NEWS: Hallie Shoffner Vows to End Arkansas’s Right-to-Work Status with PRO Act

During a “May Day” protest in Little Rock, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner pledged that her first action in the U.S. Senate would be to sign on to the PRO Act, legislation that would override Arkansas’s 80-year-old right-to-work protections enshrined in the state constitution.

Speaking to a labor-aligned audience, Shoffner, who is challenging Tom Cotton in 2026, opened her remarks by declaring herself “Arkansas’s labor candidate” and later told attendees: “People ask me, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get in office? I’m going to sign on to the PRO Act, and I’m going to whip votes for it.”

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, long a top priority of national labor unions and a signature policy of former Vice President Kamala Harris, to whom Shoffner donated 25 separate times between 2020 and 2024, would override state right-to-work laws by permitting union security agreements that require workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment, even if they decline to join.

Arkansas voters added right-to-work protections to the state constitution in 1944 through Amendment 34, making Arkansas one of the first states in the nation to guarantee that workers cannot be compelled to join or fund a union.

Beyond preempting state law, the PRO Act would import a California-style “ABC test” for classifying independent contractors, a change with significant implications for Arkansas’s agricultural economy. The standard, modeled on California’s AB5, would reclassify many owner-operator truckers, custom harvesters, and farm-related contractors as employees. The legislation would also weaken secret-ballot protections in union organizing elections by expanding the use of “card check” procedures.

Shoffner, who describes herself as a sixth-generation farmer from Newport, framed her labor pledge as part of a broader progressive economic agenda.