Tara Murtha, director of strategic communications for the Women's Law Project.

Pennsylvania lawmakers are using a playbook written by Big Tobacco and boosted by the NRA in order to block worker protections in the commonwealth.

That playbook is called preemption.

While federal law sets a floor or ceiling for state-based policies, state preemption laws prohibit local governments from passing local ordinances to meet the needs and reflect the values of their own communities. Preemption should be used to balance power and authority, but instead it is often leveraged to undermine and even retroactively nullify local protections.

No one saw the possibility of exploiting state preemption like tobacco lobbyists, who pioneered preemption for profit in the 1980s. As smoking bans became a popular response to concern about the public health dangers of inhaling second-hand smoke, R.J. Reynolds began promoting preemption laws because "state laws which preempt local anti-tobacco ordinances are the most effective means to counter local challenges."

In the 1990s, the NRA turned to Big Tobacco's playbook to inform their response to gun control efforts. Today, at least 43 states have gun preemption laws on the books including Pennsylvania. (Just recently, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled that a lawsuit led by a gun rights group challenging several local gun laws in the city of Harrisburg can proceed.)

States have been blocking local labor laws for decades, but the trend has only recently emerged as a favorite tactic of conservative lawmakers and the corporations financing their electoral races. In 2016 and in the first half of 2017 alone, state legislatures significantly increased their use of preemption laws as a tool to strip local governments of their authority to enact ordinances improving workers' lives, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Such laws typically focus on labor, public health and environmental protections because even basic protections in these areas can erode corporate profit. According to the EPI, the most common issues targeted by preemption are minimum wage, paid leave, fair work scheduling, prevailing wage and project labor agreements.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the local laws vulnerable to state preemption were passed in response to state and federal failure to take meaningful action. For example, more than 40 municipalities in Pennsylvania have passed local ordinances prohibiting discrimination on the basis of many protected characteristics such as sexual orientation, which our employment laws at the state and federal levels, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, do not explicitly cover.

Pennsylvania's stagnant minimum wage is one well-known example of the harm of state preemption. In 2009, the federal government set the floor for a minimum hourly wage at $7.25 an hour. Recognizing that minimum as a poverty wage that fails to reflect inflation and the cost of living, most states raised their minimum wage above the federal baseline. Pennsylvania, however, not only refused to raise the minimum wage above the federal floor, it passed a law banning cities and local townships from doing so.

Meanwhile, every state bordering Pennsylvania has passed bills to incrementally raise their minimum wage even higher, leaving Pennsylvania workers even further behind.

Last session's House Bill 861, sponsored by Rep. Seth Groves of York County, targeted paid sick day ordinances. It would have prevented municipalities from passing paid sick day ordinances and retroactively repeal the ordinances already passed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. As Women's Law Project attorney Amal Bass testified at a hearing last year, the way HB 861 was initially written it could have also potentially nullified a broad range of workplace protections beyond its target if it was passed into law.

HB 861 was slightly modified and re-introduced this session as House Bill 331. If HB 331 passes into law, it would repeal paid sick day ordinances in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as Philadelphia's fair scheduling bill.

Preemption efforts are not always easy to spot.

We called last session's SB 241 a "fake equal pay bill" because though its supporters falsely asserted it would narrow the pay gap, its real purpose as spelled out in the text of the legislation was to "preempt and supersede any local ordinance or rule concerning the subject matter of this act."

House Bill 2071 was written to preempt a law passed in Philadelphia pertaining to bulletproof glass in storefronts. The bill's language was so broad and vague that if passed it could have allowed employers to evoke a "safety" reason to evade nearly any workplace regulation including, for example, refusing to hire any women.

Preemption laws signify a battle for authority between conservative state legislatures and progressive cities, which is why we can see so many attempts of the Pennsylvania legislature to preempt progressive ordinances passed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But the rise of preemption as a tactic also reflects the David and Goliath battle between powerful, disproportionately white male lawmakers and workers who, given the types of ordinances targeted by these laws, are more likely to be low-income, women and people of color.

It is an abuse of power, and we must work together to stop it.

The most common argument used by state lawmakers pushing preemption is that Pennsylvania should have uniform laws across the state. If that is the case, then lawmakers interested in standardizing labor, public health and environmental laws across the commonwealth should seek to implement a fair baseline to promote progress toward equality and fairness, not ceilings to drive local standards down to promote profit for their corporate donors.

Tara Murtha, director of strategic communications for the Women's Law Project, joined WLP after many years as a full-time Philadelphia-based journalist focused on in-depth policy and media analysis, with a focus on reproductive rights, violence against women and gun violence.