to subvert union organizers and channel worker unrest into a front organization for management? The same goes for the nonvoting board representative. Without power to act, what does it matter that someone is permitted to watch and listen?