On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) in a 230–193 vote, with 20 Republicans crossing party lines to vote in support of the Democratic-led legislation. The bill, which aims to speed up first contract talks after workers unionize, now moves to the Senate.
The bill has been celebrated by a growing consortium of populists that has taken over the Republican Party.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said he was “glad to see the House has done the right thing for working-class Americans.” He added, “We need real labor reform that puts workers first.” Rep. Pete Stauber (R–Minn.), who cosponsored the bill in the House, said he was “proud to partner” on the bill to “hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table,” adding that “when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds.” The bill has also been heralded by Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, who described it as the “best opportunity yet for conservatives to show they support strong labor laws and the rights of workers.”
The FLCA is designed to speed up negotiations when a new union is certified or recognized, in part by requiring the parties to enter contract negotiations within 10 days of a collective bargaining request. They then would have 90 days to negotiate, followed by 30 days of mediation, before the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service must be notified. A three-person arbitration panel would then be created, and a majority of that panel could forcibly impose a first contract on both sides, binding the employer and worker for two years unless they both later consent to changes.
Once this process is complete, the union would become the exclusive bargaining representative for every worker, including those who did not vote for it, did not join it, and may wholly disagree with its priorities. The FLCA would mandate a federally supervised arbitration panel to impose contract terms on the entire workplace, meaning that many workers would lose the ability to negotiate for themselves. Their wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions could be settled by union officials they did not support, and government bureaucrats they did not vote for.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R–Mich.) made this very point on the House floor. He argued the bill actually “erodes workers’ rights” and that a “government-appointed arbitration panel” would impose a contract if the parties do not reach an agreement within the bill’s timeline.
“Supporters of this bill assure businesses and workers that it is about worker empowerment and efficiency,” Walberg said. “I may be misremembering the definition of empowerment, but I can guarantee it does not mean taking away a worker’s right to vote on his or her own contract and giving that power to a Washington bureaucrat with no stake in the outcome.”
Practically speaking, labor negotiations take a long time for a reason. The legislation points to a Bloomberg Law analysis that found that the average number of days between the formation of a union and the parties entering into a contract was 465 days. “It’s a hard statistic to pin down,” according to Bloomberg Law, partly because private-sector collective bargaining agreements are not required to notify the government when an agreement is made.
However, the FLCA treats the potential delays themselves as evidence of a problem requiring federal intervention, even though the number itself does not distinguish between bad-faith stalling and ordinary bargaining. By forcing first-contract negotiations into an arbitrary 120-day window, the bill risks reducing bargaining to a procedural hurdle before outside arbitrators impose the final terms.
The bill’s future is uncertain in the Republican-controlled Senate. However, in 2025, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, criticized the bill for taking “workers out of the process by removing the need to ratify a contract.” He added that workers “cannot reject” the agreement, and said that it would be “removing the democracy from the workplace.” For now, the jury is still out on whether other senators will share Cassidy’s concerns.
Crucially, a faster contract is not necessarily a fairer one. The FLCA may speed up bargaining, but it does so by replacing negotiation with government compulsion. Conservatives who claim to put workers first should be wary of a bill that hands workers’ choices to union officials and federal arbitrators.
